A chill grew in Amelia’s chest that not even alcohol could burn away. Her stomach soured and saliva filled her mouth. She’d be sick if she drank. She nodded her assent as Burt sipped.
“When do you leave for Arizona?” he asked.
“Three weeks.”
Saying it out loud somehow made it feel less real, as if she was hurtling toward a horizon that would forever elude her, and her dreams of escape were just a fickle mirage.
Burt took her glass and set it on the mantle. An age-spotted hand rested heavy on her shoulder. Amelia couldn’t place what gathered in his eyes. Regret, perhaps. Fear, most like.
“Leave sooner. Please.”
His desperation disarmed her. Light-headed, Amelia swayed subtly on her feet. “I can’t. I have loose ends to tie up.”
That she was leaving at all had carved a chasm between herand her father. It’d been two weeks since their fight with scarcely a handful of words spoken between them.
Amelia didn’t bother to explain any of that but didn’t need to. Burt squeezed her shoulder hard as fear whittled his voice to a whisper.
“Amelia, you’re fired. Make peace with your father then get the fuck out of town.”
THREE
AMELIA
At the funeral, someone asked Amelia what she liked best about working for Burt. Polite small talk often yielded dumb questions and doubly so at funerals. Then again, everyone strangled grief in their own way.
Her answer was just as polite, just as dumb. She liked that he kept a bowl of Jolly Ranchers on his desk. He’d suck on the green ones and confess his regrets, that he’d squandered his best years in the rat race. Criminal defense wasn’t for the faint of heart, and his ticker had been due for another coronary. “The widow maker,” he’d called it.
In the end, it wasn’t a coronary that killed Burton Shaw. The newspaper reported that he hung himself with a blue tie, and it seemed a ghastly oversight that his family buried him in one too. If he cared, his corpse hadn’t let on, and Amelia thought he looked rather peaceful in his casket.
On her way out of the church, she said goodbye to the other interns for perhaps the last time. They hadn’t acknowledged her in the best of times and didn’t acknowledge her then. Law students had no time for farewell fanfare. She was the baby, fresh out of undergrad and twenty-three. If they’d gotten her a cake on her last day in the office, it would’ve read “Good Riddance” in thick, sugary icing.
There’d been no cake and no goodbyes, and Amelia drove home hardly sated on sweet escape. She carried Burt’s mantle now, but secrets were like blood stains. Water might wash them away, but shine the right light and you’d find them there. They never truly scrubbed clean.
In the week since Burt’s death, Amelia had been trying to come clean with hot showers and guided meditations of blooming daisies. Behind closed eyes, the daisies never bloomed. Instead, she saw the fear on his face when he issued his plea.Get the fuck out of town.His death had delayed her departure. If he were alive, he would’ve busted a gut at the irony.
In her childhood bedroom, Amelia slipped out of her funeral attire and into a white cocktail dress. Only Richard Dauer was tacky enough to throw a party on the night of the funeral. He should’ve canceled out of respect for Burt, his business partner and friend.
Then again, Rich didn’t just throw parties. He hosted galas. God forbid anyone confused the two. Nothing offended Rich like downplaying his importance, and the annual gala was important enough that every Portland lawyer, politician, and socialite attended the lavish event held at the Dauer estate.
Amelia plugged in her phone and checked the time. Late as hell. Ever ephemeral, poetry couldn’t wait. She uncapped a pen with her teeth and, in her notebook, captured the turn of phrase niggling in her mind. Someday soon she’d bind her poems together in a proper book and have something to show for herself. Her muse was a flake, though, and fled as her father’s voice swelled with rising heat from down the hall.
“Tell me you weren’t involved in this, that you didn’t know.”
Amelia had never witnessed her father work his magic in a courtroom and didn’t need to. She knew intimately well how he verbally eviscerated and pitied whoever was getting an earful. She snapped her notebook shut and navigated the moving boxes crowding her room. Her father hated how she’d packed. That was about all he said of her leaving—pointing out the nonsense of spatulas boxed with purses, curios with cold medicine.
“Don’t lie to me! A man is already dead.”
Amelia leaned into the hall and held her breath to listen.Who the hell is he talking to?Someone from the office, no doubt. Callum Havick only name-dropped death on work calls.
“What does being a federal prosecutor entail?” Amelia had asked him once.
Death, he’d told her. Big death, to be precise, the kind West Coast crime syndicates deified. They left a body count he wouldn’t reveal, only that it was big, capital “B”. His job was to end those organizations. “Crush them” was the phrase he used. Big death made her father a harder man.
These days, work followed him home like a shadow through the door as he indicted the Velasco syndicate. Smaller and flashier, the Velascos ran the drug and sex trade in Las Vegas. They were a thorn in her father’s side, but nothing more. The Moriartys were his white whale, his obsession.
They possessed ironclad control over their territory from Seattle to San Diego and called themselves a family, but weren’t by bloodline, only ritualistic oaths. A violent brotherhood steeped in dark mythos, they bucked the old-world traditions of the Irish mob but formed traditions all their own. When her father whispered “crush them” with vitriol in his voice and hate in his heart, she knew he meant the Moriartys.
“I won’t make it tonight,” he said, the disappointment too personal for a work call. “Enjoy your little party, Rich.”
