Crow’s Row (36 page)

“Cam …” he half-yelled out of breath, “We have a big problem. The house is being attacked.” I heard a voice calmly responding on the phone, but couldn’t make out what was being said.

Rocco answered the voice, “I don’t know who or how many! It’s dark out!”

A fresh round of gunfire exploded in the distance and seemed to be moving closer fast. The voice on the other line was now rapidly speaking.

“I’m not running, Cameron. I’m not a coward. I’ll stay and fight with the guards,” Rocco told him.

Cameron was screaming, cursing on the line. Rocco peeled the phone away from his ear and handed it to me. “Here,” he said, “Cameron wants to talk to you.”

I picked up the phone, “Camer—”

Cameron didn’t give me a chance to greet him. “Emmy … Go with Rocco. Get out of the house. Run for the woods.” He was panicked. I could hear commotion behind him. Spider was barking orders, and people were yelling and shuffling rapidly.

Rocco had tottered to the cabinet and pulled a handgun out of the drawer. He handed it to me. Steady thuds could be heard at the front door.

“Oh, God! Cameron, they’re at the door. I think they’re trying to knock it down!” I breathed into the phone.

Cameron swore successively and pleaded, “Emmy, get out—” and the line went dead. I looked at the phone and handed it over to Rocco.

He examined it. “Battery’s almost dead. I forgot to charge it,” he confessed and put the useless phone back in his pocket. Rocco then started to rush me toward the patio door, but I resisted.

“You need to get out of here, Em.”

“I’m not going without you,” I whimpered. “We run together. Cameron said—”

He was incredulous. “Run? Em, I can barely walk! I would just slow you down. Besides, I’m not going to let them take my brother’s house without a fight.”

“This is no time for you to prove your toughness to your brother—”

There was a loud snap at the front door—the doorframe was giving into the attack. The trespassers were moments away from entry.

“Can’t you just listen to me for once? I’m not going with you, and I’ll be dead if something does happen to you because Cameron will kill me himself.” Rocco seemed to be getting calmer while I was getting closer to losing my mind.

“Rocco, I am not leaving without you! Please …”

Crack! The doorframe had finally given in. I jumped. Rocco swore. He looked around the room and, with all his might, pushed me into the furthest corner of the living room where there was a large wicker chest. He opened it, threw the blankets that were inside it on the couch and forced me inside. As he closed the lid, I heard the front door violently swing open and a trudge of footsteps rushing toward the living room. Through the weaves of the chest, I could see Rocco standing guard in the middle of the living room with his arms bravely crossed.

A heavyset man led the gang into the living room. With his finger on the trigger of his machine gun, he glanced around the room and stopped to stare Rocco down. Rocco never flinched.

“Clear!” the heavyset man yelled.

He and the rest of his men slightly relaxed their grip on their weapons and parted to the sides. A lanky, bookish man strolled in from the back through the split of men, stopping in front of Rocco. Unlike the sweaty and agitated men that backed him, the man was tranquil, unconcerned. There was something familiar about him. My heart was pumping so fast I was shaking.

“Where’s the girl?” he demanded of Rocco. He had an almost female tone to his voice.

Rocco cocked his head to the side. “It’s Norestrom, isn’t it? I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Where’s the girl, mongrel?” Norestrom repeated more forcefully.

“What girl? There aren’t any girls here.”

Norestrom peered at Rocco through his red-rimmed glasses. “Listen, kid, we know the girl is here. All of your men are dead. Now, you can tell us where she is and you’ll live, or you can die and we’ll still find her. Which one is it?”

Gunfire suddenly erupted at the back of the crowd, and I saw two of Norestrom’s men go down with a splat. One of the ailing guards had crawled out of bed from the basement and snuck behind them, taking two men down before getting shot himself.

While Norestrom’s men had been distracted with the guard, Rocco had cocked his fist back and punched Norestrom right on the nose. Norestrom fell back like a rag doll. He slid to the floor and his head hit the ground with a thud.

One of Norestrom’s men ran to his side but Norestrom shoved him away. Disoriented, Norestrom wobbled to a sitting position, his nose bleeding, and his glasses shattered on his face. He was incensed.

“Kill him,” he ordered pinching his nose with two slender fingers.

The heavy man immediately raised his weapon.

Shots were fired.

Rocco fell limp to the floor.

In that moment, I felt like I’d been knocked out of my body. What I had seen … it couldn’t have happened. My vision blurred, but my eyes stayed on Rocco. I willed him to get back up, to fight back, to run. But he wasn’t moving. Red stains soaked the front of his gray T-shirt, and a puddle of burgundy was spreading around him.

Thick fog had started creeping into my brain.

Norestrom got up and brushed his hands over his khaki pants. “Find her and bring her to me, dead or alive,” he commanded and thought about it, “Preferably alive.”

The men scurried and spread out, leaving Norestrom behind in the living room. Norestrom approached Rocco and kicked his lifeless body. Rocco didn’t react. Satisfied that Rocco wouldn’t attack him again, Norestrom bent over him and searched his pockets. He pulled out pieces of my Rocco’s world: screws and a nail, a napkin, a few peanuts, candy wrappers, and the cell phone.

Norestrom flipped the cell phone open and quickly scanned the screen before the battery went completely dead. Then he bellowed, and his heavy assistant ran back to him.

“He had time to call them. We don’t have much time,” Norestrom said. “Get the body out of here and make sure it’s the first thing they see when they drive in.” The heavyset man jumped and called for aid. They carried Rocco out of the living room, leaving a trail behind.

Norestrom stood and scanned the pool of blood with a smug smile. When the heavy man came back and stood with him, Norestrom turned angry. “Go find the girl!”

The two of them ran off through the kitchen doorway, and I heard their footsteps climbing the stairs up to Cameron’s room.

The sound of things getting thrown around and broken rang through the house as the men searched high and low for me.

But the living room was left empty.

I didn’t have much time before they started pulling apart the living room to find me.

In a daze, I opened the lid of the chest, crawled all the way to the patio door, sliding it open. I crept out into the night and crawled into the dark recess that had once been the site of my hidden first kiss with Cameron. I could hear men stomping within the living room and kitchen now. I rolled myself under the deck’s railing, stuffing the pistol in the waistband of my shorts and clinging to the side as I heaved my body over. Hanging from my fingers, I dropped to the ground and immediately skidded away from the basement light, squeezing my body against the cold, brick wall.

The basement patio door slid open, and a man stepped outside, glancing around. My heart pumped frantically as his gaze was slowly coming into my path.

Gunfire erupted again, and flashes of light were coming through the windows of the basement bedrooms. One of the ailing guards, who had been too ill to get up, had surely been found and killed. The man rushed back into the house to view the action.

Shadows were moving violently within the pool house. Carly’s world was now being ripped apart. Soon the men would start searching the grounds for me. With the moon and stars lighting up the landscape, I knew I would be exposed if I moved out of the shadow of the house. Taking one big breath, I darted across the grounds, praying that no one was watching.

I managed to get near the trees without notice.

Hopefulness started inching its way inside me, until I tripped.

My foot had gotten caught. I pushed myself up through the long grass and staring back at me were dead eyes—eyes that I had once known, eyes of one of the guards who had been shot down by Norestrom’s men. A scream involuntarily left my lips, and I kicked, struggling to get my foot loose.

In the distance, I heard a booming voice cry out.

“She’s over here!” a man coming out of the pool house yelled. All of a sudden, every man looked out of the back windows of the house and started herding in my direction like a pack of hyenas.

After I managed to struggle free from the dead guard’s grasp, I ducked into the dark woods.

Branches slashed me in the face, and I pummeled full speed into a few tree trunks. I couldn’t see more than two feet in front of me but I could hear the men’s war cries and earth-stomping footsteps near and around me, so I didn’t stop. I kept running, often tripping over fallen logs and bushes. My legs were getting severely scratched and bruised. My hands were tattered. The adrenaline was pumping too fast for me to feel much, but after a while, my burning lungs were also starting to plot against me. Though my mind continued to speed through, my body was slowly giving up.

When my shoulder hit an unseen tree limb, I fell backward to the ground, the back of my head hitting the hard ground. I forced myself to get up but just fell forward on my hands.

I couldn’t go on anymore.

The forest was black, with the only light coming from an imperceptible moon that reflected off the treetops. I couldn’t see the men that scoured the forest looking for me, but I could hear them all around. Voices screamed all over, and inside my head. I slid my body next to a tree trunk and shakily took the gun into my hands.

I had never actually held one before. It was cold and heavier than I had imagined it would be. My hands didn’t fit well around the handle. I pointed the gun in front of me with both shaking hands, resting my elbows on my knees, and curled up into a ball against the tree. I closed my eyes and hoped that the voices would go away. In a half-answer to my prayers, the wind picked up through the trees, and rustling leaves drowned out some of the voices. But the screaming in my head continued mercilessly.

I rocked my body back and forth in an effort to keep my mind focused on staying warm. I was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, and my bare feet were covered in cold mud.

It got much colder. At first, I could feel the chill flow right through me, and my body shook uncontrollably. Eventually, though my body continued to shake, I felt nothing. On a few occasions, I heard branches crackling and breaking nearby as the men continued to search for me in the darkness. I would just squeeze my eyes tighter, praying that they would go away. And they did, every time.

After what seemed like days of being curled up against the tree, dawn seeped through the woods. I became horrifically aware that I was no longer hidden from them by the darkness but I could see nothing but thick brush around me—maybe this would be enough to keep me unseen?

But then there were rapid steps and crashing branches. I listened with all my senses and realized that the noises were heading in my direction.

I had been uncovered ….

Somehow, I always knew that I was going to die alone. Maybe I even knew that I was going to die young—or maybe I had once upon a time just wished I would die young to get it all over with—but I had never thought that, in the face of death, I would have something, someone to fight for.

As the stomping steps moved closer, faster, I stopped my hands from shaking long enough to cock the gun’s lever back, like I had seen done in so many movies before.

I could now clearly hear running steps just beyond the brush that had kept me hidden until now. Though my hands were shaking uncontrollably once again, I held onto the gun as tightly as I could and hoped that I would figure out how to fire this thing before I was discovered. As the leaves to the side of me rustled, I turned, closed my eyes, steadied myself tight against the tree trunk and pulled the trigger. With a deafening bang, the gun fired. Pieces of tree bark went flying everywhere.

My ears were ringing. Even more footsteps were now running toward me. The gunfire had alerted the men to my hideaway.

I pulled the trigger again. Nothing happened this time. My body was violently convulsing and I could feel the cold tears on my face as I pulled the trigger over and over but nothing happened; the gun was stuck or it only had one bullet or I had broken it.

A man jumped out from the brush and clasped his arms around me to prevent me from shooting.

He tried to pry the gun from me. I struggled, fought back with everything I had left in me. But I couldn’t compete against his strength and he finally managed to get the gun from me.

He cupped his hands around my face and forced me to look at him. It was Cameron. His lips were moving rapidly but I couldn’t hear anything—just the screams in my head and the ringing in my ears. His warm lips scorched my freezing skin as he kissed my forehead, my nose, my lips.

The brush next to him moved and I jumped back, petrified. Cameron threw his arms around me, grabbed me in a bear hug, while Meatball slowly slinked toward us and licked my frozen fingers.