Scare Crow

  The captains wouldn’t let me kill Shield, and my suspicions, I knew, wouldn’t be enough to change their minds—and going against the Coalition was a suicide that I wasn’t ready for, yet. In the end, it would be a North versus South type of showdown, underworld style. Shield had already allied the Canadians and two of the biggest crime families to him. I would have to ally myself to Mexico and anyone else who followed. But this decision would have to come from the captains, something that Manny was probably already working on.

  This was why I wanted Carly and Spider to leave. They were my biggest allies. They were the people who would always have my back when I needed them. But like Emmy, they were my family. Things were about to get volatile, and I didn’t want them—any of them—to be around when the Coalition finally broke apart.

  How long did I have before this happened?

  I could only hope that, like Emmy, Spider and Carly would be out of the picture long enough for the other captains to be too busy fighting each other to try to go after them. Eventually they would go after them—no loose ends get left behind. But by then, I would have them safely hidden, somewhere, with Emmy. Hopefully.

  Every move I made from hereon had to be precise and not appear to be of my own design.

  CHAPTER NINE: EMMY

  CAN’T BEAT THEM

  Griff was teaching me how to fight. Nix that. Griff was teaching me how to defend myself, as he kept reminding me.

  He had insisted upon it after I came back from spray-painting Victor’s car. I was pretty scraped up and bruised and limped for a week. We never talked about what happened to me. I knew he wanted to ask me, but he didn’t. And I appreciated that.

  We tried out a few tactics back at the house, but after I almost went flying down the stairs, I asked Hunter to find us a safer spot to train. Because in my mind, that was what I was doing. Training. I was being as careful as I possibly could be.

  Hunter got the school gym to lend us their workout room. It came with lots of padding on the floor.

  Unfortunately, it meant that Hunter and his friends got to come too.

  What Griff tried on me, Hunter and his friends practiced on each other. It wasn’t every day that a prizefighter was showing off his stuff for free. Though I doubted that Hunter and his buddies were as careful with each other as Griff was with me. Of course, the first thing I asked him to show me was how to get out of the body hug he had done to me to prove his point that I couldn’t defend myself. He still had no idea that his antics had almost sent me running right into Victor’s lap.

  My spray-painting exercise had merited me front-page news in the Callister City Standard. But all the reporters referred to me as the thug kid, and Victor was quoted as saying that the incident simply showed how much Callister’s street kids were in need of guidance. It made bile creep up my throat. The story quickly died after that, and I never heard from Mike again. Why he had let me go, I didn’t know. But I kept his watch on me just in case he ever came back for it. It was cheap, but at least it worked.

  Griff and I were walking back from the gym, our arms rubbing between strides. His eyes darted every which way, from the face of a passerby to a car across the street. Ever since my secret escapade, I had seen a weariness grow on him, one that pulled bags under his eyes and left his shoulders tensed to his ears. He was rarely off his guard.

  I could feel the darkness in my life spreading to him, and this made me ache all over. I needed Griff, but I didn’t want him to feel the way I felt.

  I tugged at the sleeve of his shirt to get his attention and smiled when he turned to me. His eyes searched my face for a second, then he chuckled. In a sweeping movement that had come so naturally, he grabbed my hand in his and squeezed it.

  “Did Joseph find anything yet?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, not even attempting to hide the disappointment in my voice.

  “What are you planning to do with all that money when you get it?”

  “Use it.”

  When Griff asked me why I needed Joseph to find that accountant, in one breath I had confessed that I had a brother who had died and left me money and that the guy on the business card was the only one who could get it for me. I could see the question marks in Griff’s eyes. What? Why? When? What? What! “Okay,” was all he said, very calmly, as though he knew how difficult it had been for me to reveal this momentous information to him. I had spent most of my life doing everything I could to hide myself; or rather, trying to hide who my parents were. Coming from money was one thing, but coming from stinking-rich Sheppard money was a whole other ball game. Add two well-to-do Sheppard kids entangled in the underworld, and you had enough material to support all gossip magazines worldwide for three years.

  Griff and I crossed the street. “You have a plan for it,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Kind of.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with the money.”

  Griff slowed our pace. “But …”

  “But until Joseph can find the guy I’m looking for, I need to keep moving.” I swallowed hard. “There’s someone else I need to find.”

  “I’m not going to like this, am I?” he wondered aloud as we rounded the corner to our street.

  “How much do you know about the people you were working for when I saw you last time, in the barn?”

  Griff looked to the sky in exasperation. “Enough to know that I never want to see them again.”

  We got back to the house, and Griff led me to the front porch. It was late November and freezing out, but he scooted me close to him to keep us warm.

  “As far as I knew, I was guarding a heap of hay.” He turned to me. “You know me, Em. I don’t ask questions if I won’t like the answer.”

  “Do you think you would be able to take me to the barn?”

  “I have no idea where the barn is. I was taken to and from it blindfolded. The only people I talked to were the guy who came around to blindfold me, the other guards back at the bunker, and the creep who ordered me to open the trapdoor.”

  I knew that remark had been at Cameron’s expense. Griff had never concealed his dislike of Cameron, but he had been more careful lately to keep his feelings to himself.

  I kicked at the frosted ground.

  “Why do you need to go back to the barn?”

  “Because I need to talk to the people I met when I was underground. Actually, one person in particular. His name was Pops.” I propped my head up. “Do you know him?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “I think he’s a significant drug dealer … distributor,” I corrected, as Cameron had once corrected me. “He’ll be able to help me.”

  “Why on earth would a brute who puts drugs on the streets just to make a couple bucks want to help us?”

  It hadn’t escaped my attention that Griff had changed the “me” to “us.” He was doing a lot of that too, as though it were second nature now, and I kept testing him, sometimes not on purpose.

  “He’s not like the others,” I said. I knew this would sound ridiculous to Griff, so I took a moment before divulging another major piece of information I hadn’t told him before. “He hates Spider … and he knew my brother when he was alive.”

  Griff’s eyes rounded. “Your brother?”

  “Before he died, my brother was one of those brutes you dislike so much. Actually, he wasn’t just a brute; he was the brute.”

  While we looked over the street, I told Griff everything I knew about my brother’s business, everything that Cameron had told me about him.

  “You’ve already seen my brother. A picture of him, anyway. In the car garage, back at the Farm. My brother’s fake ID was in the plastic bag, and you called him a thug.”

  Griff reddened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “It was a pretty big revelation, even to me.”

  “And you didn’t know if you could trust me,” he a
ccepted. “So, this Pops person hates Spider. I like him already. What is he going to do to help us?”

  “It was something that you said. You told me that I couldn’t fight the whole underworld.”

  He grinned. “Yes, I did say that, didn’t I?”

  “And you were right.”

  He grinned even harder. “Say that again.”

  “You were right. I can’t fight the whole underworld.” I gulped. “But I can join them.”

  Griff winced as though I had just hit him with a stick behind the head. A small stick.

  As the idea settled in his brain, I felt his arm go rigid against mine. “So you’re telling me I’m responsible for this … this …” He couldn’t find the word.

  “This madness?” I found it for him because I knew this was what he was thinking. And he was right—if it hadn’t been for him pushing me to prove my point (and almost getting myself killed in the process), I wouldn’t have realized that I needed a better plan. “Have you ever had a feeling that you need to do something even if you don’t know why?”

  He chuckled very lightly. “I’m still here with you, aren’t I?”

  “I can’t just walk into a room and kill Spider and Shield, not yet, even if that’s what they deserve. But I can make them pay. I can make them crawl. I can take away what they love most.”

  “Which is?”

  “Money. Power,” I said, clamping my fists.

  “And this Pops the drug dealer will somehow help us achieve all of this?”

  There was that “us” again. I wanted to kiss Griff a million times over.

  “How?” he added.

  This was where my plan went a little murky. “He liked, respected my brother, and I think he liked me too. I’m not sure exactly how he’s going to help us, but my gut tells me that he’s the one who can make it all happen.”

  Griff remained quiet. I knew he wasn’t in love with the idea. Far from it. But he hadn’t walked away either.

  “You’ve made a lot of contacts in the underworld. Do you have anyone who would know how to get to the barn or how to find Pops?” I asked him.

  Griff thought about it and shook his head. “You can’t ask those kinds of questions without more questions being raised. Whatever we decide to do, I don’t want it advertised to hell before we even get there.”

  “Do you have any friends who would be able to tell us how to find Pops … without asking more questions?”

  Griff scratched the back of his neck as his mouth stretched thin. I could see it in his eyes. I had seen this look before whenever someone asked him for an autograph, asked him to talk about fighting.

  “Nobody is ever really a friend in that world,” he said. “The type of friends who would know anything would want something in return.”

  This I understood. What Griff didn’t know was that it was in every world—under, over, and whatever illusory world my parents lived in.

  We both took a breath, huddled on the porch. The deadness of a forthcoming winter left a silence on the streets of Callister’s slums that was tantamount to being buried in cold mud. Ergo, there was nothing to kill the insatiable sound of my growling stomach. I tried to ignore it initially. We both did. But it only got louder, to the point that neither Griff nor I could even hear ourselves think anymore.

  Griff bellowed a laugh. There was still some joy left in him. This made me laugh too.

  “Let me guess. Hungry? Again?”

  I hadn’t stopped eating since the doctor had prescribed me those magic pills. I had even put on weight, so much so that my pants were getting a little tight. Finally. My energy levels were incredible. I couldn’t stop moving until I fell into a deep coma at night. Truly magic pills.

  Griff and I left the porch. While I headed up the stairs, he went straight to the kitchen to make us something nutritious. Of course I would eat whatever he would make, but honestly, I just really wanted a Big Mac and a dozen ninety-nine-cent tacos.

  I still hadn’t told Griff that I was pregnant. I was gearing up for it because if I didn’t do it, nature would. I just hadn’t found the right time. Was there ever going to be a right time for releasing that kind of bombshell? There had been a few moments when I had thought about telling him. Moments when we were silent. Moments when we were … just together. But then he would look at me and smile his Griff-smile, as though I were the first human he’d seen in the months after the apocalypse, and I would chicken out. I wanted him to keep looking at me in that way.

  The look that he would afford me after he learned that I was carrying Cameron’s offspring, I wouldn’t be able to bear. To say that Griff didn’t like Cameron was like saying that Cujo was a bad dog.

  While I outgrew my jeans and opted for frumpy sweaters and elastic pants, I was left with restless butterflies in my swelling belly. Butterflies that were becoming more anxious with every opportune moment that passed between Griff and me.

  I was scared. I couldn’t bear to lose anyone else, especially not Griff.

  When I got to the top of the stairs, I poked my head in Joseph’s room. He was at his computer, as usual. But his hair looked like the skin of a dragon fruit, and he was mashing the keyboard as opposed to his habitual quick-rat clicks. I was holding a wrecking ball over his head, and it was getting to him.

  I took a chair to his desk and sat down. Meatball had followed me in and sat between Joseph and me.

  I had assumed that Joseph hadn’t seen me come in because his eyes never left his computer. But his hand found its way to Meatball’s head and behind his ears. Meatball’s eyes rolled to the back of his head, and his tongue hung limp. I had noticed Meatball come in here on his own lately. Now I knew why.

  “It’s like this guy doesn’t even exist,” Joseph said, his voice winded, eyes still on the screen.

  “It’s okay. I know you tried your best.” I unfolded the piece of paper that I had been keeping in my pocket. It was the wrecking ball of evidence that I had been holding against him. “I haven’t told anyone or made any copies. You can have it back.”

  Joseph peeled his eyes away from the screen for exactly two seconds before continuing his obsession.

  “I can find anything, anyone, anytime. I just don’t understand why I can’t find this guy. Don’t you have any other information on him? Like just one extra phone digit or letter of the alphabet?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll find another way.”

  “I’ve looked in about a million databases. Tried a million different scenarios. Looked in deleted files. Nothing.”

  “You mean, you’ve hacked a million databases.”

  Joseph grimaced. Apparently the word hacking was taboo among hackers.

  “I hope you got paid well for hack … getting into the library’s system,” I teased as I lifted from my chair.

  Joseph reached into a bag of candy corn and threw it in the air for Meatball to catch. This also explained Meatball’s budding love handles and the hint of caramel on his dog breath at the end of the night.

  “I do a lot of stuff for extra cash,” Joseph admitted. “But that one I did for pleasure. My mom works part-time at the library. She rolls one of those carts around and puts books away. The electronic library was going to put her out of a job.”

  This immediately made me feel like a jerk for having wallowed about losing my meaningless job … and for having used the hacking evidence to blackmail him.

  “Your mom lives nearby then?” My voice had started out normal, but ended with a squeak, as though I had just hit puberty.

  “She lives in the Projects not too far away from here.”

  I knew the Projects well. A memory of Cameron sitting on a picnic table waiting for me flitted across my brain. “That’s really close by. You don’t live with her?”

  “There are two ways to live in the Projects. You either get recruited by one of the gangs, or you get shot and killed because you’re not in a gang. Sometimes both. My mom doesn’t want me anywhere near all that stuff, especially since
my brother’s already a gangbanger and wants me to join. I’m the first one in my family to even graduate from high school, let alone go to college. My mom works three jobs just to keep me in college.”

  I was past feeling like a jerk and heading into Cruella de Vil land.

  “If she loses her job at the library, then she’ll also lose the tuition discount the university gives to employees and their family. Even if my mom worked ten jobs, she wouldn’t be able to pay for my tuition without that employee discount,” Joseph finished.

  Okay, I was the devil. “It must be hard not being able to go home when they’re so close.”

  “I get to take my mom out to lunch every once in a while. When she’ll let me. Plus she brings me home-cooked meals a couple times a week. Meatball really likes her meatballs.”

  I hated the fact that Joseph and I had been living under the same leaky roof for over a year and that because of my … issues, I didn’t know any of this. I could feel red leopard spots creeping up my neck.

  While Meatball waited on the tiptoes of his paws for another treat, Joseph dug into his drawer, pulling out a small stack of printouts.

  The first was an article on my father’s bail hearing. The second was from the Callister City Standard’s gleeful announcement of Victor’s key-to-the-city ceremony.

  He pointed to my father’s article first. “So you’re that Emily Sheppard.”

  My breath was shallow. “How did you get this?”

  “You left your Internet search history all over my computer.” He said this as though I had just asked him what color his blue shirt was. “Can’t say I understand why you’re broke all the time or why you even live in this shithole. But what really interested me at first was why you had printed this article.” He pointed to Victor’s article. “That is, until I saw this.”

  Joseph pulled out a third piece of paper—the article on the bum who had spray-painted Victor’s car. “I recognized the color of the spray paint. Ruby Red. My signature graffiti color, which has mysteriously gone missing.”