Chapter 38
THIRTY-EIGHT
EMORY
Amile from the commuter lot, the Moriarty men regrouped at a truck stop diner aptly named Crossroads. They piled into two adjacent booths and nourished scant appetites while Zulu went to work.
Across from Emory, Liam perused yesterday’s newspaper. Ink stuck to his fingertips and transferred in sooty prints to his coffee mug. Next to him, Jack avoided Emory’s stare as he tapped the filter end of an unsmoked cigarette against the table.
Disgust overwhelmed Emory. The table was dirty and cigarettes filthy. And why was his nose buried in his phone? Why wasn’t he at the other table poring over leads like Corey, Pete, and Zulu? At least Liam put up a front of relaxed nonchalance, his own attempt at comforting Emory.
It might’ve worked, except the kitchen grills filled the diner with stifling heat. Emory would burn alive in there and be happy for it, anything to stem the anxious thoughts. He stared out the window, though there wasn’t much to see.
The parking lot was mostly empty save a handful of eighteen-wheelers lined up in rows.
Drivers hopped from their cabs and walk bowlegged across the lot.
Inside, they greeted one another with stiff nods and plopped down at the counter.
They’d grind their eyes with the heels of their hands and grumble demands for coffee, black and hot.
Emory sipped on his own coffee loaded with cream and sugar to mask the bitter taste. Wanda the waitress wandered over and slung a worried look at the lot of them.
“You sure everything’s alright, hon?” she asked Liam but eyed Zulu with his gear scattered in the adjacent booth. She’d graciously run an extension cord from behind the counter and, until then, understood not to ask questions other than if they needed more coffee.
“Quite sure,” Liam said with a terse smile that sent Wanda on her way.
“I was texting Miri,” Jack explained and tucked his phone away. “She said they made it back to Liam’s.”
“I see.” Emory gestured to Jack’s empty hands. “For someone so well-connected to my sister, it seems strange you didn’t know where she was today, had no idea she’d slipped out.”
Jack huffed an offended breath, but his eyes teemed with hurt. It was the most emotion Emory had seen from him all night.
“You think I had something to do with this?”
Emory shrugged but stopped short of voicing accusations. He could take back allusions, which were often filled with weasel words and double talk. An accusation of treachery couldn’t be laughed off later as a misunderstanding. It had to be proven and dealt with or debunked without a doubt.
Liam pointed to the picked-at muffin on Emory’s plate. “Shut the fuck up and eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You will be, and you’ll need your strength.”
Emory almost rebuked the assumption—there’d be a fight he might not handle—but couldn’t marshal the wherewithal to argue. He shoved the plate aside and slid down the booth.
“I’ll be out front if anyone needs me.”
Outside, he walked the building’s perimeter and perched against a sun-bleached mural painted on the side. Once upon a time, it exalted Nevada’s flora with prickly pear and cholla brightly framing an electric sun. Beneath the light of a full moon, it looked lusterless.
Across an empty expanse of sand and rock, headlights flickered in the distance, and black mountains silhouetted the night sky. After a few minutes, Liam’s familiar cadence manifested on a crunch of gravel. With it came the peppery scent of his cologne as he rounded the corner.
“Can’t smoke anywhere these days,” he quipped with a flick of his lighter and a drag off his cigar. Fragrant wisps of smoke curled from his lips as he squinted at the horizon. “Remember what I told you about the desert?”
Emory nodded. “You said it was like a woman. Beautiful but deadly.”
His early days in the organization were a blur of memories that often bled together, but that conversation dog-eared a page in his past. It was one of the first heart-to-hearts he’d had with Liam, a man who, back then, Emory swore was trying to replace his father.
He’d been a teenager, capricious and difficult with a hair-trigger temper.
“Beautiful but deadly,” Liam said. “I told you not to get sucked in. That’s the problem. People are so infatuated by the allure, they set off. Before they know it, they’re lost and dying amongst the beauty they so desperately sought.”
Emory folded his arms and soured on the reverie. “Is this meant to be an analogy? One about Amelia? If so, save it.”
Liam’s brows lifted, and he dropped his smoking hand before the cigar reached his mouth.
“No, just reminiscing on our first meaningful conversation.” Liam shook his head with a laugh.
“God, you were a little asshole then and filled with so much anger. Like a hurricane, I watched you destroy everything in your path—relationships, friendships, yourself. I knew the rage would blow over, and it did, but I still see glimpses of it sometimes.”
Liam jutted his thumb at the diner where Jack probably sat alone with his hurt. “You shouldn’t have said that.”
“I know,” Emory conceded with a sigh. “I’m coming unstitched.”
“That’s fair.” Liam quieted and seemed to stew on his thoughts. “It’s interesting you assumed you were getting a lecture about Amelia. What criticism were you expecting from me?”
“You saw what happened last night. How did Sal put it—the on-the-fence shit will end in tragedy for everyone?” Emory gestured to the desert around them. “Lo and behold.”
“Whose tragedy is this? To most the men, Amelia’s life is a rounding error in our business and nothing more.”
Liam took a long pull on his cigar and sent rings of smoke to the silver-dollar moon. Emory watched them disband as they drifted away.
“Let me tell you a story,” Liam said. “I swear it has a point. It won’t seem like it, but it does.
I used to have this fountain pen. I saw it somewhere and coveted it long enough that Francisca told me to shit or get off the pot, so I bought it, used it a few times, then lost it.
I looked for that thing in the obvious places—pockets, desk drawers, couch cushions.
Eventually, I called it a loss and moved on.
Francisca loved pens, though. You remember that? ”
Emory shook his head. Francisca died only a year after he arrived in her life, not long enough to learn her quirks.
“Well, she did. For Francisca, pens had to feel a certain way. The right tip and grip, ink like silk on the page. We went to our lawyer one day to draw up her living will. When we left, she got in the car giggling like a little girl and pulled a pen from her purse. It was our lawyer’s pen.
She’d signed something and walked off with it.
She claimed it was perfect in every way.
The thing was hideous. A glittery, plastic abomination.
“From that point on, though, it was her pen, the pen to end all pens. I’d tease her about it, and it became an inside joke.
Whenever the pen was out, I’d give her a hard time about finding perfection in something so mundane.
When she passed and I was handling her things, I came across it.
I couldn’t get rid of it, so I kept it on my desk.
Whenever I saw that pen, I thought of how much I loved her, the things that made her happy, our life together. ”
Liam glanced at Emory. Heartache burdened his gaze.
“I lost the pen. I used it one day, and it was gone the next. I didn’t cry much after she died but broke down when I lost that fucking pen.
It was ridiculous to everyone else. It was just a pen.
I had pens, more pens than I needed and much nicer ones too.
Hell, I even had a fancy fountain pen once.
They didn’t get it. No one did. It didn’t have to make sense to others, though.
The pen meant something to me, and I lost it.
Whether or not they understood didn’t change how I felt. ”
“Did you ever find it?” Emory asked and shivered against the night’s subtle chill. It’d displaced the heat and burrowed beneath his skin.
“No, but I still look for it sometimes. Here’s my point. You lost something meaningful to you. It’s a tragedy to you. Just because the men don’t understand doesn’t mean you can change what Amelia means to you. That girl is your calm sea.”
“My what?”
“Your calm sea. When I was a young man chasing the wrong kind, my father told me, ‘Look for calm seas.’ People wondered how a delicate creature like my mother managed a son-of-a-bitch like him, but she was always the backbone, the strong one. She stilled the storm inside him. A calm sea. Amelia is your calm sea.”
Emory nodded, though it took no great deal of introspection to know what Amelia was to him. The thought was beautiful, but Liam left out a crucial part. The sea was at the mercy of the sky. When storms rolled in, calm waters suffered the surge.
“Your mother and Francisca,” Emory said, “they endured, but would you say they flourished? Or did they live their lives in service to an organization that robbed them of normalcy and peace of mind?”
Overhead, a floodlight flicked on and left Liam faintly stunned in its light. “They made sacrifices. All the spouses do.”
“But our world consumes people. You think a future of sacrifice is what I want for Amelia? Look at what I do for a living. Look at what’s happened now because of it.”
“We’ve all done awful things in our time. You’re a good man.”
Emory expelled a caustic laugh. “Am I? Sometimes, I have these dreams where my sins are weighed against Ivan’s, and the scales come up even. Same darkness. Same monstrosity.”
In those nightmares, Emory chased salvation, but the beast lived in him, and when it broke free, it thrived with Ivan by his side, two brothers bonded in blood.