We turned onto one of the side streets and were met with row upon row of low-income housing. Most of the lots were completely paved around the houses; the houses that were fortunate enough to have green patches out front had, for the most part, knee-high weeds growing among damaged furniture, old couches, and other forgotten possessions. I watched an old woman slowly stroll on the sidewalk, pulling her disagreeable kitty cat behind her with a leash. There was one of those in every neighborhood.
Cameron pulled up in front of a semi-detached house and stopped. He sat silently for a few seconds, uncomfortably staring ahead.
“Is this your mother’s house?” I asked, breaking the silence.
“Yep,” he said.
“So this is where you grew up,” I mused glancing back at the house. His mother’s house was faced with red brick and had an aluminum door with a ripped screen and cracked window in front of a windowless brown door. The porch roof looked like it was going to come crashing down on the cement stoop at any second. The front yard had mismatched chairs strewn, broken or lying on their sides, and bottles appeared among the overgrown grass.
“No. The place my mom and I lived in was a lot worse than this,” he said. “The city had it torn down a couple years ago.”
Cameron was gazing at me nervously.
“Well,” I encouraged, “are we going in or are we just going to sit here?”
Cameron sighed, let go of my out-squeezed hand, and stepped out of the Audi. I met him on the sidewalk, where he quickly picked up my hand once more. We strolled in tandem down the walkway, stepping over trash, and finally came to a stop at the front door. With one immense inhalation and a last anxious glance at me, Cameron knocked on the door. We could hear the television playing in the background. When no one came, he knocked again.
We waited for a minute, but still nothing happened. Cameron heaved another sigh, screeched open the aluminum door, and pushed on the windowless front door. He peered inside first and, with his hand protectively on the small of my back, guided me in.
The smell of mold and tobacco hit my nose as soon as I walked in, but I continued to maintain my self-possession. There were hoards of junk piled in the hallway and on the stairs that led to a second story. The pink wallpaper in the hall was yellowed and peeling off in spots, and the dirty greenish carpet was speckled with cigarette burns. I jumped when a cat leapt up from behind the pile of laundry that was on the floor.
Cameron put his arm around my shoulders. I could see that he was embarrassed to have me there. I smiled my most supportive smile at him, but I wasn’t sure if he bought it.
We walked into the living room, where two little girls and a boy were sitting side by side on the couch, watching cartoons on TV. They looked so tiny on that big couch. One of the blond girls had mad knots in her threaded hair. Their bare feet were dirty and their eyes looked almost wild as they watched us walk in. I noticed that the little boy had Cameron’s same dark eyes.
“Where’s your mother?” Cameron asked them abruptly.
The bigger of the little girls expressionlessly pointed toward a doorway.
We continued past the children and walked into the kitchen where a cloud of cigarette smoke hung in the air. Half of the cupboard doors were either hanging off one hinge or missing. There was a pile of dishes stacked in and around the sink and dirty pots on top of the encrusted stove and counters. The floor crunched as we stepped on leftover foodstuff.
A lady was sitting alone at the kitchen table, with a large plastic glass half-full of beer in front of her, two empty beer bottles next to that, and a cigarette left burning in an overflowing ashtray. She lifted her head and peered at Cameron as we walked in. The sound of the television in the background was met by the leaky kitchen faucet dripping water. We quietly stood there while the lady took a puff of her cigarette and looked lost in thought.
She sneered when she finally recognized Cameron. “What the hell are you doing here?” she croaked at him. “And who the hell are you?” she said, turning to me.
“Mom, this is Emmy … Emily,” he corrected himself nervously. I smiled at her.
“You brought a girl with you. That’s a first.” With her cigarette hanging on her bottom lip, Cameron’s mom strutted over to us and put her hand on my shoulder, directing me to sit at the table. “It must be pretty serious for my boy to bring you here. He’s usually too proud to introduce me to any of his friends—apparently he’s too good for his own mother.”
Cameron’s mother took her seat again, and Cameron yanked out a chair for himself.
“Can I get you kids anything to eat?” she asked, sweetly.
“No, we’re fine,” Cameron quickly answered for the both of us.
Her hair was shoulder length, crimped, and bleached blond—though, from the overgrowth at her scalp, I guessed that her natural hair color was likely closer to Cameron’s dark locks. She was wearing a tight, V-neck sleeveless shirt that showed off her well-endowed cleavage. Unfortunately, it also emphasized the beer gut that hung over her skintight jeans. Her blue eye shadow drew attention to her beautiful dark eyes, and almost all of the cigarette butts in the ashtray still had traces of her bright red lipstick on them. Her skin was translucent, like silk wrapping paper, the kind that stuck out of gift bags.
We sat in silence while Cameron’s mother gulped down the other half of her beer and stared at me over the rim of her glass. “You’re too skinny and you’re very pale. You need to put some makeup on,” she announced to the table, “but I doubt there’s anything you can do to make that hair color any better. Have you tried to dye it? The lady next door sells wigs—they’re made from real horse hair. I can get you a good price.”
I could feel the blood rushing to my cheeks.
Cameron was furious. “I didn’t come here so that you can insult my girlfriend. I came here to talk to you about Rocco.”
“Rocco?” she asked between puffs. “Where is that little bastard?” She leaned over the table, smirking at me. “You know that ungrateful child left me alone with no good-byes or anything.” She added, “I was worried sick and almost called the police till Cammy called me a couple weeks later to tell me that Rocco was with him.” Cameron rolled his eyes as his mother turned to him. “Seems all of my sons eventually leave me to fend for myself.”
We sat in uncomfortable silence again. Cameron’s mother got up to pull another bottle of beer out the fridge. Cameron was shaking his leg, nervous, mentally preparing to break the news to his mother.
“You came to talk to me about Rocco, so talk,” she urged. She sat back down and poured another glass full.
Cameron cleared his throat and looked at his interlaced hands on the table. “Rocco was … he’s dead.”
His mother immediately looked up and glanced from Cameron to me. The tears welled up in my eyes, and the knot in my throat inflated. I had to look away.
“What?” she asked, incredulous.
“He was shot and killed a few days ago,” Cameron said, his voice shuddering.
His mother stood and started pacing around the kitchen and shaking her head. I could hear her mumbling and swearing under her breath. Finally she stopped and winced at Cameron.
“You’re just a pariah,” she rasped to him. “I didn’t put up a fight or make the police bring Rocco back to me when I found out he was with you because he looked up to you so much. You come here with your expensive car and your little girlfriend and you think that this makes you better than the rest of us. All your money did was get my little Rocco killed. You’re nothing but a bastard, just like your father. You ruined my life, and now you’ve ruined my baby Rocco’s life. I curse the day you were born.”
My fists, my jaw were clenched. I watched Cameron. He was very calm, like he had expected this from his mother. He got up and dug into his pocket, pulling out a large stack of hundred dollar bills.
“Someone will contact you with the funeral details,” he said, as he placed the money on the table. “Make sure some of this goes
to getting food for those kids.” He walked over to me and gently pulled my chair out to help me up. As we exited the kitchen, I saw Cameron’s mother snatch the money from the table and stuff it down her shirt.
Neither one of us spoke in the car. Cameron’s eyes stared vacantly at the road as we sped down the street. We passed a street light, and, instead of turning on the road that we had come in through, Cameron kept driving and turned down a narrow laneway instead. There was barely an inch between the car’s side mirrors and the warehouse walls that flanked the laneway. He continued to drive dangerously fast until we got to the end, where the string of warehouses stopped and the lane opened up into a makeshift pier of gravel and rocks overlooking the Callister River.
Cameron unfastened his seatbelt and dashed out of the car. He stuck his hands in his pockets and stiffly leaned against the hood. I stepped out, climbed on the hood and wrapped my arms around him. His body was rigid, and he was breathing short angry breaths. When I pulled in closer, I felt his muscles slowly relax again.
“I used to come here a lot when I was a kid and needed to get away from my mom,” he told me.
I glanced around. We were in the bay of a commercial part of the river. Factories and smoke stacks bordered the shores and large barges carrying steel and crates floated back and forth across the harbor. A dead fish floated on the mud-brown water by the rocks.
“It’s lovely,” I remarked.
He chuckled. “I didn’t have much to work with back then.” He turned around to face me.
“So, you met my mother,” he said bitterly, “What did you think?”
I smiled sheepishly. “She’s lovely too, Cammy.”
He shuddered. “Please don’t ever call me that. I hate it.”
I leaned in and kissed him lightly, so as to not frighten him away.
We lay on the hood of the car and listened to the steam whistles blowing by the other shore. I thought about Rocco and finally understood why he had been so desperate to make a life away from his mother. Another thought occurred to me, and I turned to Cameron.
“That night, when those men came in, Norestrom kept asking Rocco where I was. They were looking for me.”
“Uh-huh,” Cameron replied cautiously.
“This wasn’t the first time that I had met him,” I confessed.
Cameron’s interest was piqued. “Who? Norestrom?”
I nodded and told him about the day Norestrom joined me at the picnic table on school grounds. Cameron was furious and walked to the edge of the water, swearing under his breath.
“I need you to tell me,” I pleaded, “did Rocco get killed because of me?”
“He didn’t get killed because of you. Rocco got killed because of one man’s greed.”
“I don’t understand what that has to do with me,” I said.
He sat on the hood and pulled on my legs, sliding me closer to him. “Before your brother and I started the business, a guy named Shield already had the power over almost all of the underground market. He controlled shipments, sales, business dealings, and all of the money that came with it. He had connections everywhere, and the gang leaders let him control everything because they were afraid of him and his connections. When your brother, Spider, and I came in and started making contacts with the gang leaders, all of them started to join forces with us instead. Even though Bill was a pretty smooth negotiator, the gang leaders didn’t need much convincing—none of them trusted Shield, and they had been looking for a way out. The business thrived under our management. The gang leaders were happy; and Shield lost everything but the small business he ran from his own turf. He tried to threaten us and the other leaders with his connections, but with all of the leaders peacefully united, there was nothing that Shield could do.”
Although it was hard for me to imagine my brother being anything else but a big goof, I still didn’t understand. “What does this have to do with me?”
“Shield feels that we stole the business from him and that we should have to pay him for that. After Bill died, he appealed to the leaders, asking that Bill’s money be given to him. The leaders just laughed in his face. Now Shield is coming after you for that money.”
“I don’t have any money, Cameron. My parents stopped sending me money after they got sick of me sending it back to them.”
Cameron raised his eyebrows. “I never understood that. Why do you choose to make life harder on yourself when your parents’ money opens doors for you that are closed to the rest of the world? You could do anything you want with their money to support you.”
“I can do anything I want with my parents’ money, so long as what I choose to do is what they want me to do,” I grumbled. Cameron looked confused. I shook my head, flustered. “It’s complicated. Don’t change the subject. Point is, I have no money, and this Shield guy is wasting his time.”
“Actually, you do. You have Bill’s inheritance, which is pretty generous, I might add.”
“I think I would have remembered if Bill had left me anything. He didn’t.”
“Yes, he did,” Cameron argued as he reached his hand over and slid it down the middle of my chest. I was frozen in place. He pulled his hand out, with the angel pendant that my brother had given me clasped between two fingers.
I laughed, shaking off some of the nervousness that lingered after his touch. “I hate to break this to you, Cameron, but that thing is worth a few hundred dollars at best. I don’t think Shield will be satisfied if I pawn this and give him the money.”
“Look more closely,” he urged, “What do you see?”
I humored him and looked down. There was nothing unusual about it. It was beautiful to me. An angel standing on a pedestal with a pink gem in the middle. I came up shrugging.
“Look closer.” He held the pendant upside down so that the pedestal faced me.
“Shiny silver and product codes.”
“They’re not product codes, they’re bank account numbers. Bill set up offshore bank accounts in the Caymen Islands for you before he died, with another promise from me to move all his money into them if something ever happened to him. I kept that promise too,” he said, winking.
For the first time, I realized that the numbers meant something, but that still didn’t explain everything. Last time I had checked in the mirror, I didn’t look all that threatening. “Why didn’t this Shield person just send one of his dumb soldiers to come grab the necklace from me?”
“Because they have no idea that the information they’re looking for has been hanging around your neck for years, and, until they saw me with you, they had no idea you even had the money. They must have assumed that Carly, Spider, and I had kept it for ourselves.”
“What does seeing you with me have anything to do with it?”
“I think Shield’s guys had been following me around for a while. Someone must have tipped them off that I was spending a lot of time in the projects when I had no business to conduct there,” he said smiling at me. “When Meatball hunted you down … and we officially met, I freaked out because I was afraid that they would figure out who you were. In hindsight, if I had left you alone and not gone back again, I don’t think they would have known anything was up other than my stupid dog attacking some girl.” He held my eyes. “But I really hated to see you so upset with me that day, and Meatball did break your ancient Walkman … I just couldn’t leave it alone. I had to go back and fix it.”
“I’m glad you did,” I said.
He smiled a tight smile. “Well, I shouldn’t have, because the second time we met, I confirmed their suspicion that something was up. Shield had sent one of his top guys to back up the spotter’s story. When I saw him running past us in the projects, I knew the jig was up.”
Things suddenly started to make sense. “The runner? The one from the cemetery?”
He nodded somberly. “He’s the worst of his kind. He wouldn’t have just kidnapped you—he would have done a lot more nastier things to you before he took you back to Shield. When
I heard him say in the cemetery what he had planned to do to you, it drove me over the edge … I completely lost it.”
I remembered that night in the cemetery and the uncontrollable rage on Cameron’s face as he shot the man repeatedly.
“Shield must have sent Norestrom to try to get information on you,” he reasoned.
“How is Norestrom related to Shield?”
“Norsetrom is Shield’s right-hand man, kind of like Spider is mine.”
“But I didn’t tell Norestrom anything.”
He smiled reassuringly. “I think they already suspected who you might be because of your hair. I guess someone must have told them that Bill had a little sister with flaming red hair.” I would have normally been slightly offended with that comment, but Cameron had a loving smile on his face, so I let him get away with it—this time. “That’s why they planted a trap to see if it was really you. But I didn’t catch it on time.”
“A trap?” I didn’t remember falling into a leaf-covered hole or getting caught in any flying nets.
“We normally paid some local gang kid to keep Bill’s gravesite clean,” he explained. “But the bastards threw garbage around Bill’s grave right before you came through. Of course, you couldn’t resist cleaning up the mess, could you?” he teased. “When you stopped, they knew without a doubt who you were, and we had to stop Shield’s man from coming after you. Spider and I grabbed him just as he was running out of the cemetery after you.”
“Did Spider know who I was?”
“He knew that Bill had a little sister, but that’s it.” Cameron passed his fingers through his hair. “Believe me, it wasn’t a pretty conversation when I had to admit to him that I’d been secretly watching over you and that, because of that, we would have to kill one of Shield’s top guys, possibly starting an all-out gang war.”
Crow’s Row Page 29