Chapter 19 #2
Mirabelle ignored him. Everyone saw defiance in her, a wild streak they couldn’t tame, so they clipped her wings and worried about migration. Where the fuck did they think she would fly?
On the steps out front, they lounged in the shade of cotton-ball clouds. Mirabelle liked to go there in spring when the wildflowers thrived for a little while in an inhospitable environment. Beneath an oppressive summer sun, those flowers had burnt up weeks ago.
“What is this place?” Amelia asked and studied the storefront sign.
“A haven for high rollers. The ones who care more about money than a flashy venue. They come here to avoid taxes on their winnings. For profit, of course.”
“Of course.” Amelia sipped her lemonade and asked cautiously, “Why are we here?”
Lie with a smile. It’s what you do best. Emory would never divulge his secrets to Cal Havick’s daughter. Then again, no woman should be reduced to “some man’s daughter,” so Mirabelle offered the truth.
“Emory wants the gambling operation off the radar. The guy who runs this place pushes drugs through here. The Moriartys don’t fuck with the drug business.”
“How come?”
“People in high places will turn a blind eye to a lot of things. Drugs aren’t one of them.”
With a deep frown, Amelia set her glass on the step and surveyed the street.
“Don’t look so surprised,” Mirabelle said. “There are crooked people everywhere.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” Amelia lifted her forearms and, with the grace of a pageant queen, twirled her wrists. It mocked with an elegant display of cuts and bruises still healing. “Do you?”
The pointed question came with an equally pointed look. When Mirabelle declined a response, Amelia asked, “What’s your role in all this? Do you get a say in things?”
The loaded question pried too much. Mirabelle narrowed her eyes and issued a warning to sweet Amelia so coyly sipping on pink lemonade.
“My role is to shut the fuck up when people ask me questions.”
The straw tumbled from Amelia’s lips and rolled along the edge of the glass.
“Let’s say a man like your daddy comes sniffing around. You know what I say? I say that I don’t know Gio from Adam. Or him or him or him.” Mirabelle pointed to each of the Moriarty men inside the store. “I can’t remember names, places, phone numbers. Nothing. My role is silence.”
“And the wives and girlfriends, that’s their role too?”
“The good ones, yes. It takes a special kind to be so ride-or-die for your man that you’re willing to sink with the ship. It’s why Emory wants me to find someone on the outside, settle down, be happy.”
It wasn’t just a want. He’d made her promise with the same gravitas as things spoken on deathbeds.
Amelia scooted a little closer, dug a little deeper. “Why don’t you?”
Mirabelle noticed Scumstache at the window scrutinizing the street. There was nothing to see out there, just weeds sprouting from cracked asphalt and a Lays potato chip bag flattened in the middle of the road. With no breeze, it hadn’t moved.
“I’ll tell you a story,” Mirabelle said. “I grew up in a house that backed up to woods thick enough to get lost in. Whenever things got bad with Ivan, that’s what Emory and I did; got lost back there. Jack lived down the street, so he’d tag along too.
“One day, Ivan found us. He’d come for me, to do things a brother should never do to his sister. Jack and Emory fought him off, but I knew then the price of my freedom was Ivan’s death. I guess I’ve earned it now, but I don’t believe he’s really gone.”
Mirabelle took a heavy gulp of lemonade. The memories were chaotic—screams and grunts and Jack jamming his pocketknife into Ivan’s eye. As Ivan howled in pain, Emory had put Mirabelle on his back, and he and Jack ran like mad for home. That was Mirabelle’s last day in the woods.
Amelia stared at the uneven slab of sidewalk in front of them. Even in the heat, her skin paled. “Emory said he’s dead.”
“Emory says a lot of things.”
“And what about him and Jack? What’s the price of their freedom?”
Mirabelle had been asked the same question before by lovelorn girls with foolish dreams of luring their Moriarty man away.
No pussy was phenomenal enough to break blood oaths.
That wasn’t what Amelia was after, though.
Her face betrayed resigned sorrow on Emory’s behalf, Jack’s too, all the lost souls trapped in the machine.
“Death,” Mirabelle said. “At the end of the day, this is the only family most of us got. It’s why the men stay. Besides, where are they going if they leave? They have nothing outside the organization. Inside, they have brotherhood, loyalty, and girls like me who’d move heaven and earth for them.”
Amelia propped her chin in the heel of her hand. A stray breeze rushed down the street. The potato chip bag puffed with air. Free to leave, it tumbled on, and Amelia watched it go.
“Don’t you want out? To live your dream, whatever it is?”
Mirabelle lifted her eyes to the clouds sailing by overhead. Was that the dream? She didn’t know. The outside world scared her more than it should. A strong, fearless girl inside the Moriartys, she didn’t know who she was on the outside.
“I never really thought about it,” she was ashamed to admit. “This is all I’ve known. It’s easy for Em to say I should get out. He doesn’t understand. I have reasons to stay.”
“Jack,” Amelia said with a dreamy smile.
Mirabelle sat up stiffly. How the hell could Amelia have seen? And if she saw, Emory must’ve too. Lie with your eyes. Mirabelle tilted her head and regarded Amelia like a class-A moron.
“Aren’t you two together?” Amelia asked.
“Why would you think that?”
“I’m sorry. I thought I noticed something. I—”
“You didn’t. I’ve just known him a long time is all. What about you? You got a boyfriend back home who’s gonna come save you?”
Amelia shook her head and sorrow surfaced in her eyes. “No one’s gonna save me. Only me.”
“Well, what about your dreams? You’re Harvard-bound, right?”
“No. I called it off. It wasn’t my dream.”
“Cal’s dream?”
Amelia nodded and, with her fingertip, traced a deep crack in the cement step where a single dandelion grew. “I was backed into a corner and forced into the role he wanted me to play. It didn’t matter what I wanted.”
“It’s what men do. Put you in a role and cry foul if you quit.”
That was the delicate take. Small fires existed in all women. It started as sadness that kindled the rage. It burned and it burned and they called them crazy. No woman wanted to go up in flames.
“So, here I am.” Root and stem, Amelia ripped the dandelion out. “Free, I guess. Trapped again.”
Mirabelle drew a long breath of dead heat. She had no words of comfort or priceless advice but tried for Amelia’s sake.
“It won’t be like this forever. This is just a detour.”
Quiet with her thoughts, Amelia picked petals from the dandelion. She lifted her eyes to Mirabelle with fresh resolve and chucked the flower to the steps.
“A detour means there’s a way out. I’ve told Emory everything I know. There isn’t any song to sing.”
“I know there isn’t,” Mirabelle said and not for the first time. Emory wouldn’t hear it from her, though. He had to see for himself.
“Thank you for believing me.” Amelia smiled with what might’ve been the end of it, but she bypassed the natural exit. “The motel clerk, the one Damon hurt. He’s in the hospital. What will happen to him?”
Mirabelle shrugged, uncertain of where Amelia was going. “Same thing that happens to everyone in the hospital. He’ll either live or die.”
“And who decides his fate, Emory or God?”
The blunt question pulled no punches. Amelia wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last to put Emory and God on equal ground, but it didn’t impress Amelia as it did the others.
On the surface, she was harmless and sweet, but then the gloves came off and she was discerning and sharp.
She didn’t fit the mold nor would she flit about with glamorous ambition to fuck her way to Emory’s side, his vapid queen rotten to the core.
Amelia already had her thumb to the pulse and felt his heart beating.
But she didn’t know him and couldn’t see what Mirabelle saw.
Emory would fall hard for a girl like her.
“Another lesson, know your place,” Mirabelle insisted with a sharp stare leveled at Amelia. “Some things are off limits, including questions like that. Now, about the things I’ve told you today.”
Amelia crossed her heart with her finger. “Silence.”
“Good girl. Is this a ‘fuck you’ to your dad?”
“More like a small act of defiance.”
“Sometimes it’s all we got.”
Girlish mischief gleamed in Amelia’s eyes. “Then we should take it every chance we get.”
“Yes, we should,” Mirabelle heartily agreed.
At the window, Scumstache tapped his phone and scanned the empty street again. He locked eyes with Mirabelle and the machismo fled. He looked like a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. A cold flush surged through Mirabelle.
“Let’s go,” she said. “The men are antsy. That’s never a good sign.”
Inside, a record played, but the music no longer disguised Emory’s voice down below. It rumbled through the floorboards with steady heat.
“Where’s the bathroom?” Amelia asked Mirabelle, but the question roused Scumstache’s interest.
He peeled away from the window and muttered something inarticulate, a demand, perhaps, that Amelia stay put. She paid the boy no mind and neither did Mirabelle as she directed Amelia down the hall.
Whatever his intentions, they fell apart. In a fluster, Scumstache’s hands shook as he frantically typed on his phone. From the back of the store, the two other Moriarty street soldiers noticed.
“Who are you texting?” one demanded and approached Scumstache from behind. The other circled to his side. Cornered, Scumstache shoved his phone in his pocket and turned with his back to the window.
“No one,” he answered and crossed his arms with a smirk.
The fucking nerve of this kid. Mirabelle killed the record player and marched up to him with an outstretched hand.
“If it’s no one, then give me your phone and let me see.”
The boy huffed a derisive laugh and glanced at the street again. Up close, Mirabelle invaded his space.
“I said, give me your phone.”
Scumstache sucked in a long breath and stood at full height.
Mirabelle had underestimated his size. A head taller than her, he peered down as if he had the upper hand.
For a brief moment, it seemed he might comply as he reached for his back pocket.
It was the wrong pocket, though. On the exhale, he pulled his gun and steadied it at Mirabelle.
“Drop it now!” shouted one of the street soldiers.
Hands up, Mirabelle froze and so too did Amelia as she returned from down the hall. In shaky steps, Mirabelle backed away. With his gun to her head, Scumstache no longer looked like a little boy.
He wouldn’t do it. Fear couldn’t listen to logic, though. She stumbled into the soda stool, blood pumping like ice in her veins.
Scumstache swung his gun to Amelia creeping toward the basement door.
“Stop! Stay there!” he screamed over the demands of the other street soldiers to drop his weapon.
Chaos unfolded in the basement too with a scuffle ensuing down below and Emory shouting his own demands. Amongst the mayhem, Gio rushed up behind Scumstache. He jabbed his gun to the back of the boy’s neck. His old hands trembled but his instincts were as ageless as the fury in his pale eyes.
“Put it down!” Gio demanded.
The boy lifted his hands but didn’t drop his gun. Like before, he held his breath and made himself tall, summoning all the bravery he could manage. Pressure pounded in Mirabelle’s ears as Scumstache whipped around. She opened her mouth to scream, but gunfire choked the sound.
At point-blank range, Scumstache buried a bullet in Gio’s belly and bolted for the back hall.