Crow’s Row (28 page)

“Was Bill ever suicidal? Do you think he wanted to overdose?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, he wasn’t the same person in the end.” Carly looked at me searchingly, and then exhaled and chuckled. “Cameron was right. You are exhausting.”

My heart leapt, a large smile split my face, and a few red blotches popped up. “What else does he say about me?”

Carly smiled, put a hand on my shoulder, and suggested we go downstairs before the food was all gone. We picked up our guard dog on the way down, but we were already too late—not a morsel was left from the spread I had prepared. Two of the night guards were sugar-crashed on the couch, vacantly staring at the ceiling with their hands on their full bellies, stuck in a gluttonous daze. The scary guard wasn’t there.

“Animals,” Carly grumbled as we strolled past them. She motioned for me to follow her into the small pool house.

Inside, Carly’s hideaway was cozy, distinctly feminine—and very festive. Bright red and orange and yellow and deep blue colors were splashed everywhere from the walls to the curtains to the assorted furniture. Wooden dividers of painted purple and yellow flowers separated the small apartment into three rooms: the bedroom, the living room, and the kitchenette. It all hurt my eyes a little bit.

While Carly fixed us some food, I asked her about her bold choice in décor.

“It reminds me of home,” she explained warmly.

She told me about her mother, who had emigrated from Mexico as a young girl. She told me about her five sisters and about the house that she grew up in—a house that had been decorated in a similar bright fashion, and had been almost as small as Carly’s cottage. She laughed and told me about some of the trials of living in a one-bedroom house, and sharing one tiny bathroom with six other women. She told me about all of these things with a constant smile on her lips and a tear in her eye. She never mentioned her father. I didn’t bring it up.

“Do you see them very much?” I wondered.

“Not anymore,” she answered, a tear almost breaking surface. “It’s just too dangerous. I don’t want them to get caught up in all of this. My sisters have kids. I don’t know what I would do if one of them ever got hurt because of me.”

She looked at me, and her eyes lit up, a bit. She dashed into her bedroom. After searching through the dresser drawers, she rushed back.

“Spider had to go steal this from my mom’s house for me last Christmas,” she told me, handing me a picture of her family. They were standing in front of a bright and ornate Christmas tree—a cluster of happy, smiling faces, young and old. “It’s all of them—my family. The holidays are always the hardest for me.”

“Do you ever regret choosing this life?”

Carly looked at me strangely, like I had just asked her if she regretted breathing.

“I didn’t have any choice, Emmy. People like Spider, Cameron, and I are lucky just to survive for this long. If we weren’t doing this here, we would be doing it from the street, where things are even more dangerous. We’ve all had to make big sacrifices in order to get here, but at least we have some control over our lives now. I send money back to my family. I can keep them safe from here.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to suggest that you shouldn’t be doing this.”

Carly conceded a sigh. “I know. It’s hard to understand when you don’t come from the streets, when you’ve always had everything you’ve ever wanted. Your brother always had that problem too.”

I could sense that Carly was getting upset by our conversation. I decided to not push my luck any further.

We spent the rest of the day together, Carly and I. I found that I liked her more and more. In some ways, she was very reserved—but her temperament seemed to flare up easily. I thought that we were very similar in this way; yet it was clear to me that, in her eyes, we were very different.

In the evening, we popped some popcorn and settled in for a girls-only movie night—though our chick-flick choice probably had more explosions and gunfight than a movie that most “normal” girls would have picked.

Carly even brought out a bottle of wine.

“I was able to sneak this past Spider last time we got back from the city,” she told me a little shamefacedly.

“Why would you have to sneak it in?” Dating the head of security should come with some perks.

“Spider doesn’t allow booze anywhere on the property,” she explained.

“That’s … unorthodox,” I mentioned, though “control freak” came to mind.

She was slightly dubious. “Would you want these boys carrying machine guns after they’ve been drinking?”

Touché.

Two bags of popcorn later, with plastic goblets and an almost empty bottle of wine … Carly and I were thoroughly on our way to having a great time. But when the male lead got hit by a bus, Carly suddenly turned the volume down. The slamming of a car door confirmed her suspicions that she had heard something.

I turned to Carly with question. Her face had blanched. “Oh God,” she gasped, bringing her hand to her mouth. “They’re early. Something’s happened.”

As she pounced off the couch, the front door slammed opened. What we heard next stunned both of us.

“Is someone singing?” we asked simultaneously.

 Chapter Fifteen:
 Flying High

Cameron and Spider slumped in together and were followed by Griff and Tiny, who were dragging Rocco in by the waist. Rocco’s foot was heavily bandaged, but he was otherwise very happy.

Carly was as shocked as I was. But Spider meaningfully shook his head at her; now was not the time to ask questions.

Rocco was still singing like a drunken sailor as Griff and Tiny helped him to the couch. Griff was ashen. He glanced at me from the corner of his eye, and then he glanced at Cameron. He looked like he was about to say something to Cameron, but Tiny grabbed him by the arm and led him back out.

While Carly and I wondered about Rocco’s concerto, Spider caught sight of the almost empty bottle of wine on the coffee table. He picked it up and accusingly glimpsed at Carly and me. Our cheeks burned wine red. Carly smiled, guiltily, while she examined her fingernails; I immediately went searching for the remote control, to turn the movie off.

Cameron smiled, but his eyes were lined. “Did we interrupt your party?”

I found the remote too quickly and changed the subject. “What’s wrong with Rocco?”

“He’s heavily sedated,” Cameron told me.

Rocco suddenly took interest.

“I’m not sayne-dated. Dr. Lorne just gave me some happy pills,” he squeaked, shaking a sandwiched-sized, clear plastic bag of multicolored pills. And then he ravenously grabbed the nearly empty popcorn bowl, and we all watched him try to bite through the unpopped kernels.

Carly piped up in the inflating pressure. “So, are we supposed to guess what happened?”

There was a tense moment of silence between Cameron and Spider, between Rocco’s teeth-splitting crunches.

“Rocco shot himself in the foot,” Spider finally spilled, keeping his eye on Cameron.

Cameron’s already treacherous mood exploded like a volcano. “He wouldn’t have shot himself if my orders had been followed.”

“It was an accident, Cameron,” Spider reminded him, quickly, patiently.

“I said no guns! What part of my order wasn’t clear?”

Rocco got up from the couch and limped toward the patio doors.

“Where are you going?” Cameron demanded, the anger of his voice ricocheting off the living room walls.

“To bed. It’s too loud in here,” he responded groggily. He opened the patio door, limped through, and disappeared into the darkness outside. Carly and I watched Spider and Cameron stare each other down. The tension in the room was now thick and unnerving.

Carly smartly excused herself and left through the kitchen doorway. I followed her lead and went to check on the patient out on the deck.

It was pitch black outside. At first, I couldn’t see where Rocco had gone, but as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw his elongated shadow lying on a lounging chair. There was no moon; the sky was softly lit by a million twinkling stars. It was amazing how quickly it came—my sense of insignificance in the grand scheme of things.

I sat down next to him and watched the sky. It smelled like summer now, like the woods were breathing, too alive to sleep the darkness away. Rocco drowsily mumbled and tussled on his improvised bed. After a few minutes, he went silent. I assumed that he had finally fallen asleep.

“He loves you,” he garbled.

At first I thought he was still mumbling to himself, but as I turned to look at him, I saw that he had twisted onto his side and had been staring at me. His hair was disheveled—with one side completely flattened while the other stood straight up on its ends.

“Who are you talking to?” I asked, playing along with his drugged stupor.

“You, stupid. Who do you think?” he grumbled and turned on his back and squinted, like he was trying to figure out what those twinkly things above were doing on his bedroom ceiling. He gave up trying to focus on anything and sighed, “I think Cameron has for a long time.”

I couldn’t remember how it went: inebriated people always tell it like it is, or never trust what someone under the influence tells you? Maybe the truth was, as always, somewhere in the middle. Either way, my heart thudded.

He scratched his nose and then his ear. “That night, when I knocked you over the head, I seriously thought that Cameron was going to kill me … I screw stuff up all the time … so I guess that wasn’t really weird … Except that he made me bring you here, you were more than just some chick he picked up off the street. I think it’s driving him nuts having you here. He must have called me a thousand times in the middle of the night to check up on you last time he left to go to work.”

“You should really get some sleep, Rocco,” I suggested unwillingly.

“Before you came here,” he continued, ignoring me, his sole audience, “Cameron used to work all the time and then left us whenever he wasn’t working. We used to assume that he just wanted to be alone. Since you’ve been here, he doesn’t disappear anymore.”

“Don’t you think it’s strange that, out of all the people in the park that day, Meatball would run after you?” he asked me. “I mean, I’m not really good at math, but it seems pretty slim odds that the dog would jump on the one girl whose brother just happened to be the dog owner’s best friend. I think Meatball knew who you were a long time before you actually met. He likes you better than everyone else, that’s for sure.” Was he still talking about the dog? He turned to me, keyed up. “You know what else?”

I shrugged, because I didn’t know what else there could be, because I was holding on too tight to my bottom lip to play along anymore.

“I overheard Tiny tell Spider that someone told Tiny …” I was having trouble keeping up with this given my state of mind and wondered how he managed given his state of mind. “ … that Cameron was in the projects a lot even when he wasn’t working. After you came here, it all stopped …
and
,” he added like he was expecting a drumroll, “Tiny told me that when they went to get your stuff from your house, Cameron knew exactly where you lived and where your room was in the house. Tiny was the only one Cameron even allowed in the house. But no one was allowed to go near your stuff. Cameron packed it all himself.”

Images were running through my head—images of what had, might have, already happened; images of what could be … it took me a while to remember how to speak. Rocco was—absurdly—making a lot of sense, or at least that was what my heart wanted, very much, to believe. My head, on the other hand, was shielding the rest of me, challenging the mere possibility. For Cameron to—and I had trouble saying this even quietly to myself—love me, was, as Rocco had used, slim odds. Cameron was everything; and I was, not enough. My mind was looking for ways to protect me from the reality of my shortcomings.

“Why would Cameron send Meatball after me?” I contradicted, but there was no answer. While my innards had been fighting, I hadn’t noticed that Rocco had gone quiet. I looked over—he was asleep.

A serene voice in the darkness did answer me. “I didn’t.”

Cameron had been standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, listening to Rocco and me.

“Meatball got away from me after he spotted you running.” His shadow moved past me to the furthest end of the deck.

I could only watch.

“Taking advantage of my brother’s state to extort information?” While he had spoken from the darkness, I had listened for traces of anger but deciphered nothing like that. I exhaled just a little.

“He offered,” I corrected and went to investigate him in the darkness. From what I could see, he was standing with his arms casually resting over the side of the rail, looking toward the shadows of the trees. Other than the lights coming from Carly’s house, the landscape was blackened, and I could barely make out Cameron’s face—just his dark eyes that twinkled under the stars.

“So what were you doing there in the first place? In the projects, I mean,” I probed, trying to keep my voice casual.

“Checking up on you. Making sure you were safe,” he answered, his voice mastering casualness.