Girl, Stolen

A THOUSAND THINGS WRONG


Cheyenne heard the car door open. She didn’t move from where she lay curled on the backseat, her head resting on her bent arm. Despite the blanket that covered her, Cheyenne was shivering.

She had begged her stepmom to leave the keys in the car so she could turn on the heat if she got cold. After some back-and-forthing, Danielle had agreed. That had only been five minutes ago, and here she was, already back. Maybe the doctor had phoned in the prescription and Danielle hadn’t had to wait for it to be filled.

Now the door slammed closed, the SUV rocking a little as weight settled into the driver’s seat. The engine started. The emergency brake clunked as it was released. The car jerked into reverse.

It was a thousand little things that told Cheyenne something was wrong. Even the way the door closed hadn’t sounded right. Too fast and too hard for Danielle. The breathing was all wrong too, speeded up and harsh. Cheyenne sniffed. The smell of cigarettes. But Danielle didn’t smoke and, as a nurse, couldn’t stand anyone who did.

There was no way the person driving the car was her stepmom.

But why would someone else have gotten in the car? It was a Cadillac Escalade, so it wasn’t likely someone had just gotten confused and thought it was their car.

Then she remembered the keys. Somebody was stealing the car!

And Cheyenne was pretty sure they didn’t know she was in it.

She froze, wondering how much the blanket covered her. She couldn’t feel it on the top of her head.

Cheyenne felt like a mouse she had seen in the kitchen one time when she turned on the light before school. Caught in the middle of the floor, it had stood stock-still. Like maybe she wouldn’t notice it if it didn’t move.

But it hadn’t worked for the mouse, and now it didn’t work for Cheyenne. She must have made some small sound. Or maybe the thief had looked back to see if someone was following and then realized what the shape was underneath the blanket.

A swear word. A guy’s voice. She had already halfway known that it was a guy, the way she sometimes just knew things now.

“Who the hell are you?” His voice broke in surprise.

“What are you doing in Danielle’s car?”

Their words collided and tangled. Both of them speaking too fast, almost yelling.

Sitting up, she scrambled back against the door, the one farthest from him. “Stop our car and get out!”

“No!” he shouted back. The engine surged as he drove faster.

Cheyenne realized she was being kidnapped.

But she couldn’t see the guy who was kidnapping her or where they were going.

Because for the last three years, Cheyenne had been blind.





DRAWING BLOOD


The girl in the backseat wouldn’t stop yelling. She had black hair and huge brown eyes, wide with fright. Maybe she was pretty. Griffin didn’t know. All he knew was that right now she was a big problem. Even though he was freaking out, he forced himself to think. Thank God no one was nearby.

If he stopped and let her out, the way she kept demanding, this girl would run screaming to the first person she saw. In ten minutes or less, he would be arrested. And then the cops would naturally drive out to their house, and everything would unravel. All of them in jail. Probably for a long time.

Instead of slowing down, Griffin accelerated as he turned out of the far end of the parking lot. It threw the girl off balance. He winced as her head clunked against the window, but still he kept going. He was acting on pure instinct now. And instinct told him to get as far away as possible. Growing up around Roy, you got pretty good at running. Running and hiding.

Griffin caught a break, hitting a gap in traffic. He drove as fast as he could across the freeway overpass. The Escalade leaped forward when he pressed the accelerator, hitting sixty-five with no sign of strain.

With the way today was going, the cops would pull him over for speeding. Griffin needed time to think this through, but there was no way he could afford to take it. He figured he had to put as much distance as he could between whoever had been driving this car and the girl in the backseat, who must belong to them. To get away from any witnesses who might be calling 9-1-1 on their mobiles right now. Cutting in front of a red Honda, he took the next corner on two wheels, getting off the main road.

He pounded the side of his head in frustration. How could he have been so stupid as to not notice that there was someone in the car? Griffin could hear Roy shouting at him, almost as real as the girl in the backseat, the girl who wouldn’t stop yelling.

He hadn’t been able to see past the keys dangling in the ignition. It was that simple, and that senseless. Griffin had been walking down the long rows of vehicles, looking like any other stressed-out Christmas shopper who couldn’t find his car. Instead, he was looking for packages he could boost. The packages came from the big, boxy stores that surrounded the acres and acres of the shopping center’s parking lot. (The whole place was so big that most people left one store, got in their cars, and drove the equivalent of three blocks to the next store.)