Crow’s Row (23 page)

Then there were the other darker times, fleeting moments when he became distant. A glaze would awash his face and the premature wrinkles around his eyes resurfaced. I hated these moments. Eventually, his eyes would find me, and he would come back. I’d wonder where he’d been—what dark corner he had come out of.

The second thing I noticed was Rocco’s immeasurable attachment to his older brother. Wherever Cameron went, so did Rocco, faithfully, eagerly. Cameron would secretly smile at me while his brother tried to impress with his newfound fighting skills, or tried to match whatever weights Cameron was lifting in the workout room. And we watched a lot of TV, spent our days moving food from the kitchen to the kitchen table to the couch.

Carly and Spider would join us once in a while. One was never without the other. They mostly kept to themselves. I really liked Carly. Spider was tolerable.

With the torrential weather, I had expected the house to be bustling with people trying to get out of the rain. Yet the house was quieter than usual. Guards only came in for mealtimes and sleep.

The third thing I noticed was that even the mid-rankers ate in the basement kitchen. It seemed that when Cameron was around, guards stayed away and all meals were eaten as a
family
. I loved this.

I briefly saw Griff a few times, rushing in and out of the wet weather for his meals. He’d glance at me, but ignored me otherwise, as if I weren’t there at all. I felt guilty, like I had abandoned him. He was obviously upset … I couldn’t confront him without making Cameron wary or Spider unnecessarily suspicious. Although Spider had somewhat started to relax around me, which seemed to please Cameron and Carly, I didn’t want to give Spider any ammunition to speak against me anymore.

The last thing I noticed was that I slept—dreamlessly and peacefully. Every night, I dreaded leaving Cameron to get some shut-eye; he would practically have to drag me off the couch. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I was out. Not even Meatball’s snoring could wake me. Maybe it was the soothing way the rain pelted against the tin roof, like drops hitting a champagne glass. Maybe it was something else.

One evening, Rocco had fallen asleep on the couch with the remote control tightly clenched in his hand and the channel stuck on the weather. Cameron had disappeared. I was considering resuming the stalking when he reappeared, soaking wet.

“Holy cow! What happened to you?”

“I had to run to my car,” he told me breathlessly. “I have a surprise for you.”

My heart dropped. The last time he had a surprise for me, it ended up costing him, or me, three hundred thousand dollars. The Maserati was still stuck in the mud.

“Don’t worry,” he encouraged. “You can’t crash this one.”

Although Cameron had told me that he couldn’t read thoughts, I had started to wonder if that was the whole truth.

He pulled a box out and handed it to me. “Coppola,” he said, like this would mean something to me.

I looked down, then up. “They made a movie about
Rumble Fish
?”

“Now you can finally find out how the story goes.”

Cameron had put his finger to his lips and led me out of the living room.

Hanging out with Rocco was great, but finding time alone had become an art.

“Don’t get too excited,” he warned as we walked upstairs to his room and he read my mind again. “The kid at the video store said it’s pretty old and filmed entirely in black and white.”

The thudding in my chest had nothing to do with the movie.

We sat down after Cameron stuck the disc in the player, throwing our feet on the coffee table. When the opening credits rolled, Cameron did something that I hadn’t been prepared for. His hand crawled over to mine. His fingers slipped between mine. He squeezed in. I looked straight ahead, feeling the demolition crane pounding against my chest.

I peeked at him from the corner of my eye, which was what he had been waiting for.

“Is this okay?” he asked shyly, lightly lifting our intertwined hands.

I imagined that my face was a bright crimson. My tongue was out of order. I conceded to a daft nod of my head and a fresh flow of blood to my face.

Holding Cameron’s hand was much more nerve-racking when he was awake to witness it.

Then my eyes were drawn to a movement over Cameron’s shoulder. Beyond the wall of windows, I saw Carly and Spider by the pool outside. They were walking together very closely but never actually touching—something else that I had noticed them do. They closed the door to the pool house behind them.

“Do you think that Carly and Spider are dating now?” I wondered aloud while I tried to persuade my heart to lighten the thrusts of blood so that my head and hand would stop pulsating like jungle fever.

“I know they are,” he said chuckling. “They try to hide it, but everyone around here knows, we just let them think that we don’t notice.”

I couldn’t understand why Spider would go through so much trouble trying to hide something that he had waited his whole life for. I knew I couldn’t. “Why do they try to hide it?”

“They don’t want the fact that they’re … together to be held against them.”

“I don’t understand,” I confessed, as I often did around him.

He took a long, ragged breath. “In our line of business, if someone sees that you care for someone else, it’s a weakness—something that people will use against you, or try to control you with.”

“How?” I asked him.

I looked earnestly at Cameron while he fidgeted in his seat.

“Well, think about it. What if somebody threatened to hurt someone you cared about … like your parents or your brother for example? What would you do to keep them safe or prevent them from getting hurt?”

“Anything,” I whispered with concentration. I had often lain in bed at night, asking myself what I would have done differently if I had had a second chance at saving my big brother’s life. The answer was always the same—anything and everything.

“Right,” he agreed reluctantly. “So somebody who knows that—”

“Somebody like who?” I interrupted.

His face hardened. “A bad person.”

“How bad?”

“The worst,” he muttered.

I knew I ought to be scared, but that was never the feeling I had around Cameron. “You were saying?”

He looked at me blankly.

“That the bad person who knows who you love—” I incited.

“The very bad person will use that to control you,” he finished with growing reluctance.

He squinted. “Can we stop here?”

“No. We can’t.” I was unwavering. Cameron’s world had once been my brother’s world—I needed to know, however dire. I needed to know where Bill had been, where Cameron still went.

He sighed and paused the movie. He let go of my hand and rotated his body toward me, resting his elbow on the back of the couch and leaning his head against his lifted fist.

“Imagine what Spider would do if someone ever took Carly and threatened to hurt her if Spider didn’t do what they wanted,” he put to me.

The image of a crazed Al Pacino brandishing a machine gun in
Scarface
came to mind. “Okay …”

“Someone … a bad person, who knows that Spider would do anything to keep Carly safe will use it to control him by threatening to hurt Carly and force Spider to do something that he doesn’t want to do or can’t do.”

“So people use other people as leverage to get what they want.”

Cameron slightly cleared his throat. “Right.”

“People do that all the time, Cameron,” I informed him. “It’s not the end of the world. People can move past it.” I had hoped to be proof of that … someday.

“It’s not worth hiding your love away,” I added, artfully.

“This is why I don’t want to talk about this with you,” he said with exasperation. “You’ve got this cute view of the world.”

I took a quick affronted inhalation and narrowed my eyes. His smile was warm, but his eyes were tight.

“You’re beautifully naïve, Emmy … I don’t want to change that.”

“I’m not naïve,” I huffed. “What did I say that was so naïve?”

“In my world,” he unwillingly shared, watching my face, “when a loved one gets … taken … they don’t come out of it unscathed … if they’re lucky to come out of it at all.”

“You mean people lose their lives in the process?” I tried to keep my voice professional, non-scared, non-naïve.

“Sometimes …” he admitted with a murmur.

“How often?” I quickly questioned.

He didn’t need to answer. The look on his face was enough response.

“Why—” I had to curtail my tone again. “Why wouldn’t they just let people go once they got what they wanted? Why does anyone need to get—”

“It’s more complicated than that. Sometimes you can’t do what they want you to do without getting a whole lot of other people killed. And sometimes the person you love is killed … just because you love them.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

He leaned in, and his eyes held mine. “What would you do if the person you loved was hurt? What would you do to the person who hurt them?”

“I would hunt them down, hurt them, kill them.” I was taken aback by the violence in my own voice.

“And then you would have gang war, which was probably what they wanted in the first place.”

“Like street shootings and stuff like that?”

“That’s the stuff you see on TV—the unorganized street gang stuff. In the real organized world no one sees gang wars. You don’t hear about mass shootings … you might hear about weird disappearances or house fires or car accidents or robberies gone bad. Normal stuff that could happen to anyone on any day.”

He paused. His face was impenetrable.

“What are you thinking about?” he questioned.

“You tell me. Can’t you just read my mind?” I mocked, though my voice cracked.

He rolled his eyes.

“I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I know that every time I open my mouth you get a little more nervous and eager all at once … I don’t understand it.” He shook his head and waited.

I hadn’t realized that I was holding my breath. He was very observant.

I exhaled and swallowed. “Why would anyone want a gang war?”

He shrugged lightly. “For the same reasons that the rest of the world starts wars—because they want something. Territory, power, money, intimidation … there are a lot of reasons that people start wars. But in our business, they’re usually a bad idea—eventually they attract too much attention.”

“Like when too many weird things start to happen to too many people,” I mused.

“Precisely.” His face was getting increasingly tense. “We wouldn’t start a war unless everyone agreed.”

This peaked my interest even more. “Who’s everyone?”

“Let’s just say it’s a bunch of bosses who sit down and make all the decisions for the best of the business.”

“Like a board of directors?”

He chewed on this and smiled. “Sure. Let’s call them the board of directors.”

“Are Carly and Spider on this board?”

“No, they work directly for me.”

“But you’re on the board,” I said.

He smiled wryly. “Kind of.”

“What happens if the directors don’t agree?” I couldn’t imagine that the vote would be put to the stockholders.

“Majority rules usually,” he told me. “Otherwise, there’s one person who runs the board and who has the right to make the final call.”

I was amazed by how it all seemed abnormally normal. “Kind of like a CEO?”

“CEO? That’s a good way of putting it.” His eyes lit up a bit. “You seem to know a lot about this stuff.”

“Looks like I was born to do this. Maybe I could start working for you too,” I jested, though part of me was serious.

Cameron’s face became severe. “Don’t ever joke about that, Emmy. That will never happen.”

My heart was pouting. I decided to move away from the job hunt and continue the inquisition. “What happens if someone doesn’t follow the rules? What if they don’t follow the board’s decision or just do what they want without going through the board?”

“You mean, what happens when someone goes rogue?” he clarified with intensity. “Then you have a big problem. The board has to decide what they want to do about it.”

“Can they decide to kill that person?” My voice was barely audible.

Cameron had started fidgeting again.

“Yes. They can,” he answered, also whispering.

“Have you ever had to make that kind of decision when you were on the board?”

Cameron eyed me and pressed his lips together. “I don’t want to lie to you.”

“So don’t. Just tell me the truth,” I pleaded.

“I can’t. There are some things that I can’t talk to you about.”

“I need to know,” I admitted. And I admitted more, “I need to understand you, Cameron.”

“That’s the problem, Emmy. You’re trying to understand me, but what I do isn’t who I am.” The full power of his eyes were on me now. “The thought of you seeing me in this way, of knowing this other side of my life that is so … it makes me feel sick.” Cameron took both my hands in his. “I trust you, and you can ask me anything you want. But please don’t ask me that.”