Chapter 17 Emory
SEVENTEEN
EMORY
Emory woke with the sun. It wasn’t ritual, just memoriam. In the quiet respite of morning, he’d think of his father, but the memories were forged in absolutes. He remembered everything or nothing; the recollections larger than life next to the lost years.
Even at thirty-one, he could still taste the cold winter mornings of his childhood when the sun hadn’t yet warmed the sky and frost coated the windows. In the kitchen, Emory would sit atop the air vent billowing heat as his father tugged on work boots.
And he could still feel the swampy heat of summer nights helping his dad in the garage. With his father elbow deep in a Pontiac GTO, Emory would hand off tools until Ivan wandered in.
By then, his older brother had taken an interest in torturing small animals with their father’s tools.
In the room they shared, Ivan would torture Emory too with the grotesque details of his new hobby.
Emory slept on the couch thereafter until his mother made good use of the switch.
Then he didn’t sleep much at all, sometimes at school, but that landed him in trouble too.
Ivan eventually advanced to the sledgehammer as his tool of choice. With their father distracted in the garage, he’d admire it with a silent threat. One day, he’d crush Emory’s skull. Ivan would leave then, and Emory was always slow on the uptake after.
“Get outta your head, son,” his dad would say, “and don’t worry about your brother. That boy is broken in ways even God can’t fix.”
True enough, worrying hadn’t solved anything, and God never fixed Ivan.
By seven-thirty, Emory had showered and dressed in black jeans and a t-shirt with his long hair tied back. By eight-thirty, he got to work in an unused office on the third floor. For shame it wasn’t with his hands. He’d be happier if it was. Turn a wrench and free his mind.
At a half-past eleven, Jack’s noisy trinity sounded in the hall—boots stomping, wallet chain rattling, the whistling of some goddamn tune sure to stick in Emory’s head. Jack cantered in sporting a devilish grin and flopped into the chair across the desk.
“Mornin,’ sexy,” he said and picked his nails with a pocketknife. “Rough night?”
“Just about.”
Three, maybe four hours of fitful sleep. Another fight had in the hall, though, that one had felt different. On the ropes, he had nothing left for Amelia and thought she might’ve been pleased.
She wasn’t. Amelia wanted him contrite, not defeated, but his pride couldn’t bear to bend the knee. Something had shifted in him and in her too. It burned him up that he couldn’t tell what, so that rough night bled into an early morning. If he didn’t sleep, too fucking bad. The world kept spinning.
“I heard Liam lighting you up last night. Everything alright?”
Emory shrugged and snapped shut his laptop’s lid.
“It’s fine. What’s done is done. Damon is—”
“In pieces.”
Jack’s perpetual amusement vanished and left behind a fearsome visage. He was just as dangerous and brutal as the other men but charmed with humor they couldn’t quite manage. He leaned in close. An errant strand of hair fell in his eyes and grazed the crooked bridge of his nose.
“About the motel clerk. We can make that problem disappear.”
Jack pitched cold-blooded murder with the sleazy grease of a car salesman and a toothy smile to match.
Emory shook his head and asked, “For what? What did he see? Amelia? Okay, so he saw Amelia, places her with the Burrows kid.”
“He can place Damon there too. That will track to us.”
“Damon had no loyalty. He was in a lot of pockets, not just ours.”
Jack folded the knife and acquiesced with lifted hands. His instincts had accuracy, though, enough that Emory picked up the thread to see where it ended.
“What are you concerned about?” he asked.
“We don’t know what the clerk knows. Could be nothing, could be everything. We get rid of him, we get rid of an unknown.”
“True, but the more you pick at a wound, the more it refuses to heal. Might be best to leave this one alone.”
Jack mulled it over with a nod, though clearly unconvinced. At an impasse, Emory offered no promises, just consideration.
“Let’s find out more about the hospital the kid’s at. If it’d be an easy hit, okay; a production, I don’t have the appetite.”
“Fair enough. For today, I already briefed the men. Ten are with us. The rest will stay behind with Liam.”
“Good man. Thank you.”
“You know I love you,” Jack said with a wink and hopped to his feet.
“So you say.”
Emory grabbed his gun and tucked it into his waist band. Down the hall, he and Jack walked in step.
“I want another captain with us and a few more men too,” Emory said. “I’d rather have more and need less. We can spare the numbers.”
“How ‘bout Pete? He can bring a few of his soldiers.”
“Perfect.”
They took the stairs to the first floor.
“And Amelia?”
“With me.”
Jack grinned. “She still hate your ass?”
“Probably a safe bet.”
Who could blame her? And those walls she put up, Emory would’ve put them up too.
Hell, he had put them up, but bitterness breached, an assault in broad daylight, and he traced its lineage back to blame.
Amelia blamed him for her misfortunes, and Emory inherited guilt that grew wild like weeds he couldn’t pluck out.
Outside, he and Jack waded into a wall of dead heat with no breeze to call reprieve. The tiled terrace out front offered pockets of shade but couldn’t make up for a sun that raged toward its peak. In the distance, craggy earth met bright blue sky, and popcorn clouds ambled along.
They were early. The men wouldn’t show for another fifteen minutes. In these moments, Emory indulged the break; no duty or planning or expectation to bury his fear for the sake of others.
In these moments, he and Jack unearthed old memories. Jack had a way of glossing over tragedy with detours back to happier times—riding bikes, skipping rocks, staring up at the stars those summer nights as kids, wondering how it’d all pan out. Not like this. Never like this.
And in these moments, Emory had nothing left to do but laugh. “Suck it up, buttercup,” his old man would say. It was the hand he was dealt.
Jack leaned against a stucco archway and lit a cigarette. “This plan will work?”
Emory knew better than to peg a sure thing.
Plans were simple, people were unpredictable, and business was always personal to a degree.
He wanted the organization sleek, trim, and tight.
That meant consolidating assets and lobbing off the dead weight; in that particular case, a bloated gambling establishment whose revenue wasn’t worth the trouble it caused.
“Hopefully,” Emory said. “Plans have a way of going sideways. The point is to be prepared. Are we prepared?”
Jack cocked his head back and exhaled a mouthful of smoke. “I’d say so.”
They kept conversation light and inconsequential until Liam joined them. He bummed a cigarette from Jack and settled beneath the archway.
“You boys be safe today,” Liam said. “Do what you need to and come home.”
Home.
The mansion wasn’t Emory’s home, as much as Liam wished it was. The house was too big, too lavish. Part hacienda, part Spanish mission, it’d been homage to Francisca Moriarty and might’ve been a sanctuary under better circumstances.
For Emory, it was strictly temporary, and he hadn’t the heart to foot stomp that, so he paid Liam a dull smile, and Jack did the same, though it wasn’t his home either.
One by one, the Moriarty men gathered in the circle drive out front. Emory greeted them with an iron handshake and ensured they understood their orders. At any glint of confusion, he went over the plan again. Jack bullshitted and cracked quick-witted quips that maintained morale and settled nerves.
“Figure your captains out. Play to their strengths,” Liam once told Emory. He heralded the advice and read the fine print in others. It meant knowing himself too, though; what he was and what he wasn’t.
He wasn’t Jack with all that bantering swagger, but when Jack couldn’t muster the muscle to discipline, Emory stepped in with a stern hand. The balance worked.
In the sweltering heat, his men waited and Emory checked the time. It was close enough to noon to put up a fuss. He dug out his phone, but before he could fire off a text, the front door opened and Mirabelle dazzled with a smile that doubled as a talisman against his agitation.
“You’re late,” Emory said.
She rolled her eyes. “Your watch is fast.”
Behind her, Amelia slipped through the door. She looked the way Emory remembered from Dauer’s party—bone-crushingly beautiful with full lips, upturned nose, and auburn hair cascading over bare shoulders.
It wasn’t just the length of her bare legs in a sundress or the slope of her hourglass shape he found so utterly alluring. Amelia disarmed with Bambi eyes and smiles so sweet.
Up close, the girl had claws. Push too hard, she had bite. It intrigued and infuriated him, and it was the hot blast against his skin as he approached.
“Amelia,” he greeted tepidly. “You’ll ride with me today.”
Her eyes darted to him, the electric shock of her name passing his lips perhaps or maybe the arrangements she had no say in. Without a word, she flounced down the steps to the circle drive below.
“She’s got some fire to her,” Mirabelle once said.
All Emory ever saw was ice. Amelia wouldn’t protest with passion and panic, only biting aloofness and willing estrangement.
Mirabelle frowned, apparently shattered it wasn’t roses between them, just a wasteland of salted earth that bore no understanding. Emory would happily call it a red zone and have that be that, but Liam pointed at him with a stark reminder.
“She’ll come around. When she does, you know what to do.”
Make her sing. Emory balked but bit his tongue.
The men divvied up. The ones staying behind ambled inside while the others hustled to their cars. Arms crossed, Amelia stood stiffly next to Emory’s car and eyed him warily as he approached. Every time he came near, she braced herself that way.
Emory didn’t invest in lost causes, so he’d stopped coming around, but their time apart only made things worse. Amelia couldn’t bear to be near him, and he couldn’t stomach the rejection.
“You don’t have to look so heartbroken,” he said and tried in earnest to mask his resentment.
There was no disguising it, though, as he tore open the passenger door.
She peered up at him, her eyes searching his face for something more.
Emory understood well enough that he intrigued her, that she wanted to take him apart just to figure him out.
She puzzled on what he just said, and her head went on its side as if she didn’t comprehend.
“You’re not what’s breaking my heart.”
“Well, you might be what’s breaking mine,” Emory replied, half a joke, and even laughed to prove the humor. Of all things, that made the difference.
Amelia uncrossed her arms, and her gaze flicked to his chest before meeting his eyes again.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said with surprising softness, a departure from her usual defiance.
For the moment, Emory could believe she meant it too. The tension dissolved in her shoulders, and she came closer with less affliction than before.
“It’s a long ride,” he said. “Plenty of time to tell me about your broken heart, and maybe I’ll tell you about mine.”