Scare Crow

  There were times when I would lie awake at night with my eyes closed, imagining a different story. One that started with me choosing to take that scholarship to MIT, instead of taking over the drug world with Bill. I would meet Emmy on the street. I would smile. She would smile back, immediately taking my breath away. I would take her out to dinner, to an intimate but expensive place. I would make her laugh all night. We would stroll through the streets hand in hand, stay out until the sun came out.

  Fall in love, unafraid, carelessly.

  I would ask her father for her hand in marriage. He would slap me on the back, offer me a cigar. I would marry Emmy in a huge wedding, one with as many guests as my old high school had students. We would have children. As many as she wanted. They would grow up being able to play in the front yard in the thickest, greenest grass known to man, without having to live in fear of who might be lurking in the bushes. Emmy would live happy. With me.

  I was lying on the couch with my eyes closed. She came into my brain. I pushed her out. She tried to inch her way back in. I opened my eyes and got up because there was just no changing the ending to my story. Mine would end badly. Not Emmy’s.

  I went to meet Manny at a Thai restaurant on the outskirts of Houston. It was as hot in there as it was outside, and it smelled like dead fish left in the heat. At least the place was deserted, as it ought to be. Manny and I grabbed a booth, and our guards found seats at tables nearby.

  Manny took the water pitcher that had been left on the table by the owner before he left the premises. She poured us each a glass. I didn’t touch it. As far as I knew, she had already laced it with toxin or some kind of roofie.

  She took a big gulp from her glass as if she were answering my thoughts, proving me wrong. Then she ran her index finger along the side of her glass, picking up the condensation and bringing it to her exposed collarbone. While she pretended I wasn’t watching her do this, I wondered if she had chosen this heated location just so she could wear the least amount of clothes possible and water herself.

  Sunlight was poking in through the drawn plastic shades and hitting Manny’s mane. But all I could think about was how lovely Emmy’s skin would have looked in this light. And how that dress would make her eyes shine. Everything reminded me of Emmy these days. The less I saw her, the more I thought of her. It was becoming an obsession, one that I used to be able to control. Like steam caught under a lid, I used to be able to lessen the fixation just by seeing her, releasing the steam caught under. Then I could concentrate, go back to business. I didn’t have that outlet anymore, so the steam pressurized under my skin. A pressure cooker.

  “I didn’t kill my father,” Manny announced, forcing me out of my daydream.

  I wasn’t paying attention to her, so she had to get my attention somehow.

  “I know everyone thinks I’m the one who ordered my father killed. But I didn’t.”

  “Hm,” I said as I checked my phone. There were fifteen missed calls from Spider—something was up. I put the phone back in my pocket.

  “You believe me, don’t you?”

  I glanced up and examined her face. “Is it important to you that I believe you?”

  She shrugged and looked out the window.

  Manny and I had been spending a lot of time together lately as we tried to fix the mess she had made with the three cartel families. We were meeting with the Castillos, one of the three Mexican cartel families. It was a last-resort kind of meeting. The families were no longer pitted just against each other. Now they were pitted against us as well because they knew Manny had been meeting with Julièn. She had been cavalier about her dealings with the Mexican president, and the cartel saw this as a betrayal from the whole Coalition.

  I suspected that she had been purposefully careless to get her way and force the Coalition to work with Julièn. To her dismay, the Coalition had still ruled in favor of mending our broken relations with the families. The current was, however, changing. I had already been quietly approached by three of the younger captains who voiced a sudden change of heart. Suddenly they wanted to work with Julièn.

  Manny was apparently working hard behind the scenes. Which meant she was bribing them or blackmailing them or sleeping with them. Possibly all of the above. It had nothing to do with Julièn and everything to do with her being the one to bring Julièn into the fold. She wanted the captains to see that she could broker the big moneymakers; that when the time came for them to replace me, she would be first in line.

  In the meantime, we still planned for a peace treaty. But Manny saw our time together more as an opportunity to get back into my favor and my pants. The more I rebuffed her affections, the more desperate she became. Knees swiping mine, shoulders close together, lingering looks. She reminded me of an orphaned baby raccoon. You see one lingering by your garbage—lost, motherless, needy, broken—cute enough to take home. Oh, she’ll cuddle up to you, climb up on your lap, make you feel warm inside and out. But try to get too close, try to domesticate her, and she’ll chew your face off when you’re sleeping.

  Carly called her evil. But evil was inaccurate. Manny was just a beautiful, intelligent, impulsive, total sociopath. Soft and cuddly on the outside; rabies-spreading creature on the inside.

  I glanced around the restaurant at the men I had brought with me, the men who were being paid to protect me. I barely knew any of them. Not my best guys. But Manny’s men were her very best men. Vicious, loyal murderers. Half of them were sitting inside, ready. The other half were outside on rooftops, ready to fire. This was supposed to be a friendly meeting.

  Spider was still being kept out of the picture. Tiny was out looking for Norestrom. I had no friends in this room, and that was just fine by me—though part of me wondered how bad things were about to get for Spider to have called my phone so many times.

  I looked at my watch.

  “Looks like they’re running late,” Manny told me, preempting my question.

  This was her meeting. She was responsible for scheduling it and mending fences. I was there as a show of support from the Coalition and to make sure Manny didn’t make any promises we couldn’t keep.

  “Maybe they got stuck in traffic,” I said, smirking. The cartel was never late. They came charging and prepared.

  Manny tried to grin, but her talent for drama wasn’t good enough to hide the anxiety that mounted in her. I wasn’t the only one who had noticed how very quiet it was outside.

  I took a sip of my drink, keeping my eyes on Manny. She had lost her easy manner as her gaze stayed on the door.

  She reached for her cell phone too late. Our answer came bursting through the door in a torrent of bullets. I dashed under the table just as a bullet found the water jug and glass and water exploded everywhere.

  Then I pulled a stunned Manny under with me, almost ripping her arm out of its socket in the process.

  While our guards—whichever ones were still alive—answered the masked men’s bullets with theirs, I took cover, dragging Manny with me, and made for the restaurant’s kitchen.

  “No. This way,” she yelled at me, heading toward the patron bathrooms. There was a blast in the kitchen as the rest of the Munoz family unearthed a way in, blocking our only exit. I had recognized the Munoz group by their choice in weapons: AK-47-style rifle with a dot of pink paint on the handle.

  Manny and I found ourselves in the women’s bathroom. It smelled nicer than any men’s room could ever smell, and it had three stalls and not a damn window in sight. A cul-de-sac, or a pretty-smelling coffin? Manny locked the paper-thin door and drew me to the back wall. There was an old-fashioned heat radiator, the kind that made walls seem as though they were playing the accordion. Manny pulled the radiator from the wall. It was a dummy, a fake. It wasn’t at all attached to the wall that was pretending to play it. Behind it, a hole the size of the hood of a pickup truck had been dug out of the bricks, and a metal floorboard had been placed on the floor, filling the space between the subway tiles of the bathroom flo
or and the cement wall. Inside the hole, there was a small gray screen and a lever, which looked like the arm of a slot machine. When Manny pulled the lever, the metal floor fell open—a trapdoor—and the screen lit up with the number thirty. And then the number twenty-nine.

  “We have thirty seconds to jump in,” she yelled. Bullets were fired through the bathroom door. Manny shrieked, grabbed her thigh, and fell crouched to the floor.

  I yanked the dummy radiator in front of us as a shield and gladly shoved Manny into the black hole. She rolled in like a garbage bag going down a hill, hitting her head on the back wall before disappearing. I fired my gun at the door to delay the cartel’s entry, tucked my gun into the back of my jeans, and backed myself into the hole. I was hanging by my hands, darkness engulfing my free-flying limbs, and glanced up to see five seconds on the countdown. The men had burst through the door now. I could hear their bullets hitting the empty stalls as they searched for us. It was now or never.

  I let go.

  I slid, down deep, through a swinging hatch just as a ball of fire exploded above and was shut out as the hatch slammed back. I landed on a stack of foam, next to Manny, who was grabbing hold of her wounded leg.

  I instantly recognized the expression on her face. It was a look of shock that it hurt, badly, but not as bad as you thought it would, mixed with a look of wonder as to where exactly the bullet was. Was it stuck in a muscle, like a pencil through a potato? Did it fragment? Did it go all the way through? Did it hit anything vital? Manny’s gunshot cherry had just been popped.

  I was in a metal room barely big enough to contain the two of us. I could hear more things exploding over and around us and it was blistering inside, but wherever we were, we were safe from the flames that were burning the cartel and our own men.

  “Things didn’t go as you planned.” I pulled the hem of her dress up and checked her wound. The bullet was still lodged in her thigh, but she would live. I ripped a piece of her dress and tied it around her leg, placing her hand over the bullet wound.

  Then I laced my fingers behind my head and rested against the metal wall. “Let me guess. You got a message to the Munoz family that we were meeting with the Castillos, so that they could get their opportunity to kill the Castillos. You told them that if they killed the Castillos and eventually the Vasquez family, we would give them some kind of exclusivity over all Mexican trades?”

  “They were supposed to get the Castillos outside the restaurant,” she admitted through clenched teeth.

  “Outside the restaurant. So that you would know when they got there. So that your sharpshooters would have enough time to kill both groups. So that you and I would have time to escape. So that you would have time to burn all the evidence of your deceit.”

  “I just saved you, didn’t I?”

  “This is pretty cozy. Kind of perfect, actually. Though I supposed that’s why you picked this place.”

  I held her eyes and grinned at the murderous wench. She smiled back sweetly.

  Manny was the most dangerous kind of woman. A woman in love, a woman rebuked, a woman who would stop at nothing to get what she wanted—me.

  She was willing to put us and her best men in danger; she was willing to get everyone—including me and including herself—killed, just so that she could have me, even if it were only in death.

  “And you honestly thought that the Munoz family was going to let you decide their fate? That they didn’t know what you were up to?” It felt good to see Manny humbled. “You realize that your sharpshooters were killed before they ever had a chance to feel a breeze? You just killed off all of your men.”

  I glanced over her face. I could tell she was trying to save face, but there was a hint of vulnerability in her expression. “I really fucked up,” she admitted.

  “Yeah, you did.”

  She crawled up on my lap as we waited for the fire to burn out and for the reinforcements that Spider had probably already sent flying in. He knew where I was meeting the cartel because it was his job to know. He just wasn’t allowed to come with me, this time and from now on. Through his substantial contacts, Spider had undoubtedly found out about the ambush even before we had entered the restaurant. This was why he had called me so many times. This was why I had ignored his calls so many times. I knew that, had he been with me, or had I at least brought men that he knew and knew how to reach, we would have been out before the cartel had ever even loaded their guns. But that wasn’t how it was supposed to go down.

  In the end, Manny got what she wanted. Sure, she got a dozen innocent men killed—hers and mine. Sure, she almost got us killed. Sure, she started a war—the last crack to break up the Coalition. But she got me. Stuck with her in a hot little room in the process.

  It was too bad that she had gotten shot in the leg. Her legs were the best part about her.

  ****

  “What the fuck were you thinking?” Carly yelled as though I weren’t standing right next to her. “Spider tried to call you to warn you about what was going down, and you ignored his calls. We thought you were dead.”

  Spider stood next to her, watching my expression but remaining silent.

  Manny and I had been found alive in the basement of the Thai restaurant once the fire burned out, almost twelve hours later. I had gotten on a plane and landed on a small tarmac outside Albany.

  “Some things just need to happen the way they were meant to,” was all I said.

  Spider let a sad smile come over his lips before walking away. Carly guffawed at me and at him.

  With the explosion and dozens of cartel men dead, things were going to be moving swiftly now. I didn’t have any time to waste. I marched to my car. Carly ran behind me.

  “This was all Manny’s doing, wasn’t it? She was the one who masterminded this huge fiasco.”

  “You said you needed to speak with me. You said it was urgent,” I said, opening up my car door.

  Carly held on to the door and watched me buckle up.

  “It’s Frances. She wants money, and she says she’ll go to the cops with what she knows if we don’t give it to her.”

  Frances. The woman Bill had cheated on Carly with. The woman Bill had cheated on Carly with and had gotten pregnant.

  “Give it to her.”

  “I thought we had decided that we were done giving her money until we knew for sure what she was doing with all the money we’ve been giving her.”

  In reality, Spider had decided this, and I had simply gone along with it because I had bigger fish to fry than worry about Frances. But apparently, they were going to keep dragging me into this soap opera. “What difference does it make what she does with it? If she needs money, just give it to her. Hopefully she’ll use some of it for Daniel.”

  I already knew what she was going to ask me, because this always seemed to come up.

  “Why don’t we just give the money directly to Daniel?”

  “Daniel lives with Frances’s mother, and Frances keeps them pretty well-hidden from everyone. You might be able to find them and give them money, but if Frances finds out, it might be enough to either snitch to the cops or betray us to someone else. Then we’d have to make the decision we’ve been avoiding.”

  Carly took a second before saying what she really wanted to say.

  “Spider thinks that she’s up to something already.”

  “And you?”

  There was silence.

  Being the other woman would have normally warranted Frances an ass kicking from Carly and death if we had even the slightest indication of treachery. Daniel was an innocent party to his parents’ affair, and Carly had always tried to remain objective about the whole Frances situation for Daniel’s sake. So had I—for Bill’s sake. Even with all the time that had passed, it hadn’t gotten any easier on her, and Spider wasn’t helping.

  “Spider always thinks that she’s up to something,” I said, my tone sympathetic. “I haven’t seen anything concrete that would tell me that she’s up to no good. Just
give her the money, Carly.”

  Carly stood, as though there were something else she wanted to talk to me about. I had an idea of what that might be, but now was not the time.

  I closed the door and drove away.

  I was on my way to the reservation to see Pops and Hawk, unannounced. It would have been faster to land in Callister, but I couldn’t trust myself with Emmy so near. Now more than ever, I had to stay away from her. I didn’t just have Shield’s eyes on my back anymore; with Manny’s doing, I also had the cartel’s, and they were a lot smarter and more dangerous than Shield. Once word of a broken Coalition spread, once it was known that we were no longer an army, we were going to be attacked.

  When I got to Pops’s place, he was already outside, cutting wood in his rubber boots.

  He wasn’t surprised to see me. He was never surprised to see me.

  Pops stopped what he was doing and wiped the sweat off his brow. He glanced at me, though I wasn’t sure if he ever actually saw me, and then his eyes turned to the treetops.

  “The wind is changing,” he said to the air or the earth or any of the elements he worshiped.

  Hawk came out of the house holding some kind of meat on a stick, eating it as though it were cotton candy. His mother looked after her overgrown baby from the window.

  “What’s this about?” he asked me with a mouthful.

  As gruff as Hawk was, I still preferred to do business with him. He, at least, was in it for the money. Something I understood. Something I could work with. His father, on the other hand, had always had his head in the clouds, talking in prose and long-winded legends instead of getting to the point. This only got worse with his advancing age. I liked him. Of course, I liked him. He had been there for Bill and for me in the worst of times, when no one wanted to deal with us. Despite his deteriorating state, I owed him.

  They grew the best marijuana in North America and had one of the few remaining safe drug entries that were left completely unguarded. They were small, yet influential, and no one owned them, not even us. One of the few last-standing independents.