When Griffin woke up, he didn’t know where he was. He was on the wrong side of the bed, in a sleeping bag, with someone breathing right next to him.
And then it all came back to him in a rush.
He levered himself on one elbow. Cheyenne’s breathing hitched, but then straightened out again. Her face was still pale, except for the flush across her cheeks, but she didn’t look as bad as she had the night before. He wondered if this was how married people felt when one of them woke up and the other one was still asleep. Her mouth was soft and vulnerable. Underneath her pale lids, her eyes moved back and forth. What was she seeing in her dreams?
Even though he had gotten just a few hours of sleep, Griffin was now wide awake. He managed to get off the bed with a minimum of rustling. He padded out into the kitchen, the floor icy under his bare feet. The woodstove was going in the living room, but the heat only went so far.
Griffin was surprised to find Roy, awake, leaning against the counter, drinking coffee. Next to him, the phone lay on the counter. Or what was left of the phone. Someone had taken a hammer to it. Now it was shards of plastic and colorful wires. Griffin was surprised he hadn’t heard his dad whaling on it the night before. He poked at it.
“What happened to the phone?”
Roy shrugged. “Insurance. I don’t want her getting loose and calling anyone. Now she can’t.” His eyes were bloodshot and his hands shaky.
Griffin wondered why his dad hadn’t just unplugged it and stuck it on a high shelf, but there was no use asking. “What if I need to call someone?”
“You can use that mobile I got.” He looked over Griffin’s shoulder. “Is she sleeping?”
“Yeah. In the middle of the night, she seemed like she was running a fever. I went through the stuff in the bathroom and found an old prescription of Mom’s to give her.”
At the mention of the bathroom, Griffin had been sure his dad would remember to ask what had happened to the shower curtain. Instead, he just looked startled. “Your mom’s? Really?”
His dad never talked about his mom anymore. But after Griffin came home from the hospital, he would sometimes find his dad crying and holding something that used to belong to his mom — a bracelet or a sweater. She had left a lot of stuff behind. They had had a big fight about what had happened to Griffin. It must have been the last straw, because she had taken off with her purse and her car and some pictures of Griffin and that was it. Gone so good that she never looked back.
“Mom had the prescription filled a few months before she left, but she only took about half the pills.”
Roy nodded and lifted the cup of coffee to his lips. Griffin couldn’t read the expression on his face.
They heard the front door open and then the sounds of TJ and Jimbo coming in.
“What’s the word?” Jimbo asked when he walked into the kitchen. Today he was wearing an extra-long stocking cap and padded ski pants. “Have you talked to them?”
“I got off the phone with the dad about twenty minutes ago. He says they can’t raise that kind of money. Not in cash. Not that fast.”
“I’ll bet we can speed things up,” Jimbo said. “Let’s send him a finger.”
Griffin couldn’t tell if he was joking.
“Or an ear,” TJ added. He definitely wasn’t joking.
To Griffin’s intense relief, Roy shook his head. “We do that and they’ll decide she might be dead already and hunt us down with guns blazing. We start chopping off body parts and they’ll figure they’ve got nothing left to lose.”
“Did they say how much they could give us?” Griffin asked. He kept his voice soft, hoping to influence the others to talk more quietly. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like for Cheyenne if she woke up and heard them talking about lopping off her fingers or ears.
“A million.” Setting down his coffee cup, Roy scrubbed his face with open palms. “I told him I would call him back.” His voice was glum, even though a few days ago he would have been over the moon about the prospect of getting a million dollars.
“That’s still a lot,” Griffin said. “That’s like $250,000 apiece.”
Roy shook his head. “You’re still a minor, and you still live under my roof. I’m going to watch after your share.”
TJ and Jimbo exchanged a look. “Do you really think that’s fair?” Jimbo asked. “You get a cool half million, and we get only half of that?”
Roy straightened up, and Jimbo and TJ automatically took a step back.
“Hey, I’m the one who is taking all the risks here. She’s on my property, and it’s my voice that’s getting tape-recorded every time I call. And I’m the one figuring out the logistics.”
“Logistics?” TJ echoed. It was clear the word wasn’t quite familiar.
“The plans. When I call back, I’ll tell the dad to be ready to make the drop at three this morning. Then, at three, I’ll tell him to drive someplace. But when he gets there, we’ll tell him to take another phone we’ll have waiting and ditch his first one. I’ll have one of you there watching to make sure he does leave his phone. The new phone will have outgoing calls disabled. So he won’t be able to tip anyone off. And then I’ll call him on the new phone and tell him to make the drop at Ironwood Road.” Ironwood Road was a long stretch that linked together two other equally desolate roads. It was quiet no matter what time of the day or night it was. At three in the morning in the middle of winter, it would be dead. “And I’ll have one of you watching Ironwood Road before he even knows that’s the drop site. Then we’ll grab the money and leave the bag in case they put something in it, like a tracer or those exploding dye packs they use on bank robbers. Then we’ll come back here and split up the money and go our separate ways.”
Jimbo let out a whistle. “Sounds slick.”
Griffin didn’t care about the money. The idea of it didn’t even seem real. “After we get the money, then what?”
“I think we should all get out of town,” Roy said. “I know I am. I’m headed down to the airport to get on the first flight I can find to someplace warm where they put an umbrella in your drink.”
“Wait, we won’t be working here no more?” TJ looked confused.
“You won’t need to work, dummy.” Jimbo shook his head. “That’s the whole point. You won’t need to work for years and years. If we go down to someplace where they don’t ever see tourists and haven’t jacked up their prices, we’ll never run out of money.”
Griffin couldn’t believe they seemed to have forgotten the girl who was in the middle of all this. “But what about Cheyenne?”
Roy’s face twisted. “What about her?”
“We’ll let her go, right? We’ve never used our names. And of course she has no idea what we look like.” Griffin made his voice as certain as he could. Hearing Cheyenne say, “I know your name. It’s Griffin. And now I know for sure your dad’s name is Roy. When I tell the police that, they’ll find you in a minute.” Griffin didn’t know how to make things right. He just knew that he couldn’t stand by and let something bad happen to Cheyenne.
Roy looked skeptical. “Sooner or later, she’ll tell them something that will let them know exactly where we are.”
Griffin remembered his earlier conversation with Cheyenne. “Not if we’re careful, she won’t. For one thing, she’s the daughter of Nike’s president. Do you know how many people would want a piece of that pie? When you call back, you can say something to make them think it’s all about Nike. They’ll spend years tracking down every person who’s protested against them or worked there. And they’ll never find us. Because they won’t realize it was random. That it didn’t have anything to do with Nike at all.”
Roy thought about this for a while. The other three were silent, watching him.
“On the way to the airport we can slip up into Washington and drop her off along a logging road or something,” Griffin said. “Point her in the right direction and tell her to start walking. And by the time somebody finds her, we’ll be on the beach. With our mai tais.”
“Of course,” Roy said. Griffin was pretty sure Roy had never said “of course” before in his life.
At least not when he meant it.