Girl, Stolen by April Henry Page B

other, cutting through the crystalline air. He identified them as the Honda and the pickup, which was almost as bad as if it had been Roy’s Suburban. TJ and Jimbo were back.
    In a few minutes, the two men would be in the house, wanting to ogle Cheyenne, wanting to talk about what they had seen at the shopping mall, wanting to boast about their bravery in retrieving the Honda.
    In a single movement, Griffin pulled his leg back in and jumped, not out the window, but into the tub. With a sound like firecrackers, the shower curtain rings popped as the curtain ripped away under his weight. Underneath the damp, sour-smelling plastic, Cheyenne twisted frantically. He wrapped his arms around her muffled form. While he still could, before the engines cut out and the two men made their way into the house, he risked shouting at her.
    “Listen to me!” He shoved her back against the tiled wall. Her head made a hollow thunk. “Listen! In a minute, those guys will be in here. And if they know you were trying to escape, they’ll tell Roy. And he’ll make our lives a living hell.” He gave her another shake for emphasis. “
Both
our lives. Do you want to get beat up and hog-tied? Do you?”
    The shower curtain slid down from her face. Her lips were pulled back in a snarl. “I know your name. It’s Griffin. And now I know for sure that your dad’s name is Roy. When I tell the police that, they’ll find you in a minute.”
    He grabbed her upper arms, hard, and he didn’t slacken his grip, even when Cheyenne cried out in pain.
    “Do you just
want
to die?” Griffin hissed. “Is that it? You start pointing stuff like 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,