that out to my dad, he’s not going to feel like letting you go.”
Inside, he was shaking. Every second it seemed like all the choices got worse and worse. And there was no way to undo what he had done. If only he had spent two seconds checking in the backseat! A two-second mistake was going to destroy his life. Cheyenne was right, Griffin knew. If Roy let her go, the police would find them without too much trouble. And then what?
Suddenly, she went slack. “All right,” she said, her voice low. “Help me get out of here and then you can tie me back up. Quick.”
He hustled her out of the bathroom — closing the door on the tattletale ripped shower curtain — and then back into his room. He pulled the cord that was tied around her ankle out of her sock and quickly looped it around the bedpost. What about her hands? He had cut off the shoelaces, and the remainder of the cord he had used to tie her ankle was out on the kitchen counter. Griffin had taken two steps to get it when he heard the front door open.
He barely had time to turn back and hiss, “Quick — put your hands behind your back!” before TJ and Jimbo were thumping down the hall.
“You should’ve seen it!” Jimbo crowed. He had added a black down jacket over his coat. Griffin wondered how he had been able to fit behind the steering wheel. “That place was crawling with cops. And they had two of those portable news vans there with reporters doing stand-ups. One was that hot redhead on Channel Three. And they had yellow crime-scene tape up around a bunch of parking spaces — must have been where the Escalade was parked.”
“Where’s R—” TJ started, then said, “Ow!” when Jimbo elbowed him. “Why’d you do that?” he protested.
“No names, dummy.” Jimbo nodded in Cheyenne’s direction. “No names and she’ll never know who we are.”
It infuriated Griffin that Jimbo was capable of thinking further ahead than he had been. “He’s gone to make some phone calls,” Griffin said. He risked a glance at Cheyenne. She was sitting with her back against the headboard, her arms tucked behind her, as if they were still lashed together. Every time someone spoke, her head swiveled in that direction. He wondered if that was left over from being able to see, or if it helped her hear better.
“There was this other lady there, too, and people were lining up to interview her. Must have been your mama,” Jimbo said to Cheyenne.
“Her stepmom.” Griffin found himself correcting him.
“Did her real mom get herself traded in for a better model?” TJ said. “’Cause that Nike president’s got himself a nice piece of ass.”
“Don’t talk like that around her,” Griffin said sharply. He could see how stiffly Cheyenne held herself.
Jimbo and TJ responded at the same time with a mocking “ooh!”
“How much money do you think he’ll want to spend to get his own daughter back?” Jimbo said. “A million?” Griffin heard the yearning in his voice.
TJ reached out to finger Cheyenne’s curls. “A pretty thing like you ought to go for a lot.”
Cheyenne’s lips curled back. She jerked her head away from TJ. But when she did, she lost her balance and had to put out one hand to stop from tipping over. A hand that was obviously not tied to anything at all.
“Well, well, well, what have we here?” Jimbo said. “How come you don’t have her tied up?”
ONE WAY TO DESCRIBE STEALING
Something dark loomed in the corner of Cheyenne’s vision as the gross one taunted her. When she instinctively pulled back, her hand flew up, revealing that she was no longer tied up. She froze. What excuse would Griffin give? Five minutes earlier, she had been ready to scratch his eyes out. Now he seemed like the only buffer between her and these men who treated her like she didn’t have ears to hear what they said.
Griffin sounded unhurried, unworried. “She had to go to the bathroom. I was just getting ready to tie her back up when you guys came home.”
“Are you sure that’s all that’s been happening?” the gross guy said. “I mean, maybe you’re just taking advantage of the fact that you finally got a girl in your bed.”
So this was Griffin’s room, not a guest room. Cheyenne was surprised.
“Better not handle the merchandise,” the other man said. He seemed smarter, but not by much. “Remember, you break it, you bought it.”
Wanting to keep the focus away from her untied wrists, Cheyenne put the hand that was no longer behind her back in her pocket. She barely missed cutting herself on the piece of glass she had hidden there earlier. It was nestled in the kibble that always, since she had gotten Phantom, half filled her pockets. (Cheyenne had learned the hard way to check before she put her clothes in the washer.) The kibble was used for rewards, as well as for what the guide dog school had called counter-conditioning. If Phantom was distracted, giving him a piece of kibble was one sure way to get his attention back on her.
“Bring me the twine,” the second man said. “Let somebody who knows what he’s doing tie her up.”
The gross one sniggered.
For a minute, Cheyenne wondered if she could use the glass to hold them all at bay. And then what? She couldn’t come up with a scenario that lasted for more than a few seconds. It probably wasn’t even possible to cut someone with a broken piece of glass without cutting yourself at the same time.
“I’ve got things under control,” Griffin said. “And it’s not like she’s some huge flight risk. She’s blind, remember? You guys should go out and finish working on that Toyota.”
Nobody moved. There wasn’t a sound. She wished she knew what was happening. In the silence, she could feel the tension stretching out between Griffin and the two men.
Then the second man laughed. “You just think you got things under control.” But there was a note in his tone, as if he were trying to save face, trying to make Griffin think this was his decision, not Griffin’s.
Cheyenne and Griffin were both silent until they heard the front door open and close. Then she said, “Thanks. I don’t like them.”
“You’re not the only one.”
“Who are they?” Cheyenne made a conscious effort to look toward his face. People got nervous if you didn’t look at them, but for her, the face was no longer important. It was just the place the voice came from.
“Guys who work for my dad.”
“Doing what, exactly?”
Griffin hesitated for so long she wondered if he was even going to answer. Finally, he said, “We sell cars and car parts for cheaper. Say you want to buy a seat for a Honda Civic. If you get it from the dealer, it’ll cost you three thousand. Buy it off us, it’s a lot cheaper. A lot.”
“So why is it so much cheaper?” Now that the two men were gone, Cheyenne’s body was reminding her how sick she was. She had used up all her energy thinking about how to escape, then deciding it would be better to try to find a phone once the house was empty, and then struggling with Griffin. “Do you guys run a wrecking yard or something?”
“Or something.” Griffin sighed and settled down on the end of the bed. Cheyenne pulled her feet farther back so that she wouldn’t touch him. “It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that.” He took a deep breath. “One of the things we do is buy junker cars at auction. Stuff that the insurance company has declared a total loss.”
“And you use them for parts?”
“Mostly we just use a couple of the parts, and that’s it. Just the ones with the VIN on them.”
“What’s a VIN?”
“The vehicle identification number. Each car has a different one. There’s a tiny one on every dashboard that you can see through the windshield, but they put them in a few other places, too. The cops can check a VIN to see if a car has been stolen. So once we buy a junker, then we go looking for a second car that’s the exact same year, make, and model, only
