Scare Crow (15 page)

All of a sudden, Mike and I had a lot in common. And killing him would be the demise
of his fa
mily.

“I’m letting you go,” I told him. Spider and Mike just stared at me as though I were
speaking Klingon. “Make the arrangements you need to safely get yourself out of Shield’s
grasp. Go back to your family. And if you tell
anyone
about
anything
, know that I will come after you and your wife and your kid. You’ll wish I would
have killed you t
oday.”

Mike’s eyes were round, mirrored only by Spider’s
eyes.

****

“What the hell was that?” Spider grunted as we walked down the b
lock.

“It was my decision. I stand b
y it.”

“It was that picture, wasn’t it? Sick little girl. Devoted parents who shaved their
heads to make their daughter feel better about losing her own hair. You believed that
classic sob story about a kid dying of cancer. It could have all been a bunch of bullshit.
He could have printed that picture off the Internet and kept it on him for the sympathy
vote.”

I remembered Mike’s reaction as I held the picture. “He was telling the truth.” Of
this, I had no d
oubt.

“What if he wa
sn’t?”

“He was. And if he wasn’t, then he’ll suffer an even worse d
eath.”

I found Tiny waiting for me at the meeting p
oint.

“This is exactly why you should have never been doing all this yourself. Now you’ve
given him enough time to warn Shield before disappea
ring.”

“No one can ever disappear forever,” I reminded him. “And he won’t do anything to
jeopardize his kid’s
life.”

“That is, if he even has a kid,” Spider mumbled as I got into the
car.

“If he dies, so does the money that pays for the kid’s medical b
ills.”

Spider held on to the door so that I couldn’t close it. “So we kill him and send his
family more money than they know what to do with. They can pay bills or whatever the
hell they want. Who the fuck cares what happens to them? Since when do
you
care? We don’t leave liabilities, Cam
eron.”

“My decision is final. Mike is to remain unharmed unless I order other
wise.”

“Emmy’s messed with your head too much. You’re not thinking straight anymore. She’s
not even around, and she still manages to fuck yo
u up.”

“Let’s go,” I ordered
Tiny.

As soon as Tiny pressed on the gas, Spider let go of the door and I shut it, leaving
Spider to talk to himself on the sidewalk. We were immediately going to the closest
airfield—initially part of my escape plan in case things with Mike went w
rong.

Spider was initially supposed to meet me there, so I suppose I could have just offered
him a ride to the airfield. But he had gotten himself to Mike’s place, and he could
get himself back. Besides, he needed time to cool
off.

When we drove up to the tarmac, I was surprised to see Carly waiting by the p
lane.

I was going to ask her how she was feeling. But by the stern look on her face, I knew
this attempt at compassion would be met with a gri
mace.

“Manny’s been chomping to meet with you,” she said, practically spitting out the words.
Carly had never hidden her utter disdain for M
anny.

“What a
bout?”

“Probably wants to have your babies,” she snapped. All of a sudden, her face twitched
and went pale as the immensity of her words hit home. She quickly shook it off. “Obviously
she wouldn’t tell little ole me about her earth-shattering t
opic.”

Manny. She had been born into the business of the underworld, literally. Her father,
leader of the Latin Mafia, had been captain before her, before he was assassinated
in broad daylight by a sniper bullet. Everyone knew she had masterminded the assassination.
But no one could prove it. And no one dared to bring it up. She hopped into his spot
as though he had just been keeping it warm for her. Her beauty, her ruthlessness,
her hunger for money had made her popular around the captains’ table and in my
bed.

“I’ll talk to her before the big meeting,” I said to Carly as my eyes followed Spider’s
car as he drove onto the ta
rmac.

I went up the stairs, and Carly followed me into our private plane. While I was pouring
myself a drink, Spider came in and found himself a seat as far away from us as possible.
Unfortunately for him, it was one of our smaller pl
anes.

“I need you to look into something for me,” I said to Carly, loud enough for Spider
to hear. “There’s a guy named Mike Westfall. I need you to look into
him.”

She shrugged. “What am I looking
for?”

I could feel Spider glaring a
t me.

“He’s got a wife and kid somewhere. You might have a bit of trouble finding them.
He’s been trying to hide
them.”

“And what am I supposed to do when I find
them?”

“Find out what they need and give it to them.” I pushed my seat back and threw a T-shirt
over my
face.

“That’s completely unclear as usual,” she grum
bled.

****

When we landed in Houston, my first meeting was with Kostya, leader of the Russian
Mafia in the United States. With saggy cheeks and a fat nose that looked like it had
been punched one too many times, Kostya was the ugliest man I had ever met. He still
had the marking of the bullet that had slid across his forehead in an assassination
attempt … the first time. There were two more attempts after that. He lost his wife
over ten years ago to cancer. It seemed that with each isolated year that passed,
his eyes sank a little deeper into the sagging skin of his
face.

At first glance, Kostya looked like an undereducated thug. But in reality, he was
well-spoken and though
tful.

Nothing was ever as it seemed in the underw
orld.

In addition to managing his own turf on the East Coast, Kostya was responsible for
pharmaceutical requisitions. Each captain was accountable for one aspect of our activities,
whether it was product or police rep
orts.

Kostya’s car was waiting for us on the tarmac. Spider and I climbed in, leaving Carly
to take care of everything else. Our one-on-one meetings were always in a moving vehicle.
All of the captains had their idiosyncrasies. This one was his. After three assassination
attempts, he was a little jit
tery.

“We need to drop our Chappelle de Marseille shares,” he announced after offering me
a drink that I ref
used.

This wasn’t news to me. Chappelle de Marseille was the largest distributor of pharmaceuticals
to the United States. For years, because of Bill, we’d had an inside into their distribution.
Skimming their shipments. Arranging for truck deliveries to go missing. Dropping our
shares also meant that we would be taking our business elsew
here.

For the last few months, Kostya had been trying to push me to agree to sell and get
out. He had good reason: Chappelle de Marseille was about to undergo extreme government
scrutiny following the seizure of its parent corporation. My problem was that the
parent corporation was Sheppard Enterpr
ises.

So far, the seizure was just a rumor. Everything had been hushed up by the government
to give them a chance to quietly dig into the Sheppard funds before they totally disappe
ared.

Pulling our shares from Chappelle de Marseille wouldn’t just bankrupt this small company;
it would also set off a media frenzy, an avalanche that would bankrupt all of Sheppard
Enterprises, Emmy’s family. Emmy had refused to take my money after Carly had given
it to her. I feared that if her parents were bankrupt, she would have absolutely nothing
to fall back on if things got really bad for
her.

I had been trying to stall the inevitable. “What’s our alternative?” I asked him,
expecting no answer as had been the case the last few times we had met to discuss
this t
opic.

“Adva
ntis.”

My expression remained uniform. “A little small for our demands, don’t you t
hink?”

“Not for long. My sources just confirmed that they are going to be merging with Chemfree.
They’re just waiting for funding … fro
m us.”

“Two small American firms that will corner the pharmaceuticals market,” I mused. “That’s
all well, but we will need an inside guy before we move the business
over.”

“Already done,” he said, a look of satisfaction flooding his ugly face. There was
no trace of doubt in his v
oice.

When I hesitated, Spider eyed me to see what I would do. If we didn’t make a move
soon, we would lose millions. This was for the best of the Coalition, and that was
why we were
here.

“Sell our shares,” I settled. “As soon as poss
ible.”

The Sheppard family, I knew, wouldn’t survive this. But I comforted myself in knowing
that Bill would have made the same deci
sion.

CHAPTER SEVEN:
EMMY

SMILE. THOUGH YOUR HEART IS BREAKING

I was smiling. Because that was what the Charlie Chaplin song said to do, with promises
that the sun would come shining through. So I hid my sorrow behind a smile. But the
clouds never pa
rted.

Time heals all wounds. At least, that’s what people say. Yet I still found myself
dreaming of Cameron and Rocco every night, each dream becoming more vivid as the pregnancy
progressed. Each dream leaving me sweaty and heartbroken. I couldn’t stop dreaming
about them, even if I’d wante
d to.

Griff had kept his promise and never left my side. At school and at work, he walked
me to the door and was waiting for me when I was done. If I found myself wandering
about the house in the middle of the night, he would come fin
d me.

I’d smile. He’d smile. But we barely spoke. Well, Griff tried to talk to me, reason
with me, plead with me initially. I had started talking to him in monosylla
bles.

It was weird how lonely you could feel even when you were never alone. Having Griff
there was better than not having Griff there. So I smiled. Griff mostly smiled too.
But I noticed his gaze wandering off into nothingness. I knew that I was breaking
his heart, and as much as this killed me, I was incapable of giving him what he wanted:
for us to mov
e on.

If my roommates ever wondered why Griff kept so close to me, they never asked. Too
mesmerized, I supposed. Griff had become somewhat of a celebrity around our house.
Hunter had dragged everybody he knew to the house just so they could see Griffin the
Grappler Connan with their own eyes. Everything about Griff was infectious. His laugh,
his self-assuredness, the way his mouth crinkled at the side when he smiled. Hunter
had quickly learned to not bring any girls around to meet Griff; otherwise, he’d be
ignored the rest of the night as the girls swooned over G
riff.

I knew that everybody was tolerating Meatball and me because of G
riff.

Griff was a little put off by the attention, especially when we finally happened to
find ourselves alone only to be immediately interrupted again. But he was polite enough
and signed autographs when requested. He even eventually signed Hunter’s poster after
Hunter agreed to take it off their bedroom wall. All the attention Griff was getting
made me feel even more alienated. The only time anybody ever really talked to me was
to ask me questions about Griff—and then I hid behind a s
mile.

I hadn’t realized how bad things had gotten, how bad
I
had gotten, until Griff was walking Cassie and me to school one mor
ning.

“You changed your hair color,” I remarked, making small talk with Cassie. Her hair
had gone from kettle-black to blonde, and she had removed her pale-face makeup to
reveal her blonde eyebrows. It seemed she had given up her vampire ways for sun-ki
ssed.

Griff and Cassie simply looked at me as though I were talking to them from the
moon.

“I changed it two weeks ago,” she said with a s
mirk.

I had taken a liking to doing my homework in the school library. Because it was quiet;
because Griff couldn’t talk and I could be alone with my thoughts. While Griff picked
a nearby table and read a book, I sat at a computer to write my criminology paper.
The fact that I had decided to write on the topic of white-collar crime wasn’t coincidence.
Every day I scoured the news, looking for anything relating to my father. It had become
an obsession, a release, a drug. I couldn’t walk by someone’s discarded newspaper
without grabbing it. I couldn’t sit at a computer without seeing what new information
there was on my father. For the first time in my life, I was getting to know my father;
unfortunately, it had to be through the eyes of various reporters. I just wished someone
had something nice to say about him, other than his great ability to make money. At
least I was double-dipping on my time and using the information I collected on my
father’s crimes to write my criminology p
aper.

Griff and I found ourselves having fewer and fewer things to discuss, that is, argue
about. Everything had been said. He wanted to move forward, and I couldn’t. We were
at an immovable, focal impasse, and trying to make small talk was rendered pointless
when there was such a huge boulder hanging over our heads. Sometimes we would walk
all the way to school and back without ever saying one word to each other. Sometimes
I would go to bed at night realizing that I hadn’t uttered one word to anyone all
day. I had already given up hope that Griff would come around, and I could feel that
Griff was giving up hope that I would come around. But the more sedentary I became,
the worse the dreams of Cameron and Rocco became. To the point that I barely slept
or ate anymore. There was a lot of wandering around the house in the middle of the
n
ight.

The obsession with my father hadn’t replaced my obsession with Victor and Spider.
In fact, it had fueled it. On one of my news-hunting exercises, I had come across
a picture of Victor in the
Callister City Standard
. He was standing next to a mound of paper-wrapped bricks of cocaine. Another glorious
moment for the local hero. I wanted to punch a hole through his papered face. Instead,
I cut out his picture and stuck it on my bedroom wall, hiding it under one of my Van
Gogh posters so that Griff wouldn’t see it. When I realized that this art project
was half-finished, I drew a picture of a red ugly spider and stuck this next to Victor’s
picture. I had gone from staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling to glaring
at a replica of
Wheatfield with C
rows
.

I didn’t just want revenge—I needed it. But with Griff following my every move, I
couldn’t do anything to obtain it. And this was slowly killing me, like a long drawn-out
f
ever.

****

“I made pancakes,” Griff announced one Friday evening when we were alone in the house—a
rare moment. I was lying on my bed doing homework—trying to do homework. My mind was
always elsewhere nowa
days.

I smiled. Of course I smiled. “Not hungry. Th
anks.”

But Griff had stopped smiling as of late. “C’mon,” he ordered with that infectious
voice of
his.

This was something that Griff had started doing instead of smiling: insisting on food,
for me. His cooking skills were my least favorite of his attributes. He would try
to sneak healthy stuff in my food, like replacing sugar with protein powder. (
Who does that?
) I could barely keep anything down; eating pancakes that would probably taste like
flaxseed oil was a new form of tor
ture.

My eyes had found their way back to Plato’s
Symposium
. I was already two weeks behind on the required readings for et
hics.

Griff kept standing there. I kept ignoring
him.

He sighed a sigh that came from deep within. As though it were his last breath. “How
long are you going to keep this up
for?”

“I’m not hungry,” I insisted, with a smile that I really had to work har
d on.

I saw Griff’s body turn rigid, like something was rising inside of him. He lifted
his fist, held it up like he was about to hit something. He took another breath through
clenched teeth and let his fist slightly bump the doorframe. I could see it was taking
all his resolve to not exp
lode.

“Goddamn it, Emily. What is so wrong about wanting to move on from the bad into something
good?”

I let go of the stupid smile. “I can’t move on, Griff. Maybe you can forgive and forget
so easily, but I can’t. If I don’t do something, I’ll
die.”

“Because they’re going to come and kill you?” he said, mocking me darkly. “You still
haven’t given me any good reason as to why they would ever come after you again. Why
did they grab you in the first p
lace?”

I stared blankly at him. This was more information that I wasn’t letting g
o of.

His eyes were on fire. “So you’re going to kill two drug lords. Have you ever even
killed someone, Ms. Shep
pard?”

“No,” I said, wincing. “But there’s a first time for everyt
hing.”

“Do you know how ridiculous you s
ound?”

“I sound ridiculous?” I slammed my book shut and got up. “Rocco, a fourteen-year-old
kid, a kid who looked up to you, gets killed for no reason. And I’m the ridiculous
one? At least I have a sense of loy
alty.”

“He’s dead,” he shouted, his arms extended. “The kid was a really great kid, and something
like that should never have happened to him. Or to you. But he’s dead now, and we’re
alive. We have a chance to be happy. Karma will get those bastards back, and maybe
someday we’ll be able to settle the score ourselves. But for now, we need to stay
out of their way and out of their w
orld.”

“I already told you, Griff. I’m not asking for your permission, and I sure as hell
don’t need
you.”

He was si
lent.

I turned sideways to avoid bumping into him as I left my
room.

Griff pulled his arms around me, in a sort of hug, pinning my own arms against my
body, my back held against his c
hest.

“What are you doing?” I demanded when I realized it wasn’t a hug. I struggled to get
out of his en
fold.

“How are you going to get out of this, Em? If someone comes up and just grabs you
like this. What are you going to do?” he asked me, on the edge of hyst
eria.

I wiggled around, tried to jump, tried to kick from behind, but nothing changed the
fact that I was stuck. Meatball had come flying out from under my bed and tried to
nudge us apart. Since he spent most of his days with Griff while I was at school or
work, they had come to some kind of understanding. Now he was confused as to what
he ought t
o do.

Griff was trying to make a point, and he had a point. I couldn’t
move.

Anger bubbled inside me. “Let go o
f me.”

“These men that you want to go after, these men that you want to kill, they all have
guns. You want to kill them when you can’t even get out of my arms. What are you going
to do when you come face-to-face with someone who’d love nothing better than to have
you wedged against him like
that?”

Furious tears came gurgling
out.

Griff turned me around and held me at arm’s length. “The hurt, the pain, the hate.
You have to let go. If you don’t, you’ll become just like them, and you
will
die.”

Pain shadowed the boyish features of his
face.

And this made me so angry. Because I didn’t want to be the one to cause him all this
pain. And yet I
was.

“You’re an asshole,” I hissed before he could say anything
else.

I went through the closest door and locked it behind me. I bent over, putting my hands
to my knees. I took several breaths and wiped the furious tears that Griff had managed
to squeeze out o
f me.

Funny enough, I was in Joseph, Hunter, and, now, Griff’s room. The room that anyone
would usually avoid. But I remembered it being far messier than this. There was no
food or dirty dishes lying around, and I could actually see the carpet. Griff had
made a valiant effort at making his bed, which was difficult given that all he had
was a mattress on the floor made snug between Hunter’s and Joseph’s
beds.

I had no idea that Griff was so responsible in this world. When we were at the Farm,
in the underworld, Griff slacked off as often as poss
ible.

At the Farm, I was the responsible one. The one who hoped for the best, the one who
lay mostly passive, waiting for someone else’s decision. Now the tables had turned.
Griff was the responsible one. The one who made his bed and didn’t go running after
drug dea
lers.

I could hear Griff pacing outside the door, so I was in no hurry to get out. I just
couldn’t deal with his reality, which was probably pretty close to the rest of the
world’s reality. But it wasn’t
mine.

By grabbing me like that, Griff had basically told me that I was just a stupid little
rich girl who was looking at life through her murky rose-colored glasses. It was worse
than a slap in the
face.

When I saw that Joseph’s computer was on, I sat down and got on the Internet. Though
I was scouring the news again, it wasn’t for my father. I was looking for something,
an article I recently read in the
Callister City Stan
dard
.

While I was waiting for the archived search to load, a message bubble popped up in
the screen’s corner. It was a message from someone named Bubbalic
ious.

“Need
help.”

I snickered. I couldn’t resist. “Don’t we
all?”

“Serious. I’m failing three of my cla
sses.”

“That really sucks,” I wrote back. I knew what that felt like. I was lucky if I made
it through class without drooling on my notebook while I s
lept.

“My boyfriend told me you hacked the school’s system to delete the electronic library.
Genius. Can you go in and change my grade
too?”

I yanked my fingers off the keyboard as if it had just caught fire. So Joseph had
been the reason why I had lost my job at the lib
rary.