Scare Crow

by Julie Hockley

  “It’s already been taken care of,” Joseph said, his voice completely calm, as though we were talking about picking up a pint of milk.

  “How?”

  “I called my brother. He took care of it.”

  My breath was cut short. “You shouldn’t have involved your brother in all of this. You’ve just made him an accessory to murder. A cop’s murder.”

  Joseph laughed. “Are you serious? My brother couldn’t wait to take credit for the kill. The guy you killed has apparently been wanted by some big bad drug guy, and there was a huge reward for whoever managed to find him. My brother’s going to soar up the gang ranks with this one.” He put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “No one will ever know you had anything to do with it.”

  I tried to breathe through the disquiet that was building in my stomach.

  “I need a favor from you. Don’t tell Griff about this.”

  Joseph’s shoulders sank. I knew he liked and respected Griff. But it had been a long time since I had seen Griff that happy. Norestrom might have been dead, but more like him would come.

  “Won’t he wonder what happened to Meatball?” Joseph wondered.

  “I’ll make something up. I’ll tell him he got neutered.”

  Joseph winced and looked at Meatball sympathetically. “Meatball will be happy he only got shot.”

  I knew that I would have to think up a better story because the white patch over Meatball’s chest wouldn’t match the story. But Meatball was going to stay at the vet’s clinic for a few more days until his wound healed. I didn’t want to leave his side, but the vet wouldn’t let me spend the night by his cage. To get me out the door, the vet assured me that Meatball would be in a drugged coma so that he couldn’t scratch at his stitches and that he wouldn’t even know that I wasn’t there.

  When we got back to the house, the sun was about to poke its head over the horizon. The hallway carpet had been ripped out, exposing sparkling clean parquet flooring. My cell phone was ringing in my bedroom. I had expected it to be Griff, but I didn’t recognize the number.

  “Hello?”

  “My father has asked me to tell you that we have accepted your offer. We will be in touch,” said a voice over the phone. The man hung up.

  It only took me an extra second to figure out that Hawk had just called me.

  And that I was about to become a drug lord.

  I let my body fall into the mattress. It was no longer a matter of if I were going to do this. The deal was done. I was doing this. I turned my head and saw one of Bill’s boxes at the foot of my bed. I had been going through his things slowly, methodically, hoping I would find him somewhere in there.

  If he saw me now, about to embark on a major drug deal, he would have locked me up in a tower and swallowed the key. But he was gone. And I needed to do what I needed to do to protect myself. All of a sudden, I thought of something.

  I went searching through the box that contained Bill’s high school stuff and pulled out his last yearbook. I flipped through the pages until I found what I was looking for. Frances wasn’t hard to find. She was on every other page. I burst into Joseph’s room and jumped on his bed.

  “I need you to find someone for me.”

  He pulled the blanket over his face. “I still haven’t found the last guy you wanted me to find.”

  I yanked the blanket back and threw my brother’s high school yearbook on his chest. “I have a first and a last name. I even have pictures.”

  Joseph grinned devilishly and jumped out of bed.

  “This is it,” I told myself while he was clicking away. “This is how I am going to make this right.”

  CHAPTER 16: CAMERON

  FAITH OR FATE?

  “Cameron.” My eyelids flipped open. It was Emmy’s voice. She was in my head again.

  She had as much room as she wanted in there now.

  I threw a T-shirt on and marched out of my room into the guest suite I was now sharing with Carly and Tiny. They had arrived late last night with news. I had dragged both of them to the waterfall outside so that our voices would be drowned out by the crash of water.

  Tiny stood waiting. He wanted to tell me something but watched Carly from the corner of his eye. I knew it had to do with his secret task of finding Norestrom.

  Carly huffed at Tiny. “If you needed to come here without me, then it’s obviously something you guys don’t want me to know. So I obviously need to know what this is about. I didn’t come all the way here to be kept in the dark. Spill it, Tiny.”

  I didn’t care anymore if Carly knew what I had been up to. I just wanted to get to Norestrom.

  “Go on,” I ordered Tiny.

  “Norestrom is dead.”

  “How sure are you?”

  Tiny glanced around and pulled out his phone. A video came on. Gangsters hidden under neck scarves, waltzing around a body. Norestrom’s dead, useless corpse.

  “He was shot in the back.”

  “Who shot him?” Carly wondered. She wasn’t surprised as to what I had been up to.

  “The Finch Street boys. They heard about the reward that was being offered, and they found him hiding in one of their neighborhoods. They killed him when he tried to run.”

  The Finch Street boys … their neighborhood was close to Emmy’s neighborhood. Norestrom had been close to Emmy. Too close.

  “Give them the reward,” I told Tiny, even though the reward had been for Norestrom to be delivered alive. They had saved Emmy without knowing it. As much as I wanted my revenge on that bastard, Emmy was more important. Shield would just have to suffer my revenge for Norestrom as well as himself.

  I had spent a lot of time working with Julièn and Manny. Visiting the pot fields. Meeting growers who had no idea what they were doing. Julièn was good at making deals, but he was not a businessman. He took no care in the product he delivered. As long as there was product and he got paid, the rest was immaterial. He had a lot to learn from Pops.

  Yes, I had put in a lot of hours with Julièn, but I still had a lot of work to do. I had to make amends with all three cartel families. I had to make amends with Pops. I had to kill Shield. I had to fix the Coalition. It wasn’t too late. I could fix anything.

  First, I had to get Emmy back, if she would have me back. Yes, I could fix anything.

  Tiny was watching yesterday’s sports highlights from the designer couch that doubled as his bed. The television was small in terms of the kind of system Tiny was used to. It was hidden behind a fake Rembrandt because it didn’t fit into Julien’s European décor. As though Europeans didn’t watch TV.

  Carly was sitting by the window with a cold cup of coffee in her hands. I was in a hurry, energized for the first time in months. I couldn’t wait to loop her in. But there was something that slowed me down. Her eyes were moving, but she was absent. Body. Mind. Spirit. All disjointed.

  She had never been so far away for so long from Spider. This was no accident.

  Julièn’s boys were playing soccer on the grass outside. Carly was watching them.

  I sat across from her and poured myself a coffee.

  “What are you doing here, Carly?” I asked her. We both knew Tiny didn’t need to be escorted here to give me the news about Norestrom.

  “Apparently you have a death wish. I came here to make sure you didn’t get yourself killed. Or get Manny pregnant. Same difference.”

  One of the boys, the youngest one, ran for the soccer ball but forgot to stop when he got to it. He rolled over the ball and went soaring into the soft grass, making his brothers and his mother cackle. I thought of Emmy and chuckled. Carly remained detached.

  “We both know you’re not here for me,” I said.

  She turned her robotic gaze to me. “He got a vasectomy.”

  I remembered what Spider had said to me after Carly had miscarried—the last time Carly had miscarried. “I can’t let her do this to herself anymore,” was what he had said. I guess he had found a way.

  “The funny
thing is,” Carly continued in thought, “he isn’t the only one who can get me pregnant.”

  She said this as though Spider weren’t the only one for her. I sighed.

  “Not everybody is meant to have children.” Definitely not us, I thought but didn’t say.

  “Julièn has kids. And he is the worst.”

  I couldn’t deny that. But the boys—the three successors—were Julièn’s trophies. He had provided the seed; this was the extent of his attachment. I was trying to find a way to explain this to Carly, but the usually subdued Tiny interrupted us.

  “It’s that guy. The ginger who used to work for us.”

  He leaned over his fat belly to get a better look at the screen.

  I wouldn’t have bothered to get up had it not been for Carly. She stared at me, wide-eyed, like she had surprised a bear in the bushes and was deciding whether she should run or scare him off.

  I saw the screen just as that guard, whatshisname, came out through the archway under the stands. He bounced his way down to the ring.

  I would have spotted her anywhere, even in an arena of thirty thousand screaming heads. And I had. I stopped moving, hypnotized by the small screen that was out of place in this European design. I sat on the uncomfortable couch and leaned over like Tiny.

  The sports anchors talked about his knockout win. About Griffin the Grappler Connan. That was his name. Griff. The one who’d had his eye on Emmy. The one whose face I had wanted to kick in. Still wanted to.

  The Grappler’s triumphant return to the ring wasn’t the real news, though. What he had done afterward was. He had run out of the ring. Before shaking his dumbfounded opponent’s hand as a show of respect for the sport. Before the referee had raised his hand and officially declared him the winner. Before the belt had been looped around his waist.

  Before Griffin the Grappler Connan had had a chance to celebrate his win, he had run out on all of them and into the crowd. Stepping over fans, to get to this unknown girl. The camera honed in on them—she was in his arms.

  The picture stilled and diminished to a floating image between the heads of the two jocks reporting sports. The real knockout, the caption read under Emmy’s face as the anchors giggled craftily. They moved on to the next highlight. They could do that—move on. As though this were just another day in the office.

  Tiny had already quietly disappeared from the suite. Only Carly and I remained.

  “This?” I shouted, grabbing my head in both hands. “This was your plan to keep Emmy safe? Send her into the arms of that … of that …” I was shaking my head, trying to erase the image of Emmy’s arms around that bastard’s neck.

  Not him. Not him and her. He wasn’t good enough for her. Those arms, that skin of hers, smooth, silky, around him.

  Carly cocked her head and fought back angry tears. When she spoke, I realized it was me she was angry with. “This was what you wanted, wasn’t it? For her to be safe? For her to move on without you? She’s moved on. I did what you asked me to.”

  “She deserves better than him.” She deserved … me. The better version of me. The one who had gone to MIT. The one she had met on the street and fallen in love with over a candlelit dinner.

  “You left her. She deserves to love. And be loved back. And he loves her, Cameron. I saw it. The first time I spotted them together at the Farm. So did you. That was why you were in such a big hurry to get rid of him.”

  I was about to tell Carly about getting Emmy back, like she had wanted me to do, asked me to do, but she beat me to the punch.

  “This life … no one wants this life. I miss her too, Cameron. But did you see? How good Emmy looked? She’s happy. Griff makes her happy. He’s a good man. He’ll protect her. He’ll put her first.”

  I never thought I would want to punch a girl so much, let alone one of my best friends.

  I had to breathe. I had to focus on every breath.

  Carly was right. He was a good man. And I was scum. Emmy. She was smiling, beaming. When he had come to her. She looked more beautiful than I had ever seen her. It was as though she were shining. Glowing under the camera lights.

  Happy? Emmy was happy? Emmy had moved on?

  She had found someone else, someone of her own kind, almost.

  She had done exactly what I had asked her to do. For once in her beautiful life, she had done exactly what I wanted …

  She wasn’t coming back.

  And I wasn’t bringing her back.

  She didn’t belong with me. I was an idiot to think, to have thought that we were meant to be. I was an idiot to have hoped.

  As I turned to Carly, I had solidified and my heart had deadened. “It would be best if you left immediately.”

  “What?” she asked, even though she had clearly heard what I said.

  “Go with Tiny. That’s an order.”

  She kept a steely gaze on me. Then she nodded once.

  I grabbed the doorknob, left the room, and went to knock on another door.

  Manny was still in her nightie when she appeared through her doorway. She placed her hand on my chest, and I pushed my way inside.

  Broken hearts are for fucking saps.

  CHAPTER 17: EMILY

  BROKEN PROMISES

  Frances and I pulled up to a gray skyscraper in the core of downtown. It was a busy street, with no parking in sight. We were blocking traffic, and cars were honking behind us. I rushed out of the car, and Frances took off in search of parking.

  Joseph had found Frances pretty quickly for me. Like half an hour quickly. I’d waited for Griff to come back from his celebrations and sneaked out as soon as he had conked out on his mattress, which was about two minutes after he had come through the door with the rest of the drunken clan.

  Frances lived in a ritzy apartment building downtown. The doorman looked at me a little strangely as I walked to the stairs—then again, my walk was more of a waddle these days. After several unanswered knocks on Frances’s door, I sank to the ground and rested against her door, ready to wait as long as it took.

  When her door opened, I rolled back like a beach ball, my head hitting her welcome mat, my legs splayed in the air, like Humpty Dumpty falling off his wall.

  I peered up at Frances, who was in a silk kimono.

  “Emily?”

  I rolled back up and brushed myself off while Frances recovered from the shock. There was an old man in a suit standing behind her. If disease had a face, it was his; he was ugly but looked harmless enough.

  “My sister,” she stammered to him.

  He kissed her on the cheek, keeping his eye on me, or rather on my nonblonde sisterly hair color. As soon as he was out of sight down the hall, her charmed grin left her lips, and she dragged me into her apartment, slamming the door.

  “Did anyone see you come here?”

  “I need your help.”

  I pulled my poncho aside, revealing my secret belly.

  Frances brought her hand to her mouth.

  After I handed her the mostly erased business card that Carly had given me and asking for her help in finding the underworld accountant, she had hesitated.

  “Emily,” she started, “the baby. Is it—”

  “It’s mine,” I said sternly. “All mine. Are you going to help me or not?”

  As the blood left her face, she sat down on the arm of her ivory chaise and grabbed one of the whisky glasses sitting on the coffee table.

  “You really shouldn’t be here,” she said over the rim of her glass.

  I took a chance sitting on the fragile glass coffee table and reached for her arm.

  “Do you remember asking me if Bill had left me any money? Well, it turns out he has left me all of it. This accountant can help me get the money.”

  She was still shaking her head and looked at my face and at my stomach until her gaze turned to empty space.

  ****

  Twenty-four hours later, I had a name, an address, and a ride downtown.

  A northern gust was blowing peop
le away, but I was steady on my feet. I held my poncho tight to my body and ran into the building. There was a manned information kiosk in the middle of the lobby that I ignored. I walked up to the golden plaque on the wall and looked for the name I had been searching for so long: Henry Grimes. He was on the eighth floor.

  I spun on my heels and waited for Frances. She had insisted on coming in with me. “Emmy,” she had said, “this man that you are going to see manages money for the biggest drug dealers, murderers in the country. You are pregnant, and you are not going in there by yourself.”

  And so I was waiting. People in business suits were filtering by me and cramming into the elevators. I was wringing my hands, feeling how close I was to retribution and to my freedom.

  I took another look around. No Frances.

  There was a large clock on the wall. I watched as the seconds ticked away, each one feeling like a lifetime. I started to tread toward the elevators like a mosquito to a porch light.

  I couldn’t wait for Frances to get there. I couldn’t wait for anyone else, for anything else.

  I got stuffed into the elevator with the rest of the traffic and was luckily the first to get off.

  Goose bumps ran up and down my arms; I wasn’t sure if it was because of the excitement or because the eighth floor reminded me of a school hallway. The plastered walls, the wooden arches, brought back memories of getting run over by girls who were prettier, smarter, more popular than me. Part of me wanted to scurry through and find an empty bathroom stall, any spot to hide. But that part of me had been slowly getting snuffed out in these last few months. And now it was gone. I wasn’t that nervous, insulated target anymore. My name was Emily Sheppard. My brother had been Bill Sheppard, once king of the underworld. I was going to be a mother. I was carrying Cameron’s child—Cameron, who had also been king of the underworld. Now I was going to take a piece of the world for myself and my child.