Girl, Stolen Page 3

  Leaving her purse and her cane on the floor, Griffin began to help Cheyenne out of the car. Duke, not used to seeing strangers, exploded in a frenzy of barking. He strained against the length of his chain.

  Instead of shrinking back against Griffin, the way any normal person would, or provoking Duke by trying to run away, Cheyenne stopped and was absolutely still, her head cocked.

  The dog didn’t seem to know what to think. Griffin doubted he had ever met a human who didn’t regard him with fear or kick him with a steel-toed boot. He stopped barking and eyed Cheyenne, a low growl still rumbling in his throat. Roy was staring at Duke, looking back and forth between the dog and Cheyenne. It was the first time Griffin could remember Duke shutting up in the presence of a stranger.

  Basically, Duke didn’t like new things. If a car came down the road, they knew it long before it showed up. And nobody could just walk around their property, not without Duke throwing himself to the end of his chain, barking and growling. The dog allowed only Roy or Griffin to feed him, and he barely tolerated that. Anyone else who came too near risked losing a body part.

  Roy hadn’t bought Duke or gotten him at the pound. Duke had been given to him by a customer who sold a little of this and a little of that. The guy had had a big bloody bandage around his upper arm and he had kept his distance from Duke, not really relaxing until he was back behind the wheel of his truck, with a metal door between him and the dog.

  Duke was just the kind of dog Griffin’s dad had been looking for.

  “Easy, boy,” Griffin said now into the silence, pretending like Duke was acting normally. “She’s with us.” Then he nudged the girl forward. “We need to get you in the house.”

  They started walking. Griffin kept his hand on her arm. “What kind of dog is he?” Cheyenne said as calmly as if they were talking about somebody’s pet.

  “Him? Half pit bull and half mystery meat.”

  All muscle and no heart. In truth, Griffin didn’t know what kind of dog Duke was. He looked like he had been put together from a half dozen different dogs, taking only the ugliest parts. He had the short, sleek fur of a pit bull, brindled brown and gold, but scars from fighting marred the tiger’s-eye pattern. One ear stood up, and the other flopped down. His legs were a little too short, and his tail was all wrong for a junkyard dog – fluffy and curved. And with his one droopy eyelid, Duke looked sly. Like he was plotting something.

  Now, as they walked toward the house, Griffin found himself strangely glad that Cheyenne couldn’t see where he lived. Just having her by his side made him view the whole place the way a stranger might. It had been a long time since a stranger was out here. Roy didn’t like strangers much.

  They were set well back from the road. At the end of the driveway, where Griffin had left the Escalade, was the barn. One of the barn doors stood open. Inside were compressors, welding equipment, an engine lift, and a beat-up flatbed truck. The barn was where they did most of their work, but the overflow spilled out onto the lawn. Only it wasn’t really a lawn, just bare patches alternating with weeds. A bumper lay here; a car door, there. Back by the fence, a minivan, stripped of its wheels, looked more like a crushed shoe box.

  A long time ago, back when Griffin’s dad had had a job, on weekends he also worked as a mechanic, among other things. Then he got fired and one thing led to another, to the point where TJ and Jimbo were employees, if you could call them that. A chop shop sounded kind of organized, like an assembly line of thieves. They were anything but. Take a bunch of guys with no women around, throw in cars and car parts and machinery and tools, and you had the recipe for a real mess.

  People out in these parts didn’t think twice about leaving a rusting pickup up on blocks in the driveway or hauling an old washing machine out to the long grass. Griffin and Roy’s place just looked a little worse than most. But in case the law came looking, most of the operation was out of sight, out of mind. The barn hid their activities from prying eyes, even from the air. And once a vehicle had been stripped of all usable parts, TJ or Jimbo would eventually get out the tractor and bury the skeleton out back.

  West of the barn was the house. It was a few decades newer than the barn, but it had needed painting ever since Griffin could remember. Now the paint curled up in long, rusty red strips.

  Behind the house rose forested hills where nobody noticed if you shot a deer – in season or not. A few hardwoods were sprinkled among the evergreens, brilliant orange and red in the fall but bare and gaunt now. But mostly the forest was rich green pine and Douglas fir. Somebody owned the land, the government or maybe some rich guy back East. Griffin had heard it both ways. But whoever owned it never came around, so Griffin thought of it as his own personal forest.

  Cheyenne caught her toe on a crankshaft and stumbled into Griffin. “Sorry, sorry,” he mumbled. It was hard to look ahead and think what might trip her up. Feeling contrite, he steered her around broken gears, a windshield wiper, and a gas cap.

  They reached the front steps. At the last minute, he remembered to say, “Step up.”

  TURNING SECRETS INTO WEAPONS

  The house smelled funky, like mold, bacon grease, and cigarettes. The floors were bare. Cheyenne could tell by the sound of their footsteps that they were made of wood, not tile or linoleum. She shuffled her feet so that she could hear the echo from the walls. The rooms sounded small.

  She wished her hands were free so she could protect her belly. She kept hitting her shins, knees, and stomach on furniture and other unknown obstacles. Sometimes she could sense things ahead of her, but the way Griffin was hustling her forward, she didn’t have time. Her body was already mapping this house in bruises. If only Phantom were here. Griffin was terrible at guiding her.

  Griffin. She held the name close to her, like a gift. His name was Griffin. There was a kid at her high school named that, a senior. But the name wasn’t that common. Once she got free – and she would get free, she had to – his name might be just the clue the police needed to find them and lock them all up.

  Then Griffin would be the one stumbling with his hands bound behind him.

  And there was Griffin’s dad. What kind of a dad thought it was okay for his kid to be out stealing cars? Cheyenne thought she had heard one of the two other men say his name before they left. Ray? No, Roy, that was it. At least she thought so.

  Cheyenne resolved to keep whatever secrets she could. Maybe, just maybe, she could turn them into weapons. Take her blindness, for example. A lot of blind people weren’t totally blind. Including Cheyenne. Cheyenne could see a little out of her left eye, but Griffin didn’t know that.

  The doctors had called what had happened to her a contracoup injury. The blow had hit her forehead, but the damage had happened when her brain bounced off the back of her skull.

  Even three years later, Cheyenne still remembered snippets of what the doctors had said standing over her hospital bed. Her dad had sat by her and cried. Cheyenne had had a tube down her throat, so she couldn’t talk. There were more tubes in her nose and arms. She had kept her eyes closed and pretended to be asleep while they explained what the injuries were and what they meant.

  “Occipital lobe injury.” “Damage to the visual cortex.” “Wiped out the vascular system in the back of the brain.”

  What it meant was that all of Cheyenne’s central vision – the 20/20 part, what most people thought of as seeing – was gone. Most of her peripheral vision was gone, too. She had been left with only one ten-degree slice on the very left edge of what had been her old field of vision. But the problem with peripheral vision was that it wasn’t 20/20, but 20/200. Legally blind. The way the edges of everyone’s vision were, except they didn’t know it. People saw with clarity only whatever they focused on, not what lay on the sides. So now what a normal person could see at two hundred feet, Cheyenne could see a tiny slice of at twenty feet.

  What she was left with was a blurred sliver of color and shapes that usually was more distracting than helpful. Now, if sh
e wanted to see anything at all, she had to turn her head away from it. It seemed like a metaphor, but Cheyenne didn’t know for what.

  Paying attention to that slice of vision usually only gave Cheyenne a headache and didn’t yield anything useful. A lot of times she just closed her eyes or wore dark glasses. For one thing, it made other people feel more comfortable. They didn’t like to talk to someone who might or might not be looking directly at their eyes.

  The sound of her footsteps changed. The space had narrowed even further. A hall. It was colder here. She felt Griffin lean past her. A door creaked open. He nudged her forward. Once they were inside, Griffin put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around to face him.

  “Sit down. There’s a bed just behind you.”

  A bed. The thought made her nervous. Maybe it made Griffin nervous, too, because his voice was too loud, the way sighted people often were when they talked to her.

  “Can you untie my hands?” She stood with her shoulders curled over and made her voice weak and small. She wanted Griffin to see her like that.

  Cheyenne tried not to think about how she really was weak and small.

  “No,” he said in a tone that said there was no use arguing. “Now, sit down on the bed.”

  Cheyenne shuffled backward until she could feel the mattress against the backs of her knees. She sat. She heard him run out of the room, but before she could react, he was back. Until she felt him touch her ankle, she didn’t know Griffin had crouched down next to her. She let out a little shriek that immediately shamed her.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I just have to tie you to the bed so you don’t take off.” She felt a smooth narrow cord go around one ankle. “I’ll leave you enough slack so that you can lie down.” His hands finished the knot and then tugged at it. “Okay. Now you’re going to have to stay in here for a while. Don’t even think of trying to get away. We’re miles from nowhere. And even if you did manage to get out into the yard, Duke would swallow you whole for supper.”

  Duke, Cheyenne thought. Griffin and Duke and Roy. And doing something with electric saws out in the middle of nowhere. There can only be one place like this.

  “Please, mister,” she said, “can I have a glass of water?” There. Maybe calling Griffin “mister” would make him think she didn’t know his name. Cheyenne gave a little fake cough, but it quickly turned into a real one. She coughed and coughed until her lungs ached. She heard him leave again, then water running, his footsteps hurrying back.

  “Here.” He put his hand on the back of her head and tried to tilt the glass to her lips. Most of it sloshed over her coat. Some of it ran down her neck. Cheyenne gulped, choked, sputtered. A little of it went down her throat, which felt as if it were on fire. Awkwardly, he patted her face with her scarf.

  “You should lie down,” he finally said. She heard him set the glass down. “I’ll be back later.”

  He closed the door. She listened for the sound of his footsteps disappearing down the hall. The front door opened and closed. As soon as it did, she rolled off the bed and began to search. With her leg tethered, she was only able to get a few feet from the bed. But Cheyenne used her free foot. She turned around and fluttered her fingers against anything she could reach with her hands tied behind her back, even bent forward from the waist and literally nosed around what she thought was a desk.

  She didn’t know what she was searching for, and she didn’t know that she would know even if she found it. Cheyenne needed something. Something that would tip the balance. She knew it was too much to hope for a pocketknife, a telephone, a pair of scissors. But even a pen would be good. She might be able to hide a pen and use it later to stab someone. The room was surprisingly neat and empty. Even though they didn’t seem like the kind of people who would have a guest room, maybe that’s what this was.

  The only useful item Cheyenne found was on top of the desk. She ran into it with her nose and nearly tipped it on its side. The glass! She hooked it with her chin and pulled it back to the edge of the desk. Then she turned around and grabbed it with the fingers of her bound hands.

  Whole it was nothing. But broken? She pinched the top edge between the thumb and fingers of her right hand. Without giving herself time to think, she swung her hand in a short, sharp arc that ended when the glass hit the edge of the dresser.

  THIS MIGHT CHANGE THINGS

  Walking back to the barn, Griffin thought that he had never had a girl in his room before, let alone on his bed.

  And it was weird to be able to look right at someone and know that they had no idea that you were looking at them. And you could stare as long as you wanted without ever worrying about being caught. Although if Cheyenne hadn’t told him she was blind, Griffin might not have known. When he spoke, she seemed to look right at him. Maybe her right eye wandered a bit, that was all. She had beautiful eyes, so dark they looked all pupil.

  It was easier to think about her being blind than it was about what to do now. Griffin wished life was like one of the computers at his old school, that he could just make a few clicks and restore things to the way they had been five minutes before he spotted the keys dangling from the Escalade’s ignition. Instead, he had made one impulsive decision after another, and now he was stuck with the results.

  Griffin lit the cigarette Cheyenne had made him take out of his mouth earlier. He could hear the radio playing from inside the barn. The sound floated on the crisp air. For some reason, TJ and Jimbo liked to listen to this right-wing radio talk-show host, some guy who was constantly going off about illegals and health care and homos. Griffin thought it was kind of funny how they were always agreeing with him, saying “damn straight!” when the radio host would probably have happily strung up the two of them himself.

  Iced-over puddles cracked under his feet. It hadn’t snowed yet, but it felt like it might. Griffin liked how the snow shook a white blanket over everything, softening all the edges. Take the remains of one car – a Honda that had been relieved of its wheels, door panels, seats, and stereo – sitting midway between the house and the barn. Covered in snow, it would become a beautiful, abstract sculpture.

  His dad had driven the Escalade into the barn and was now walking around it, eyeing it up and down. The SUV was cherry. It had less than fifteen thousand miles on it. Stealing it should have been a real coup. It would have shown his dad that Griffin was capable of playing in the big leagues – if Cheyenne hadn’t been in the back. But that was a pretty big if.

  “Are you going to replace the VINs?” Griffin asked Roy. A VIN – vehicle identification number – was stamped in several places on all cars. Basically, it was a car’s fingerprint. But you could take the VIN from a salvaged car and put it onto a stolen car, in essence swapping the fingerprint of a wanted car for a legal one.

  Roy ran his thumb over his lip. “I don’t know. It’s probably too hot to risk it. I’m thinking maybe we should just slap some new plates on it for a bit and have you ditch it up in Washington, like the forest or something. You could throw that old moped in the back, and then when you got there put the old plates back on and wipe the whole thing down and use the moped to get back. Leave it someplace it won’t get found until next spring.”

  “We could get fifteen grand for it, easy,” Griffin protested.

  “We could get fifteen years for it, easy.” There was an edge to Roy’s voice. “In Oregon, there’s minimum sentences for kidnapping and no plea-bargaining. If anyone finds out we’re involved, we’ll be in deep for sure.” The anger returned, as Griffin had known it would. “Just what in the hell do you think you’re going to do with her?”

  They had been living on the wrong side of the law for a long time, but it had always been property crimes. Folks who lived around here maybe knew that Roy ran an odd little body shop. But they weren’t the kind to ask questions about why it didn’t advertise in the yellow pages, didn’t have a sign out front, and didn’t accept customers off the street.

  “Look, she can’t even see us,” Gr
iffin said. “So she can’t say what we look like. She doesn’t know our names. She has no idea where we are. We can keep the car and trade plates and VINs. And tonight I’ll drive her out to the middle of nowhere and make her get out. By the time anybody finds her, I’ll be long gone.”

  But Roy had stopped paying attention to Griffin. He was holding up one hand, his eyes narrowed down to slits as he listened to the radio.

  The announcer was saying, “Coming up in the noon news – police are investigating the daring kidnapping of the sixteen-year-old daughter of Nike’s president. She was taken at ten this morning from the Woodlands Experience shopping center.”

  Nike’s president? Griffin thought. Nike had started out as a running shoe company but now made clothes and shoes for every kind of sport or for people who just liked the look of their clothes.

  Roy turned up the radio. In silence, the two of them listened to two commercials, one for a law firm, the other for Burgerville.

  The female announcer came back. She said breathlessly, “Police say sixteen-year-old Cheyenne Wilder, daughter of Nike’s president, Nick Wilder, was kidnapped shortly after ten this morning at the Woodlands Experience shopping center. Her father spoke to reporters a few minutes ago.”

  A man’s voice, strained but professional sounding, said, “My daughter is blind. We lost her mother three years ago in the same accident that took Cheyenne’s sight. And Cheyenne’s also very ill. In fact, she was returning from the doctor’s office when she was kidnapped. If she doesn’t receive treatment immediately, she could die.”

  The announcer cut in. “Police say Cheyenne and her stepmother stopped at the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. The stepmother, Danielle Wilder, went in alone to get it, and that’s when the girl was taken. She is described as five foot two, one hundred five pounds, with brown eyes and long, dark, curly hair. She was last seen wearing a black tracksuit and a silver down coat. The car is a dark green Cadillac Escalade SUV, license number 396CVS. While there are reports of the car being driven at a high rate of speed out of the parking lot, witnesses were unable to give a good description of the person driving the car. An AMBER Alert has been issued. If you spot the vehicle, police ask that you call 9-1-1.” The announcer took a breath. “In other news…” Roy turned down the radio.