Crow’s Row
Julie Hockley
Julie Hockley
iUniverse, Inc.
Bloomington
Crow’s Row
Copyright © 2011 by Julie Hockley
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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ISBN: 978-1-4620-0390-7 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4620-0392-1 (dj)
ISBN: 978-1-4620-0391-4 (ebk)
Printed in the United States of America
iUniverse rev. date: 4/5/2011
For my husband,
thank you for your love, support and enthusiasm … and for finally convincing me to let you read this before I destroyed it. I couldn’t have written this without you.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter One:
Forever Freakish
Chapter Two:
The Secret to My Excess
Chapter Three:
Haunted
Chapter Four:
Chow Mein
Chapter Five:
The Farm
Chapter Six:
Cool Kids
Chapter Seven:
Sand Castles
Chapter Eight:
Unclothed
Chapter Nine:
Misery
Chapter Ten:
About Taking Risks
Chapter Eleven:
Fun and Games
Chapter Twelve:
A Dark Place
Chapter Thirteen:
Therapy
Chapter Fourteen:
The Proper Kind of Diversion
Chapter Fifteen:
Flying High
Chapter Sixteen:
Scar Tissue
Chapter Seventeen:
Different Worlds
Chapter Eighteen:
Heated Moments
Chapter Nineteen:
Expecting the Expected
Chapter Twenty:
Terrorized
Chapter Twenty-One:
I Never Said It Was a Good Plan
Chapter Twenty-Two:
Fitting Pieces Together
Chapter Twenty-Three:
Normal?
Chapter Twenty-Four:
A New Calling
Chapter Twenty-Five:
Broken
Chapter Twenty-Six:
Deadly Risky Business
Chapter Twenty-Seven:
Old Emily
Chapter Twenty-Eight:
Giving Up
Chapter Twenty-Nine:
The One Who Holds the Gun
Chapter Thirty:
Passing on the Crazy Torch
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my Mom and Dad for encouraging (i.e., bribing) me to read as a child by intensely quizzing me on the books that I would read, and then paying me; though, it still seems a bit unfair that I didn’t get paid for doing chores, even though I still had to do them! In spite of this, I love you very much.
I would also like to thank France, Jen, Jess, and Laura, my book club girls (a.k.a. the baby club and the super fatty dessert club). Asking you to proofread and critique my manuscript was a tremendous favor, particularly when we don’t have much time to ourselves any more. Unfortunately, you are now on my fictitious payroll to read the next books in the series. I’ll make sure to bring dessert.
“The man who desires something desires what is not available to him, and what he doesn’t already have in his possession. And what he neither has nor himself is—that which he lacks—that is what he wants and desires.” Plato, Symposium
Prologue
The motor of my 1989 Chevrolet Capri was thumping against the hood, making the whole car jitter. We sat in silence, stuck at another red light while the oversized muffler gurgled.
For the sixth time in the last five minutes, I checked my watch and sighed, aware that my left leg was impatiently shaking with the rest of the car. I stepped on the gas about a half second before the light turned green, trying to coerce the old lady in front of me to react a little faster—honking, swearing when she didn’t react at all. The old lady woke up and finally stepped on it.
My bumper practically rubbed hers, but I only had one thing on my mind. Colors. Would it be green or blue today? Maybe white—my favorite. A dark voice in the back of my mind offered no color at all as an alternative. I smothered that voice. The days of no color were simply too hard to bear. I needed color today. My cohort in the backseat echoed my edginess with a whine.
When the traffic came to Finch Road, the old lady veered off with everyone else. Finch was the line that separated city life from no man’s land—that good people like the old lady ahead of me pretended didn’t exist and steered away from as quickly as possible, lest it suck them in to the point where they would be forced to acknowledge its existence. I couldn’t blame them—I wouldn’t want my loved ones to ever come near this hellhole. This thought made my knuckles strangle the steering wheel.
As soon as I passed the Finch threshold, I switched the music on and turned up the volume until the tinted windows of my Capri were vibrating. I was definitely in the projects now. Rusty, souped-up beaters were lined up on the street, some half-parked on the crumbled sidewalks, others sat tireless on cement blocks. Men and boys amassed in the doorways of the decrepit apartment buildings, watching as I drove by. A place that even the police avoided, and one of our best moneymakers. I had nothing to fear here, so long as I made sure to pay my respects before disappearing into the crowd.
I drove up to the last building at the end of the street where a small group of choice gangbangers was waiting for me—a reminder that I was on their turf. This last building was their headquarters, providing them with a full view of the business and goings-on of the street. I parked illegally next to a fire hydrant, threw my baseball cap on, and pulled my hood up. I took the revolver out of the glove box and tucked it into the back of my jeans, making sure that just enough of the handle could be seen by those who would be looking for it.
I then stalked out of the car, and Meatball pounced from the backseat, following me out.
In a motion that had become second nature, I scanned the area and gathered an infinite amount of information in a few short seconds: shadowed doorways, quick exit points, how many thugs with guns were staring at me, how many were avoiding staring at me. Basically, I spent my life with my stomach in a fist and my teeth clenched like I was already locked away, looking at the world through the steel bars of my cell.
But all was well in the projects today—as well as the projects could be.
He was known as Grill—paying homage to his fully gold-plated smile, financed with his illegal fortunes. I nodded to Grill. Though he was a low-ranker—a much lower-ranker—I was required to acknowledge him before entering his turf. This would ensure my safety, reassure him that my presence didn’t mean that the leaders were trying to oust him.
“Out for a stroll?” he asked, and then he hopped back when Meatball stepped forward.
I tugged Meatball back, and then I looked around us … I didn’t need any trouble today.
Grill finally relaxed and cocked his head to the side. “You alone again today, sir?”
I checked my watch again. Then I waved him off and walked away. The look of indignation on his face told me that he didn’t appreciate being dismissed in this way in front of his troops. But I had no time for ego-stroking.
Meatball shepherded us through the hoards of families that had gathered in the nearby clearing to enjoy the rest of the sunny May afternoon. He tugged ahead, and we quickly worked our way deeper into the clearing. I recognized some of the faces. From their stares, they recognized me too. There was no love lost there—I was the face to their problems; I couldn’t hide the blood that stained my hands. But I wasn’t trying to either. All I wanted, needed, today were a few seconds of peace.
We found a vacated picnic table and hid in the crowd, waiting. I pulled my shirt over my gun.
After a few minutes, Meatball’s head shot up, and his ears went flat to his skull. My breath quickened, the fist inside me loosened a quarter of an inch, and the dark voice inside my head was made null and void, finally.
Chapter One:
Forever Freakish
By the time the instructor called time, I had already meticulously gone over my exam paper five times. It must have been at least two hundred degrees in that auditorium, like the school needed to make sure that absolutely no one would be spared the sweat of exam week. The crevasse, dug into the back of my neck by the steady stream of sweat, was proof that I too hadn’t been spared.
The few students that lagged behind left the stifling auditorium. Callister University was not an Ivy League school. It had probably never even been in the running for a top one hundred, top one thousand, any list of any schools in the country. But I still needed to maintain an A average to keep my full scholarship. So I took an extra second to check the dotted line at the right hand corner of my paper, on the off chance that Professor Vernon was one of those profs who still gave students an extra point just for spelling their names correctly. Emily Sheppard. My name was spelled right, though I still cringed, just a little.
Then I put my pencil down, turned my exam paper over, and had to let a very small sigh escape me. At the very least, I had survived one year of college, which meant that I was temporarily free of cramming for exams, of listening to endless lectures … school was such a great way to kill time. I would miss that.
I rushed back to the house and stepped into complete chaos—then again, when you share a three-bedroom hole with six other roommates, everyday is chaotic. You just learn to measure in degrees of chaos. In our house, chaos ranged anywhere from the morning run through the obstacle course of empty beer cases to get into the one bathroom … to keep your head down, and hope that nothing with sharp edges was within reach of the couch. Making it out the door in time for your next class was a challenge, to say the least.
Today was in the range of controlled anarchy. All of my roommates were moving out for the summer. There were hampers and garbage bags bunched at the door, most of them filled to the brim with dirty laundry—a common end-of-term gift for the parents. Everything was being packed—thrown really—into whatever container they could find, while their parents were shouting orders, trying to get out of our hole as quickly as possible.
Everyone who could escape Callister did so at their earliest opportunity. I was the only one of my roommates who wasn’t going home for the summer break. Burt and Isabelle, my parents, were spending the summer in France, where Isabelle was born and over-bred. Europe was a regular retreat for the Sheppard family. I had put an end to that too—even a hot summer in a dead city was better than that torture.
My roommates were rushed with their good-byes and have a great summer. And then they were gone, and I was left standing in the living room, alone with the abandoned school books and empty pizza boxes.
The house had been dubbed by some—mostly of the parental origin—a dump. I loved it. New and interesting stains appeared on the living room carpet, unrecognizable smells emanated from the basement, the kitchen housed a family of ants, the sole bathroom with the tub that often doubled as a beer bucket was booby trapped with rotting plywood. These were but a few of the marvels of this student housing. And I would have it all to myself for four glorious months.
I basked in silence for a few minutes more and then ran upstairs to my bedroom before I ran out of daylight.
My bedroom was the one at the end of the hall. Except that it wasn’t really a bedroom, but a broom closet that had been converted into a “rentable” space. In other words, if it was big enough for a semi-grown person to lay in, the landlord could charge student rent for it. It had no windows, no lights, no electrical outlets, and a curtain hung in place of a door because my single bed took up all of the floor space. I’d had to run a fire-hazard electrical cord from one of my roommates’ room into mine just to be able to plug in a lamp and an alarm clock.
What my room lacked in square footage it made up in character. My doll-sized bed, squeezed between three walls, stood on three-foot high stilts made of milk crates that had been secretly borrowed from the corner store. My clothes, my shoes, and my schoolbooks were stacked in Rubbermaid bins under the bed, and two-dollar Van Goghs hid most of the holes in the walls. The best part: it only cost me a hundred bucks a month—all inclusive.
I closed the curtain door, switched my jeans for sweatpants and ran back down the stairs.
After hiding the key under the front mat, I hit the ground running, literally, and zipped down the streets. I dodged people and the heaps of garbage that were piling up on the sidewalks—remnants of all the students who were gradually abandoning the city. By this time tomorrow, the city would be bare of the students that gave it life, the heaps would have been well looted, and only the real garbage would remain.
This part of Callister was considered the slum of the city—a stark contrast to the manicured lawns I had grown up with. What had been—probably a million years ago—a cute, middle-class neighborhood was now another dilapidated, though nicely affordable, sore spot on the city’s good standing. With its proximity to the university, it accommodated this weird mix of college students, underprivileged families, and drug dealers. It had a certain charm—most of the houses were small, wartime wooden homes built about three feet from the street and barely two feet apart from each other.
I was sure that the neighborhood must have been pretty at some point. Now most of the paint was chipping away. Multicolored layers started peering through spots as if the houses bared the scars left by the previous owners before being abandoned for good.
I hiked up one of the busier drags—my least favorite part of the run. Too many cars were driving by with practically everyone turning their eyes in my direction, like this was the first time they had ever seen someone run. I told myself that it was because of where I was—in this city, someone who ran was usually running away from something, like the cops or the barrel of a shopkeeper’s gun.
But somehow I knew it had nothing to do with the bad neighborhood, and everything to do with me—I was a beacon for curious stares. My hair was the color of spaghetti sauce. Not the expensive, gourmet kind, but the kind that was usually in a can, usually sold in bulk, and mostly made of carrots. And to say that I was pale was greatly fallacious. The reddish-brown freckles
that speckled every inch of my ghostly skin were enough color for my taste. To top it off, I was skinny. Not the “you-should-be-a-model” type of skinny—but the bony, awkward kind of skeletal. I held out hope that I would someday add something, anything, to my bones, but given that I was still my skinny mother’s carbon copy, hope faded with every year that passed.
I wasn’t paranoid … but still, I turned up the sound on my Walkman. It’s easier to ignore people’s stares when you’ve got music blasting in your ears. Then I ran up the hill and took a right into an almost hidden alley.
Behind two brick buildings there was a small patch of trees that towered over the laneway, shedding a carpet of little white beans all over the street. It was one of the few areas in the ghetto that had anything green still living. I veered onto the pathway that led through the cemetery. Like the rest of the neighborhood, the cemetery had been left neglected, with weeds growing everywhere—around, and within the slow cracks of tombstones. Street-gang graffiti, spray-painted art covered almost every surface of the graveyard, including some of the stones.
It was among the broken beer bottles, cigarette butts, and fast-food wrappers that stood the only tombstone that had been maintained by the caretaker—he must have been paid handsomely by my parents to keep the weeds and garbage away from my brother Bill’s grave. I ran this same route almost every day after school. Some days I would stop and sit to talk to Bill or just stare at the head of his stone.
Today I kept running, trying to make the most out of the lingering daylight, because I was running late, because a graveyard was definitely not where I wanted to be after dark. I had watched too many movies for that.
The pathway snaked the cemetery and eventually led through a fence of overgrowth and trees. I ran into the opening of the field of weeds and into the projects. The projects were a city within the city, a bouquet of high-rise public-housing apartment buildings built by the good people of Callister. What they really were was ugly and, as far as I could tell, barely habitable. They were built quite hastily by the city in the middle of a large piece of land—an unusually large, vacant, removed, industrial piece of land. The city’s plan was to keep the poor off the streets, or away and out of sight from the rest of the city. Entering the projects was like entering another world.
