Scare Crow

by Julie Hockley

  I had slowly been making plans, trying to find a safe place for them, somewhere where they could disappear until the dust settled. I had to move very slowly and keep under everyone’s radar, with the hope that I would have everything in place before the war erupted and my life came to an end.

  “This is for us. This island,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “And Emmy. I trust you to get her out when the time is right, when no one is watching.”

  Carly looked me in the eye. “But you’re not going to be there.”

  I wished I would be there with them. I had even let myself imagine what it would be like, living free on a little island north of Fiji. Emmy sitting on a beach in her bikini; or better yet, Emmy on a beach without her bikini. But that would never happen. I would be hunted down with all the manpower the underworld had to offer. Emmy, Carly, and Spider would be nowhere near me when this happened. They would be studying the migration patterns of the humpback whale for the Society for Cetacea, the bogus foundation I had set up as a cover.

  Carly held on to the back of the chair with both hands and narrowed her eyes. “So how exactly am I supposed to do this? I wait until you’re dead. Until you’re really dead. Then I knock on Emmy’s door. ‘Hey, how have you been? I know you’ve been grieving for Cameron for months. It turns out he wasn’t actually dead. But, yeah, now he really is, so you should be crying over him now. On the flip side, he bought you an island.’ And then I kidnap her again and force her to go to this place without you there? So that she can grieve you for realsies since you are genuinely dead this time?”

  “Emmy will get over it eventually. This island is gorgeous. She’ll forget me, and she’ll forget about this mess I put her in. The important part will be to get all of you out of here and in a safe place before I’m gone. You’ll be able to leave it someday, when the heat is off.”

  “You’ve lost too many people, Cameron. You’ve forgotten what it’s like to bury someone you love.”

  Carly glared as she shoved herself away from the back of the chair.

  “You don’t ‘forget,’” she said, fingering quotation marks in the air. “You don’t ‘get over it.’ You just find a way to stuff the pain in a pocket somewhere inside. But every once in a while, something—some stupid, insignificant little thing—triggers it. The worst pain you have ever felt. And you have to start all over. Feel that same jerking agony that only comes when you realize, when you remember that you’ll never see his face again, that you’ll never be able to share that stupid thing that reminded you of him in the first place. The pain never goes away. It only dulls, waiting for another trigger.”

  Carly snatched the paper from my hands.

  “Emmy won’t get over you. No matter how hard you try or how much money you spend, you’re going to kill her.” She turned on her heels. “You’re a fucking idiot if you think otherwise.”

  CHAPTER 13: EMILY

  A NEW CHAPTER

  On Christmas Day, Griff had given me a gift. A location. It wasn’t what I had expected. Not the barn, where Pop’s secret underground drug lair was. Because, as he explained it, we would have been shot down before we had even come within a mile of the place.

  What Griff had given me was Pop’s actual home address on the reservation.

  But it had come at a cost. I didn’t know what he had had to give to get the information, but by the withdrawn look in his eyes, it wasn’t good.

  We left my parents’ house as quickly as I could get out of there, after many concerned hugs from Maria and Darlene. My brother’s boxes were loaded on the backseat, leaving Meatball just enough room to sit and glare at me.

  Griff pulled my hand from my lap and squeezed it. “What’s the plan?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Won’t your parents be upset that you left on Christmas Day, before they had a chance to say good-bye?”

  I tried to not burst into laughter.

  With every mile that we drove, I grew more nervous. Preparing different versions of my speech in my head. What Pops would say, how I would respond. I realized it was Christmas Day and that his entire family would probably be there. I would have to be prepared for that too. Above all, hiding the pregnancy was key—not just for our safety but for business’s sake. Which drug baron would want to team up with a pregnant girl?

  While I silently rehearsed my lines, Griff interrupted my thoughts.

  “I want to marry you,” he announced, glancing back at me.

  It took a second to focus on what he said to me.

  “Like, right now?”

  “If you want.”

  “Why do you want to marry me? Because I’m pregnant? I’m not going to marry you just because it’s convenient. That’s what my parents did. I won’t do that.”

  “Fine. Then marry me because you love me.”

  I held my breath and shook my head, never breaking eye contact. And I could see the fissures cracking through him.

  “I understand,” he said.

  I squeezed his hand. “I do love you, Griff. I love you so much, but—”

  “But you don’t love me like that, I get it.”

  “I don’t love you like you deserve to be loved.”

  He took a breath. “Will you ever love me? Like that?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed.

  “Do you want to love me? Like that?”

  “I do,” I answered with no hesitation.

  He forced a smile through the mask of pain. “Then that’s enough for me.”

  We didn’t speak for the rest of the ride. Griff’s announcement had been enough to distract me from the leap ahead.

  For some stupid reason, I had expected that the landscape would change as soon as we drove into the reservation. But there were no teepees or men walking around in moccasins. Mostly, the landscape was as cold and barren as it had been outside the reservation. The only change I noticed was the poverty. Tiny wooden shacks sitting on patches of mud, crumbling tin roofs, windows blocked with newspaper to keep winter out. Each with a satellite dish sticking out the side.

  It took Griff and me a while to find Pops’s house. The roads were not clearly delineated, and neither were the address numbers on people’s homes. It was as though they all wanted to be shut in and forgotten. Griff and I actually drove past Pops’s house twice because we were looking for a drug lord’s mansion. But his house was only slightly better than his tribesmen’s.

  My old car took a beating as we drove down the potholed driveway. The windows were curtained, as opposed to newspapered. There was no visible satellite dish and only two cars in the driveway. I leaned over the seat and took a map out of Bill’s boxes, reassuring Meatball with a rub of the ears before getting out of the car.

  The old woman who opened the door looked a little shocked to see Griff and me standing at her doorstep on Christmas Day. A waft of turkey roasting and carrots boiling on the stove came to the door with her.

  “Hi. My name is Emily,” I announced. “I’m sorry to disrupt your Christmas dinner, but I need to speak with Pops. Please.”

  The woman’s hair was gray and pulled back in a bun. Under her apron, she was wearing a blue polyester suit and polka-dot blouse. Her Christmas best.

  She glanced at us, unsure.

  My heart was beating bongo drums. I had to stuff my hand in my jacket pockets so that she couldn’t see how badly my hands were shaking. Griff put his arm around my shoulder, which helped to calm me but it wasn’t enough to stop my teeth from chattering. The cold, the nerves were getting under my skin.

  Probably realizing that a girl who looked more scared than a turkey on Christmas wouldn’t be much of a threat to her, the old lady grinned and moved aside to let us in.

  With a wave of her hand, the woman brought us to a living room of sky-blue couches and navy-blue lampshades that matched the color of her suit. So she really liked the color blue.

  She left us sitting on the couch. The minutes that passed seemed to turn into hours. My apprehensio
n was overwhelming, pushing against my skin like the devil trying to escape. I just couldn’t sit still anymore, so I got up and walked around the room. There were a few framed pictures on the walls. One of Pops outside in rubber boots. Next to that one was a yellowed one of a kid who looked like a mini-version of his son, Hawk. And then there was a more recent one with Pops and Hawk, each with an arm around the old lady who liked blue.

  I walked to the corner, where a black woodstove was blazing. There was a black and white framed poster near it. I stood, warming my shaky hands over the stove, my eyes on the poster. It was a picture of wrinkled old hands open on the bottom corner, with a white dove flying out of the other corner.

  “Do you like it?” someone asked from behind.

  I spun around. Pops was standing by the door in his rubber boots. His son, Hawk, towered behind him with a load of chopped wood in his arms.

  “What does it mean?”

  He removed his boots and stuck his socked feet into burgundy slippers. “Have you ever heard of the expression, ‘If you love something, let it go’?”

  Of course I had heard it before. “If it comes back to you, it’s yours forever.”

  “And if it doesn’t, it was never yours to begin with,” he finished.

  I hated that expression. Did anyone ever bother to ask the bird how it felt about this little experiment?

  “So, do you like the picture?” Pops asked me again.

  “Not anymore.”

  “Neither do I,” he said. “But until I have pictures of my grandchildren to put up, it fills the empty space.”

  I turned to him. “You’re not surprised to see me?” What I was really wondering was whether he was upset that I had found him, in his own home. And whether he was in a killing mood.

  He touched my arm and motioned for me to sit back on the couch next to Griff, who sat tranquilly but motionless, examining.

  “Surprised? No. Happy? Yes. Though I am surprised to see your change in company.”

  “This is Griff,” I told him.

  Pops scanned Griff’s face and smiled, extending his hand to shake Griff’s. Then he backed up to sit in the powder-blue La-Z-Boy on the opposite wall, letting his slippered feet flip up.

  “My son, Hawk,” Pops said to Griff, nodding toward his son, who had come to stand next to his father’s chair after stacking the wood by the stove.

  “How many grandchildren do you have?” I asked Pops, making small talk.

  “None. That’s the problem.”

  Hawk eyed me dangerously. “What is this about? Who sent you here?”

  “No one. I’m here of my own accord.” I cleared my throat.

  A quizzical look came over both their expressions.

  “Well?” Hawk pressed.

  “I’m here because,” I stammered, “I’m here because I have a business proposition for you.”

  Hawk let a laugh without a smile escape him. “You? You have a business proposition? For us?”

  I was losing my nerve.

  Griff gently knocked his knees against mine to urge me forward.

  I inhaled and kept my eyes on Pops. He hadn’t laughed but had kept a questioning watch over Griff and me. Was he wondering where Cameron was? Did he even know about Cameron’s death? Had he been dealing directly with Spider now? Could I really trust him? Was I an absolute idiot for thinking that I could?

  If Pops had questions, he remained silent.

  “A few years ago, my brother, Bill, came to you with a proposition. You took a chance on him, and he didn’t disappoint you.”

  “And now you are coming to offer us the same thing your brother offered us years ago? Something we already have?” Hawk’s tone was debasing.

  I held his stare for an extra second before answering. “I’m here to offer you something better.”

  I pulled out a marker and the map I had taken from Bill’s box and spread it on the coffee table.

  “The country is about to undergo a major pharmaceuticals shortage. Which means that there will be a very high black-market demand for all prescription drugs.”

  “And how do you know this?” Hawk inquired.

  I uncapped the red marker. My hands were steady. “Because my family is about to create the shortage. Chappelle de Marseille is the biggest pharmaceuticals company in the United States, and it’s about to close its doors.” My parents were in too deep. They would not be able to save the Sheppards, and the Tremblays were going to go down with them, unless they got a better deal—from me.

  I drew large circles on the map. New York. California. Arizona. Nevada. And then I moved to Canada. Ontario. Quebec. “These places all have protected lands that are occupied by Native American tribes.”

  Hawk guffawed. “Only a white girl would bunch all Native Americans into one big group. The territories you’re pointing out belong to different tribes. Siouan, Shawnee, Lumbee, Chippewa …”

  Pops placed a hand over his son’s chest, silencing him.

  “I realize that,” I continued, realizing how ignorant that first remark had sounded. But I wasn’t done. “Because you all do have something in common: oppression, thievery, lies, evictions. The kidnapping and reeducating of your children. And now, an epidemic of drug and alcohol abuse among them. Extreme poverty. You may be of different tribes, but your pain is mirrored. All of your tribes are dwindling in numbers, and the government is taking more from you every day until eventually your children will die too young, be assimilated, or be forced to leave the land for good.”

  Pops managed to sluggishly cross one foot over the other. The soles of his slippers were only hanging by a few threads. “And yet we are still here. We don’t wallow in our plight, young Emily. We have fought and won many wars. This fight we will win too.”

  I put the cap back on the marker and leaned back into the sofa. “For years, millions of dollars have been allocated by North American governments to Native American tribes as so-called reparation for the wrongs committed in the past. How much of this money have you and your tribesmen actually seen?”

  “I am reminded of an old Cree proverb,” Pops said stoically. “‘Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we can’t eat money.’ I am not a political soul, Emily. Any money from a government is of no use to us. No wrongs can ever be righted with money.”

  He was a proud man. He was a generous man. A man who made millions but wouldn’t keep enough for himself to buy a decent pair of slippers.

  “But you realize that, right now, your people need money and purpose to thrive, to fight, and that the money you’re making from the drug shipments and the marijuana will never be enough to help all of your tribesmen.”

  I could tell by the look of dismay in his expression that I had hit a deep nerve. “What is it you’re proposing?”

  My voice hit a deeper, stronger octave. “I’m proposing that we become partners. I have the family contacts to make the best pharmaceuticals money can buy, and you have the ability to get these into the country. We could team up with all tribes across North America and supply the people with cheap drugs.”

  Pops folded his arms over his extended belly. “We did hear of Chappelle de Marseille moving its business out of the country. But you may not be aware that Advantis and Chemfree have just announced a merger. This will make up for Chappelle de Marseille closing its doors.”

  “Yes. I’m aware of that. But Advantis and Chemfree are two small companies that only have very few factories, all of which are in the United States. It will take them years to be big enough to supply enough for the whole of North America. In the meantime, they will have monopoly over the pharmaceuticals market, and they will jack up the price of the drugs that people need to survive. People will be looking for a cheaper, better alternative, and this will be us.”

  “And once Advantis and Chemfree are able to reach demand and sell drugs at a cheaper rate, we will either have to sell pharmaceuticals at little to no pr
ofit or go broke?” Pops argued.

  “Advantis and Chemfree will be too greedy for that. Besides, they will have a hard time ever getting enough steam to ever get any bigger, what with the cyber hackings and the major fire that will burn down their main factory.”

  Hawk was grinning now. “The fire?”

  “With the unification of Native American tribes, we will have significant resources and manpower across the land. We will have the ability to make things happen quickly and efficiently and most of all, quietly. Native lands are virtually untouchable, at least by local police. And if the feds want in, they can’t do so without creating a political nightmare. At least, without us ensuring a political nightmare.”

  While Hawk had been growing more excited with every word I uttered, Pops’s frown deepened. He had watched every movement Griff and I were making. Swing of the hand. Itch of the nose. A cough. A shift of the body. If I hadn’t been wearing an oversize sweatshirt, I could have sworn he had noticed my swelled stomach.

  “What do you think, Pops?” Hawk asked his father. He was foaming at the mouth. I thought he might jump up and hug me. Or at least give me a high five.

  Public speaking had never been my forte, to say the least. Stepping up—on purpose—in front of a crowd, your every word to be judged, like some new form of sadistic self-sacrifice. To me, it was tantamount to a virgin climbing the steps of the Mayan temple and offering her neck for Aztec examination.

  But the more I spoke in this small room with Pops, Griff, and Hawk listening to my every word, the more confidence I gained. I knew what I was talking about, and I knew that my idea was, well, a total work of genius. It all felt right.

  “Our life’s path is not always the one that is illuminated by the morning sun,” Pops answered as his wife came in carrying a tray of cookies and tea. He got up and pulled my map away so that she could rest the tea on the coffee table. He gave her a kiss on the forehead before she exited the room.