Girl, Stolen(48)

“You just found it,” Jimbo said. “Lying in the bushes?”

“Yeah. That’s how I knew I was getting close.”

“Okay, Griff, what really happened? Did you get her back for whacking you upside the head?” Jimbo grinned. “I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” He looked around. “So where did you put her?”

“What are you talking about?”

TJ shook his head. “Never mind,” he said. “It’s nothing you need to know.”

Jimbo looked back at Griffin, a sly grin playing across his face. “Where do you think your mama’s been all these years?”

“Chicago,” Griffin said, but when he said the word out loud, it seemed silly somehow. “With her family.” He had always wondered if she had remarried, maybe had another family. A kid who didn’t have scars.

“I told you, don’t tell him,” TJ said urgently. “He doesn’t need to know.”

Jimbo didn’t pay any attention. “Chicago?” he echoed Griffin sarcastically. “Uh-huh. Eating deep-dish pizza and listening to jazz?”

“Why?” Griffin sat all the way up, ignoring the screaming pain in his leg. “Is she, like, in Portland or something?”

“Portland. That’s a good one,” Jimbo muttered. “Portland.”

TJ sighed. “She’s been out in the back, Griffin, underneath a Honda quarter panel. We buried her out there.”

“What?” Griffin didn’t even feel shock. He just felt – nothing. Like he was falling, and there would never be anything to catch him.

“Roy’s always had a temper, you know that,” Jimbo said, shrugging. “Well, things went crossways between him and Janie when you were in the hospital. She was always ragging on him about you getting burned. And one night he gave her a little shove when she had been getting into his face. She tripped and her head hit the fireplace. He left her there to teach her a lesson, and went to bed. And when he got up, she was stone-cold dead.”

“No,” Griffin said. He shook his head violently, not caring that it might jostle his leg. “No.” Even though he could picture it in his head, even though he could see it more clearly than he could see Jimbo and TJ. He started to stand, needing to get to his feet, and then fell back with a cry. His mother was dead?

“Look at him,” Jimbo said in a flat, unaccented voice, like a hypnotist’s. “If we leave him here, then how long is he going to last? I mean, look at him.” TJ turned and together the two men regarded Griffin as calmly as if he were something they had found by the side of the road. “His skin’s already kind of blue. We’ll just tell Roy we never saw him and let nature take its course. And that way we’ll know he’ll never tell anybody about the money.”

It was like Griffin wasn’t even there.

TJ cocked his head to one side. “But what about Roy?”

“That’s not our problem, dummy,” Jimbo said. “If he wants to come out in the woods and start looking, then so be it. We’ll be long gone by then.”

“You’re just going to let him freeze to death?” TJ seemed to have finally grasped what Jimbo was saying.

“He’s already halfway there,” Jimbo said calmly. “Why do we have to intervene?”

Griffin thought it couldn’t get much worse, but his blood turned to ice at TJ’s next words.

“Jeez, if I had a dog like that, I’d shoot him.” TJ pointed his handgun at Griffin’s midsection.

Griffin froze.

Jimbo pushed the barrel of the gun aside. “Don’t be stupid. You do that, they’ll go looking for who shot him. You leave him just like he is, and it will be clear what happened. He caught his foot in a hole, he broke his ankle, and he died. End of story. Nobody asks any questions, and nobody’s in trouble.”

“I’m not stupid. We’ll bury him out here. I’m tired of you saying I’m stupid.”

Griffin’s hand closed on a fist-sized rock. It was ridiculous – like using a slingshot against a bazooka – but he wasn’t going to die just lying on his back on the icy ground.

“I told you,” TJ repeated when Jimbo didn’t respond. “Don’t call me stupid.”

“Why not? It’s the truth.” Jimbo shrugged. “You are stupid. It’s way too much work to bury him. But that’s just like you – you never think things through.”

Then a gun went off. And Griffin’s heart stopped.

But it was Jimbo who collapsed on the pine needles.

“There,” TJ said. “Who’s stupid now? Who’s stupid now, Jimbo?” He was breathing hard.