Crow’s Row

  “Shield’s boys are here. They want to talk about a truce and a merger. They say there’s a lot of money attached to this deal.”

  Cameron swore under his breath as he turned to Spider to spit his words. “I’m at my brother’s funeral. Whatever they want can wait till tomorrow.”

  Spider looked offended at being spoken to in this way, but with a nod of the head, motioned to the guard to follow the boss’s orders. The guard ran out of the church, but returned a few minutes later. Whatever he had whispered in Spider’s ear had made Spider’s face go hard and his brow furrow.

  “They came here without Shield knowing. They want to change their alliance and work for us. They’re willing to take Shield down themselves to make this happen.”

  Spider looked at Cameron, waiting for a response, but Cameron remained silent and continued to glance ahead. His cheeks were flushed with anger.

  Spider spoke a little louder. “Cameron?”

  “I heard you,” Cameron skewered back. He tapped his foot and considered.

  He turned to Carly, “How much money would we be talking about?”

  Carly turned her eyes to the ceiling as she calculated invisible numbers in the air. “I don’t know,” she absentmindedly responded. “It depends on what kind of merger they’re proposing. I need more details before I can give you a figure on a reasonable settlement.” She pondered a few more seconds and then looked back at Cameron. “If we make this deal, it would give us control over all of the Northeastern factions. Might even bring peace—end the war. That would be worth a lot for the bosses. This could be the break we were looking for to make them forget about everything else that’s happened.” Carly quickly glanced at me as she said this.

  Cameron went quiet again and vacantly stared ahead. I could see that his mind was running full speed.

  But Spider grew impatient again.

  “We don’t have a lot of time. There are over thirty of them out there. They’re armed. We can’t stall them much longer.” Spider leaned further toward Cameron, his worried voice was now audible only to the four of us. “Cameron, if we don’t go talk to them, they’re not going to let us live to tell Shield about their betrayal. We don’t have enough men to cover us.”

  Cameron turned and quickly whispered something to Tiny, who was sitting behind him. Hushed shuffling ensued on the bench behind us, and Tiny produced two shortwave radios that he handed to Cameron. Cameron turned back to me. He looked sickly.

  “Take this,” he said, handing me one of the radios. He latched the other one onto his belt. “You call me if there’s anything. I’m going to be right outside the door.”

  I could hear the guards clicking the latches of their guns as they slowly filtered into the aisle. At Spider’s low command, they hid their readied weapons under their shirts, tucking them into the waistbands of their pants. They waited for Cameron.

  He looked at me for a long minute and then turned his eyes to Frances. With an urgent whisper, he called her name. She jumped and turned around. She looked terrified. I figured that I must have looked much the same, except with fire-engine red hair and a lot more freckles.

  Cameron ordered Frances to come sit by me, which she immediately obliged. As she glided her way to the bench behind her, Cameron turned back to me, his eyes unyielding. He leaned in. “I’m right outside,” he repeated, though I didn’t know if this had been for my benefit or his own. He forcefully kissed me on the forehead. Frances warmly smiled at me as she spied us, but her eyes were saddened.

  Cameron walked to the lineup of guards, and they quickly encircled him into a cocoon of human protection. As I saw Carly leave with the rest of them, I wanted to yell back and demand that he take me with him, but I knew that now wasn’t the time and that his mind had already been made up. Nothing I could say would change it. I definitely had no accounting skills to bring to the table. The only thing I was good at was distracting Cameron and getting him in more trouble. I forlornly watched them leave us.

  The deacon, who had barely glanced in our direction during the commotion and departures en masse, pursued his sermon without skipping a beat. I was a tumbleweed of emotions—terrified that Cameron was out there, devastated with my loss of Rocco, angry that I had been left out, again, and perplexed as to why Cameron would ever want to make a deal with those who might have contributed to his brother’s death. As if she sensed my need, Frances slid closer to me and took my hand. She seemed pleased with having been given a purpose. Even she had been assigned a job, I silently griped. I then smiled to myself. Rocco and I had so much in common.

  During my reverie, someone had slid in the bench behind us.

  “Emily,” a hoarse voice whispered.

  I turned around and hardly believed what I was seeing. He was older now—deep wrinkles mapped his forehead and his blond hair had grayed at the sides, like he had grown wings.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven:

  Old Emily

  “Uncle Victor?” He wasn’t really my uncle. Not by blood anyway. He was my brother’s uncle, but I had always called him Uncle Victor, and, even though I was kind of an adult now, it seemed weird and maybe a bit disrespectful to say his name without the word uncle preceding it.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked—almost accused—him.

  He was nervously glancing around the church, and his voice was hurried. “I’m here to get you out.”

  “How did you find me?” Even I didn’t know where I was.

  “Your parents—” He jumped as one of the rambunctious children dropped or threw a book or a bible on the floor out front. “It’s a long story. We need to leave now.”

  “What? No, I’m not leaving,” I yelled, louder than I intended.

  The deacon stopped his sermon. And then, with a look of annoyance, he continued.

  Victor was beside himself. “What do you mean you’re not leaving? I’m risking my badge to come rescue you!”

  “There’s nothing to rescue me from. I want to stay here.”

  He grabbed my shoulder as he leaned in and hurriedly whispered, “Kid, in about five minutes the DEA is going to come storming through here and shoot anyone who gets in their way. They won’t ask any questions first. If you’re lucky, they’ll just arrest you, but I won’t be able to help you then.”

  Frances looked like someone had just sucker-punched the air out of her lungs. “They’ll take Daniel away from me if I get arrested,” she distractedly whispered. Her face was pale and terrified as she turned to me. “Em, I can’t get arrested. I’ll lose my boy.”

  Victor looked at both of us and impatiently sighed.

  “I’ll take her too,” he conceded, “but we have to leave now.”

  “Take Frances with you,” I ordered. “I’m not leaving. They can arrest me if they want. I don’t care.”

  “I promised your mother I would get you out of here unscathed. If I come back without you, she’ll have my head and my badge. Either you both come, or we all get arrested or killed.”

  Frances’s eyes were pleading with me. My thoughts were a mess—express decision making was not my forte. I looked toward the door that Cameron had exited, hoping that if I stared at it hard enough, he would walk back in. He didn’t … but I knew how to make him come back. Without glancing down, I pressed on the red button of the shortwave radio and guilelessly turned to Victor.

  “Uncle Victor, let me talk to them,” I said with my voice just loud enough for Cameron to, hopefully, hear me but not enough to arouse Victor’s suspicion.

  “Who?” Victor looked confused.

  “The FBI … or the DEA,” I almost yelled, but recomposed myself. “I’ll tell them the truth. That I’m fine. There’s no need for them to come here.”

  I was a horrible actress. But, thankfully, from behind the bench, he couldn’t see my hands or the fact that I was trying to send a message to Cameron. This I was sure of. What I hadn’t planned on was a naïve Frances curiously looking down at my hands—and Victor following her gaze. I thought
the pulsating vein on Victor’s forehead was going to explode when he caught me.

  “What the hell are you doing? I could go to jail for coming here, and you’re warning them?” he shouted as he knocked the radio out of my hands. It went crashing to the floor, and this time everyone in the church was looking back at us. Cameron’s mother noticed our presence for the first time.

  I was thinking, readjusting my strategy when a loud pop was heard from outside.

  The stained-glass window at the front of the church exploded, and the deacon fell to his knees and covered his face to shield himself from the shards of glass that had come flying down around him like a cutthroat blizzard.

  Gunfire then erupted outside, and everyone at the front of the church was screaming.

  “Everybody get down!” Victor yelled with experience and authority. He adeptly jumped over the bench. “Emily, keep your head down and don’t stop running.” He grabbed me by the shoulder of my shirt and forced me to run with him. Frances had grabbed my other hand and followed us out to an emergency exit at the side of the church.

  Outside, an empty white sedan was waiting. Victor forced me into the front seat, ordered Frances to get in the back, and climbed into the driver’s seat. As he sped away through the cemetery road, I was frantically glancing back, trying to locate Cameron. I couldn’t see anyone, but could still hear the gunfire that was bursting on the other side of the church. My heart was thumping so hard that my vision was thumping with it, causing the passing graves to pulsate like neon signs in video-store windows. I was trying to talk, yell, but couldn’t catch my breath.

  We turned onto a dirt road, and Victor slid the car into high gear.

  “Turn back,” I finally shouted, using up the miniscule amount of air that I had managed to accumulate.

  “There’s nothing you can do for them now,” he said coldly.

  My cheeks were wet. I could hear Frances whimpering in the back.

  Victor looked over at me, and his face faintly softened. “If it’ll make you feel better, I promise to bring you to the DEA as soon as your parents see that you’re okay. You can tell the police whatever you want them to hear. I won’t interfere.”

  This didn’t make me feel any better. There was no doubt in my mind—I had abandoned Cameron, on one of the worst days of his life. Talking to the police would never change that. I tried to tell myself that maybe my warning had come soon enough. Maybe he had been able to escape on time. But then there was all that gunfire … all of a sudden I found myself actually hoping that he would get arrested. It seemed like the safer alternative. The mere possibility of the other alternative made me want to throw up. I put my head between my knees, willing myself to focus on keeping the vomit down, and figure out how I was going to help Cameron.

  The car came to a stop. I looked up. Victor had pulled the car up to the sidewalk. We were in a small town outside the city. The town consisted of a stop sign, four corners, and a cluster of tiny houses with big yards—the kind of place nice parents wanted their nice children to grow up in.

  Victor peered at Frances through the rearview mirror. “There’s a convenience store around the corner. The bus comes every hour on the hour. It’ll take you back to the city.”

  Frances looked embarrassed. “I dropped my purse in the church. I don’t have any money.”

  Victor was growing impatient. He huffed and aggressively dug out his wallet. He emptied it of its cash content and gave it her. Frances got a lot more than she needed for a bus ride. As soon as she closed the door, Victor sped off, not waiting to ensure that she knew where she was going.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “My place,” he explained. “Your parents are waiting there.”

  I had no idea where Uncle Victor even lived, though we had lived in the same area for over a year now.

  We turned a corner and came to a stop sign. I had been wrong about this one-stop-sign town—apparently there were two stop signs. Victor impatiently tapped on his steering wheel as a man slowly crossed in front of us. The man was wearing a suit that was two sizes too big for him and walked with a strut. I couldn’t see his face, but I was on high alert. Not just because he didn’t fit in this town for nice people—but he was purposefully avoiding eye contact.

  Please keep walking, I internally begged. He was taking a ridiculous amount of time to cross the street, or was I just imagining that he was? Time had seemed to stop. I started to shake … I knew. But what I didn’t know was that he had just been a diversion while his cohorts approached the car from behind. The back doors opened, and I yelled … didn’t I? An arm grabbed me from behind and held my body against the seat while a burlap sack was being thrown over my head. I couldn’t breathe, and I started flailing my hands, scratching the skin off the arm that was suffocating me. Something pricked my neck. There was a rush of warmth. My heartbeats slowed. Was I still breathing? A gurgled moan in my throat, and then it was all nothingness.

  Surely I was dead. My eyes were open—I had to bring my fingers to my face to confirm this. Yes, they were open. But I couldn’t see a thing.

  I groaned, but the sound that came out was not my own. It was the sound that a sixty-year-old chain-smoker would make. My head was pounding against my skull. My clothes were drenched with what I assumed to be my own sweat. Spit had leaked out the corner of my mouth and dried on my cheek.

  I was lying on something soft.

  There was a slit of light streaming in a few feet ahead. Good. I wasn’t blind either.

  I struggled to turn my body on its side—everything was numbed. I was a marionette, with my brain pulling on strings to make my body move. I rolled to the ground in a thump. There was carpet, but it was too rough and cheap, the kind that was sold by the acre. I could feel the coldness of the cement seeping through it. I was suddenly thankful for the numbness—the tumble would have hurt otherwise.

  I dragged myself across the floor like a rabid dog toward the light. My breaths were shallow.

  It took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust to the light. My elbows were too weak to hold me up. I had to slump to my side, with my cheek against the smelly carpet. All I could hear were the cymbals that were clashing between my ears.

  Through the slit under the door, there was nothing to see but a white wall and an expanse of more bargain-basement carpet. I willed myself back onto my elbows and used the door to hold my weight while I struggled to sit up. The blood rushed to my head. With a dozen deep breaths and my back against the door, I inhaled and exhaled the nausea away, while clumsily fingering above for a door handle. I hit something cold—the door was locked. I was focusing on breathing … but the panic was slowly setting in. I needed to move. Crawling on my hands and knees, I slid my hand against the wall and felt my way around. Wherever I was, there wasn’t much to it: a square room of maybe ten-by-ten feet with a bed—nothing else.

  The room was so hot. There was no exit. I was having difficulty breathing, and I was sweating buckets. I started to dry heave and finally threw up on the floor next to me. I rested my head on my wobbly knees.

  I must have fallen asleep or passed out. When I awoke, I was curled up in a ball on the cold floor. Someone had opened the door and pulled on the string that hung from the ceiling to turn the single lightbulb on. It was still swinging back and forth when I looked up. The light hurt my eyes, but a bit of air had strewn in from the opened door.

  A man stood in front of me, staring with his arms crossed and his legs spread in a guarded stance. His head was shaved to the skin, and a pistol hung on a holster across his chest—like a soldier awaiting his marching orders.

  “There’s a bed right next to you. You don’t need to sleep on the floor,” he said, his voice robotic.

  I sat up at a snail's pace, rested my elbows on my knees, and held my head in my hands. My lips were quivering uncontrollably.

  “Eat,” the man commanded. He kicked over a tray of food that was on the floor: a juice box and a sandwich with what appeared to be b
ologna. The nausea hit me again. I brought my trembling hands to my mouth.

  “I’m a vegetarian,” I said coarsely through my fingers. A lie.

  “Eat the bread then,” he grunted impatiently. “It’s the only thing that will make the nausea go away.”

  “What did you inject me with?”

  “Just a mild sedative.”

  I pulled my right hand away from my mouth and held it flat in front of my face. It was still trembling, more than a mild sedative should make me tremble. I scowled at him. He didn’t flinch. I noticed the scratch marks on his arms. This made me grin—at least I had gotten a piece of him.

  “You’re Shield, right?” I asked with a matter-of-fact tone.

  “I’m not leaving here until you eat.” His stare was unremitting.

  “Where’s my uncle?”

  He looked at me strangely. “You mean the guy who was in the car with you?”

  I stared in response. “He’s fine. Now eat,” he said.

  I couldn’t tell if he was lying, but assumed he was.

  “I want to see him,” I said with difficulty. The room was spinning, and a bead of sweat was forming on my forehead.

  “Eat,” he commanded again.

  “I’m not … eating till I … see … my … uncle.” I leaned over and threw up.

  The soldier-man swore. The walls of the room shook as he slammed the door behind him. I heard the lock on the doorknob click. His footsteps echoed down the hall and eventually dissipated into silence.

  Afraid of passing out in my own vomit, I climbed onto the dirty mattress, turned to my side, and brought my knees into my chest. I was worn out.

  The door burst open. The hanging lightbulb was still on. I had no idea how long I had been out. The soldier-man was holding Uncle Victor by the collar and, with frustration and impatience on his face, pushed him into the room. The door slammed and locked as he exited again, leaving Victor and me alone.

  Victor ran to my side and held me at arms’ length. “You look terrible, kid,” he said, inspecting my face.