Scare Crow

  ****

  The wind blowing through the buildings was vicious and cold. It took my breath away and practically knocked me over when I stepped off the bus. I strained, pushing to take every step as I walked up the two blocks to City Hall.

  The city square was abuzz with camera crews and reporters. There were people looking over bridges; a few had climbed up lampposts. All hoped to catch a glimpse of Victor Orozo as he valiantly accepted the key to the city. They must have all read the same announcement I had in the Callister City Standard, though I doubted that they had the same plan I did. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what my plan was. Not exactly.

  Spider and Victor. One wanted to be lost; the other wanted to be everywhere.

  How do you hurt two criminals who have only darkness in their hearts? How do you get your revenge and kill them when you’re just one girl, as Griff had made me realize?

  You go after the only thing they both cherish more than anything: supremacy. Their desperation to be king, I surmised, was their biggest weakness. They were hungry for power, and they were not good sharers. Only one could be on top, and any threat to his reign could send the other over the edge.

  But neither could kill the other without approval from the captains of the underworld, something that wasn’t going to happen. Not without a little encouragement. Cameron had told me that the one thing the underworld avoided at all costs was publicity, and nothing attracts the media more than a good old-fashioned gang war.

  Spider and Victor were going to war … they just didn’t know this yet.

  As a white Cadillac drove up, the crowd soared, and so did my energy. I felt as though I had just been shot straight to the heart with adrenaline. I got close to the car, keeping my book bag close and my face hidden under my hood. Victor stepped out into the sunlight, and I stopped. I was remembering what he had almost done to me in that tiny room with the swinging lightbulb, remembering that he was the reason that Cameron had decided to leave me forever by choosing his death.

  Victor walked to the podium, where the clueless mayor was waiting while the clueless crowd cheered and applauded. And I wanted to scream, expose him for the murderer that he was. His driver got back in the car and slowly drove away, avoiding the mob as it crossed the street to get a closer glimpse of the hometown hero.

  I smiled and followed the car from the sidewalk, hidden among Victor’s fans.

  The driver parked the car around the block and got out, locking it before walking to the square. I waited in the shadow of one of the buildings. When he was out of sight, I marched ahead, pulling the spray can out of my bag and shaking it so that it was ready to go by the time I was by the car.

  I didn’t waste any time. I leaned over the hood and drew a large red ugly spider on Victor’s beautiful white Cadillac. Then I moved to the passenger-side door and repeated the same message. I was about to move around to the back of the car when three men dressed in black suits came through the crowd, smiling, quietly chatting with each other.

  They hadn’t seen me yet, so I pulled my hood down and started backing away from the car.

  Then one of them stopped, midconversation. He saw the art I had left on Victor’s car. And then he saw me.

  He started running, and when the other two realized what was going on, they followed his lead. My legs unfroze, and I turned around, tearing down the sidewalk. I ran through traffic to the other side of the street, dodging shoppers and slamming into a few shopping bags. I ran around a truck that was pulling out of a delivery zone, got clipped in the hip in the process, and ducked into an alleyway when I was out of their sight line. My heart pumping, my breath gone, I sank behind a garbage bin and peered around its corner. A bunch of black suits ran by, more than the initial three who had seen me in action. I let my head fall back against the cold metal bin and waited for my breath to find its way back to my lungs.

  It was only when I got up again that I realized how badly my hip was hurt. Keeping out of sight from the street, I kept to the brick wall and went to the first door. It was locked. But there were four doors in the other building that led into the alley.

  Before crossing the short way to the other building, I held on to the bin and peered around its corner. I was tackled to the ground by a mass in a black suit.

  We wrestled on the cement wet from the leaking garbage bin. His sunglasses went flying. He got hold of my arms and sat on my legs.

  I kept struggling, to no avail. I wasn’t going anywhere. The only thing that was going through my head was that Griff had been right.

  The man dragged me up, pushed me against the brick wall, and yanked the hood of my gray sweater off my head. My hair popped out like a jack-in-the-box. Victor’s minion gasped.

  I looked up, face-to-face with the man in the black suit.

  It was Mike. The same Mike who’d stood outside the room where Victor was keeping me captive. The same Mike who had refused to help me get away from whatever Victor had planned for me.

  Mike let go of my arms. “You,” he said, incredulous.

  I spit in his face. “Me.”

  I clenched my teeth, readying myself for the blow. But it never came. Mike wiped my spit off his face and just kept staring at me.

  He glanced down at the spray can that had come loose during our struggle. His eyes made their way up my hands, which were stained with the evidence of red paint, and back up to my face.

  His own face was crumpled in disbelief. A herd of dress shoes ran and stopped outside the entrance to the alley. We were still hidden behind the garbage bin, against the brick wall where he had shoved me.

  Mike stood still for a second, as though he were deciding.

  Then he put his finger to his lips before stepping out from behind the bin.

  “Nothing in here,” he reported as he walked the alley and tried the first door across the way. It was also locked. The men walked on, and Mike came back. “What the hell were you doing?” he demanded.

  I furrowed my brow. “Sending a message.”

  He stood again, watching me. He looked at my sweater, and it was also splattered with paint. I obviously needed spray-painting lessons.

  Mike grabbed the can of spray-paint from the ground and flung it into the garbage bin. Then he took off his jacket and pulled his T-shirt off.

  “Take your sweater off,” he ordered, handing me his T-shirt.

  There was no way that Victor’s minion was actually going to help me. Especially after he had refused to so many months ago. And yet, I did what I was told and pulled my sweater over my head.

  While I put Mike’s black T-shirt on, he buttoned up his jacket so that you could hardly tell he was shirtless. He crossed the alley and checked the other doors. All locked. No exit.

  He considered this, came back, and threw my painting sweater into the bin.

  “Do you have a watch?” he asked me.

  I didn’t. He sighed and gave me his.

  I was beyond trying to comprehend why he was doing this.

  He sat me down against the bin and pointed his finger at me. “Don’t move from here for the next two hours.”

  I nodded.

  He left.

  I had no idea what had just happened.

  But I listened to Mike and did not move from my spot, keeping my eyes on the watch.

  Within half an hour, I was shivering so hard my body was making the garbage bin rattle. Once the adrenaline wore out and the cold seeped in, I couldn’t move without shots of pain up and down the side of my body.

  Then the cramps came. In my stomach. It was unlike anything I had ever felt. It was the sort of pain that ran through every vein and lit coals in my belly. For once, my heart and my mind were on the same track. Something was happening; something was wrong with the baby.

  As I crouched over, retching, panic rose and I rose with it, holding on to whatever I could. Oblivious to time and space. Indifferent to Victor or his security. I managed to grab a bus back to school and found myself at the clinic, feeling the wetness
of blood in my underwear.

  The nurse behind the counter was closing the plate glass as I walked through the automatic doors. Elevator music played in the background.

  “We’re closed,” she told me, but I held the plate glass open. I caught a glimpse of my reflection. My hair was half in, half out of a ponytail, I had mud all over me from my scuffle with Mike, and my hands were covered in red paint.

  There was a doctor behind her, his back turned as he put files away. He was the medical student who had somewhat patched up my broken fingers.

  “Hey,” I shouted like the madwoman I resembled.

  He jumped and spun on his heels. It seemed to take him a minute to figure out who the hell I was.

  I didn’t have a minute. “I’m pregnant.”

  The nurse’s eyes rounded and jumped from me to the med student. She likely assumed I was accusing him of getting me pregnant.

  “I’m bleeding. I think the baby is hurt.” I was shivering in the T-shirt that Mike had given me. This was not T-shirt weather.

  The doctor in training bade the nurse good night and led me through the building into the basement offices.

  “How far along are you?” he asked softly.

  I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. “I don’t know. I’m not really sure.”

  He unlocked a door, and we walked through an empty waiting room to the back. He brought me to a small dimly lit room and made me lie down, pulling my shirt up. Cold gel was squirted onto my belly, and a lever hooked up to an ultrasound machine followed.

  “This is the second time I’ve seen you, and you’re coming in even more banged up than the first time,” he observed, keeping his eyes trained on the screen.

  I tried to look at the screen, but he had turned it away from me. He stopped and turned sternly my way.

  “You need to relax. It’s hard to see anything if you don’t relax.”

  He went quiet again, one hand on the keyboard, the other swaying with the lever on my stomach. I could hear him breathe and tried to match his pattern to calm myself.

  Breathe, Emily, breathe. One breath in. One breath out. One breath in. One breath out.

  The swaying on my belly slowed down, and he started clicking on the lever.

  I closed my eyes. Oh God. Breathe in. Breathe out. Don’t cry. Breathe in. Breathe out.

  There was no more clicking, no more swaying.

  I stopped breathing.

  The doctor kept the lever on me and clicked one last time on the keyboard, turning the sound on.

  Boum-buh-boum. Boum-buh-boum. My eyes flew open. I knew exactly what that sound was. As if I had heard it all my life. As if I had been waiting all my life to hear it again.

  The doctor had turned the screen so that I could see it. There was a tiny blinking light in the middle of a wiggly squash.

  The doctor pointed to the screen. “That’s the heart. The head. The arms. The legs.”

  It had arms and legs. It had a head. It had a beating heart.

  “The baby is fine. Based on the measurements, you’re about four months pregnant,” he continued and sighed. “You, however, don’t look well. Have you been taking any vitamins?”

  I smiled at the screen. “Can’t keep anything down lately.”

  He wrote something on a pad of paper and handed it to me. “These will help. But more than anything, you need to rest … and take better care of yourself. You need regular medical attention, from a doctor.”

  I could tell from the sound of his voice that there was something else he wanted to say. But I couldn’t take my eyes away from the screen, and I couldn’t stop smiling.

  Eventually, he pulled the lever off my belly. And remained quiet as he put the equipment away. I pulled my shirt down, letting my fingers flutter over the skin of my stomach.

  He helped me up and excused himself for a minute. I looked at the empty screen again, wanting more. Then my eyes went to the corner next to the bed, where a visitor chair had been placed close for excited family members, for expectant fathers.

  I stared long and hard at the chair, imagining Cameron sitting there. But there was no one sitting there for us.

  The doctor walked me out of the darkened building and hesitated. It was raining the kind of cold rain that gets sucked through your skin all the way to your bones.

  “Do you need a ride?” he asked me.

  I stepped out into the rain. “No, I’m fine.” I would be fine. We would be fine. But I needed to be more careful from now on. I couldn’t risk us.

  He nodded and handed me a pamphlet before running out into the rain.

  I looked down at the pamphlet. “Domestic Violence & Pregnancy.”

  I crumpled it and threw it in the nearby garbage before heading back home.

  ****

  The wind and the rain blew the door open for me as I came through it.

  Hunter was sitting on the stairs, with his phone in hand. He shot up when he saw me.

  “Griffin has been looking everywhere for you. He’s out with Meatball, walking through the school.”

  I ran past him up the stairs and into my room. I grabbed papers I had hidden under my mattress and went searching for my ethics notebook.

  When I finally found it, Griff and Meatball came jumping through the doorway. Both were gasping for breath.

  Griff had me in the fold of his arms before I could apologize and tell him he was right. That I couldn’t fight two men who wanted to rule the underworld.

  “Okay,” he said in my ear.

  I pulled away enough so that I could see his face. “Okay?”

  “I’ll help you with whatever you need,” he said in a voice that was scared and defeated. “But you have to tell me everything, Em. I just can’t do this anymore.”

  I threw my arms around his neck and let myself get scooped up closer to him.

  “I’m so sorry I scared you, Griff. I’ll never do that again,” I said to him as we were cheek-to-cheek.

  He chuckled a bit. “Never ever say never.”

  I dropped back down to the floor and took his hand. Then I dragged him out of my room and opened the door to his room without knocking.

  “Uh, Em, what are you doing?”

  Joseph was sitting at his computer and swiveled his chair, surprised by our brazen entry.

  “Telling you everything,” I said to Griff.

  I marched us up to Joseph.

  He took one look at me. “Why are you soaking wet?”

  I handed him the printout from his computer. “I lost my job at the library because of you.”

  He took a moment to read the lines on the page. His expression went blank, his face pallid.

  Then I handed him the sodden business card that Carly had given me. It had once contained the information of an accountant for the underworld who was to help me get Cameron’s money.

  “I need to find this person,” I told Joseph.

  It took a moment for him to register that I was blackmailing him.

  He took another look at the card. “But there’s barely anything on here. How am I supposed to find this person?”

  I slit my eyes. “You seem to have a way of getting the information that no one else has access to.”

  Griff stood by me, watching.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: CAMERON

  CRACK

  We were gathered in an old tin mill in Chicago when Manny walked in. And there were three things I noticed. First, her bra strap was peeking out from under her shirt, which looked big enough to fit a toddler (this was the second thing I noticed). Third, she was stalking toward me with a look that I could only compare to a lioness during mating season. She was stunning, and she knew it.

  Carly growled from the second Manny had made a beeline for me until she was within earshot. And then she growled a little bit more before giving Manny and me some privacy. Manny kept a smirk on her face as she watched Carly leave.

  “You need better help,” she sneered.

  “I was told that you wanted to talk to me abo
ut something?”

  “What I said was that I needed to see you. But I’ll settle for talking to you.”

  She was inching forward, her chest pulling her in, trying to close the space between us. “That’s close enough,” I told her, keeping a stern tone.

  She glanced around the room as a few of the captains had filtered in. It was early still, and those of them who were being tailed by the feds took a bit longer to safely get to meetings.

  The captains weren’t oblivious to the fact that Manny was attracted to me or to the fact that we’d had a meaningless fling some time ago. (Secretly, they all wished they’d had the same chance.) But that was all over, and I wasn’t about to risk any further distraction.

  Manny was all about distractions. She rocked back on her heels and laced her hands behind her back, making every seam of her tiny T-shirt exert. A pigeon in heat.

  “Been seeing anyone lately?” This was the question she would ask me every time we saw each other lately.

  I knew what she was really asking me: Have you seen her lately? A question I had already answered and was done answering.

  “Oh, there have been a couple broads here and there.” I gave her my most arrogant smirk. “But you know me. I like to string them along for a while. I’ve never met anyone who was worth keeping around.”

  She winced. This had, of course, been for her detriment. Though I had always been clear to her that what we had was just another fling and that I would never have feelings for her, she wasn’t getting it. I hoped this last punch would be enough to quiet her questions.

  I started to walk away until she held me back.

  “I still need to talk to you,” she said, having regained her business edge.

  I arched my brows and waited, my patience running thin.

  “I’ve been able to make a deal with Mexico. The biggest deal we’ve ever had. Unlimited drugs, unlimited weapons. We could be running everything we want through their borders, and they won’t stop us.”

  Manny had been responsible for keeping the peace with the Mexican cartel while ensuring our treaty was respected, a job that her father before her had excelled at. Manny had bigger plans than her father.