“Yes. They did,” he confessed quickly. He came to take the seat next to me. I could feel the heat off his arm. I wondered if he did this on purpose, to confound me.
“I have to leave for a little while,” he told me quietly. “I know that you have a lot of questions, but I meant what I said: the less you know, the safer you are.” He smiled his crooked smile. “Please don’t start any more hunger strikes while I’m gone. Rocco will not feed you, and from the smells that come out of his room I don’t think that he would even notice the smell of a decomposing body.”
His brown eyes were fixed on mine. I wanted to touch him, just a little bit to see if he was real, but I just yawned a long, boorish yawn. He chuckled and he reached out to gently squeeze my shoulder. My heart thudded—he was very real. “It’s late. You need to go to bed.”
I squinted toward the clock in the living room. Though my eyes were burning and my neck felt like it was holding up a bowling ball, I didn’t want to go to bed.
“When will you be back?” I asked, stupidly yawning again.
“I don’t know,” he told me. “Could be a couple days, could be a week. It depends on how things progress. I have a lot of catching up to do.” He winked at me, “I have to finish the business that was interrupted last time I was in the city.”
This time my yawn hit my eyes and made them tear up. This made him chuckle. “Go to bed, Emmy. I promise we’ll talk when I get back.”
He got up and hesitated before extending his hand to help me up. I took it—without comment this time. His hand was warm and it awakened something.
After he had led me to his bedroom door and after there was an awkward pause between us, he turned on his heels and started to walk away.
“What made you think that Daniel was my son?” he asked as I was grabbing the door handle.
I shrugged shyly. “Why else would you be paying Frances?”
Cameron considered this for a moment. “He’s not mine,” he told me, and with my heart still hotly pounding, I closed the bedroom door and pushed Meatball over before crashing into bed, still fully clothed.
There was overwhelming desolation. I had sensed it as soon as my eyes had fluttered open; even before I had noticed the string of light that was poking through the curtain borders and before Meatball started whining at the door to be let out of our cave. Whatever place Cameron had come to occupy inside of me was now being wrenched by distance. Weirdly, I felt him far away, and the only way I could explain this to myself was that he had quickly become the only true tie I had left to my brother. It was the closest I had ever come to knowing about my brother’s other life and I was starved for more. The fact that Bill had been involved in something most likely highly illegal wasn’t all that surprising to me—I was even a little proud of this. How entrenched he had been in these extracurricular activities and what part Cameron had played and might still have been playing in these endeavors, I didn’t know. Part of me wondered if the whole truth—and I was starting to have an idea what that truth might look like—would even perturb me, change how I felt.
My sixth sense was validated when I went outside to let Meatball get to his business and saw that Cameron’s car was gone.
Rocco and Griff were on the front stoop, so I held back the deep sigh that was inflating my chest and resigned to pinching my lips together.
“Ginger!” Griff exclaimed through a cloud of his cigarette smoke. “Where have you been hiding, love?”
The place looked abandoned. The vans and cars were all gone, and there were just a few guards left marching about the property line.
I smiled meekly at Griff while Rocco watched poor Meatball dash for the first patch of green he could find. “What’s Meatball doing here? He should be with the chief.”
I could feel my cheeks picking up color. “I guess he forgot to bring him,” I said, feeling guilty for having forgotten to let him out at a decent time.
“Doubt it,” Rocco muttered. He coughed out smoke signals, his lungs refusing to inhale the toxins from the cigarette he was trying to smoke. He quickly gave up the habit and put it out with barely a puff’s worth gone from it. Griff had already finished his and snuffed it out with his sneaker. He kept his twinkling eyes on me.
“Is everyone gone?” I asked, changing the subject and holding on to a miniscule glimmer of hope that my intuition was flawed.
“Yep,” Rocco confirmed gloomily. “Everyone is gone.”
The sun was blazing. I was cold still. The melancholy had followed me outside and engulfed Rocco too. Griff, who was cheery enough for the both of us, put his hand on Rocco’s head and shook it about to mess up Rocco’s already messy hair. “Aw, cheer up, buddy. You’ll get your chance to run with the big boys soon enough.”
Rocco shoved Griff’s hand away and stared dejectedly ahead.
Griff chuckled. “I don’t know why you want to leave so bad, Kid. This place is great when they’re not here to boss us around.”
“It’s boring here, and I’m not a damn babysitter,” Rocco sulked.
I imagined that he was referring to me as the baby he had to sit for. I didn’t take it personally.
“I can do a lot more than this, but they won’t let me,” Rocco said.
“Tell you what, Kid,” Griff offered, his eyes narrowing, “I’ll teach you how to fight, toughen you up a bit. And I’ll talk to Tiny when he gets back. Maybe he’ll let you tag along with them next time they go out.”
Rocco’s face lit up. “Really? You’ll teach me some stuff? You think they’ll let me go with them?”
“Sure thing.” Griff got up, using his rifle as a stretch bar over his head. He then swung the gun strap over his shoulder and sighed. “I better get back to my spot before another fly escapes through the tree line.” There was a wink at my expense and he walked away.
Rocco went into the house, and I sat on the stoop to soak in some warmth. Griff hadn’t taken two steps before I heard the crush of the gravel stop. “What are you up to today?” he asked me.
I opened my eyes and shrugged in response. My options were looking pretty bleak.
Griff had a mischievous smile. “Wanna help me play hooky?”
I couldn’t help but smile back.
He strolled back and grabbed my hand, pulling me up like a string puppet.
“Won’t you get in trouble if you don’t go back to work?” I asked as we made our way down the driveway.
Griff exaggeratingly scanned the landscape around us. “Tiny’s gone. Spider’s gone. There’s no one here to tell me what to do.”
This made me laugh. “Couldn’t they just call Tiny to get you in trouble?” I observed, my eyes on the other guards who were glowering in our direction.
“Have you seen any phones around here? Because I haven’t. All of our stuff like our cell phones were confiscated before we got here.”
“What if something happens, like someone gets hurt, or there’s some kind of emergency?” I was also assuming that 911 was an option in the middle of nowhere.
“Look at the guys with the big guns,” he said, pointing at one of the guards. “Do you think anyone else can just waltz in here? If someone gets hurt here, they stay hurt … or they disappear.”
I could feel the blood draining from my face.
“Don’t worry,” he said forcing a smile. “I won’t let anything happen to you.” Griff put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed me in a one-armed crushing hug.
We kept walking down the driveway until we reached the tree line where the driveway became the gravel road that continued into the forest—the same road that Rocco and I had driven through when we first got to the farm. There were two burly men with machine guns standing on each side of the perimeter. They looked like twins, wearing identical black T-shirts and jeans and mirrored sunglasses.
As we attempted to walk past them, both men swiftly approached us and blocked our way.
“The girl doesn’t leave the property,” said the bigger of the two men.
“C’mon, man! We’re not going far. I won’t let anything happen to her. I’ve got my gun if something happens,” said Griff.
“Sorry, Griff. Chief’s orders. The girl stays here.”
“No one’s around. I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.” Griff was thickly laying down the charm.
The man’s tone became harsh. “Listen, man, if you don’t want to follow rules and mess with the girl after you were told not to, that’s your funeral. But I ain’t gonna get shot for you. Now, you can turn around and we’ll forget all about this, or you can keep going and I will make this your funeral.”
I held my breath as Griff stood facing the two men in a standoff while he considered his next move. I felt like a dwarf among giants.
He turned back to me, slightly smiling. “I guess we’re not gonna get anywhere here.” He hooked my arm around his and led me away.
We walked along the property line, passing armed guards every once in a while. None spoke to either Griff or me. Griff remained silent, sulking. When I was sure we were out of earshot from any of the guards, I asked, “Who ordered you to not mess with me?”
“Spider, who else?” he said.
I couldn’t imagine why Spider would care who I hung out with. “Why?”
“Who knows why these thugs do anything. I don’t think they know themselves half the time.”
I glanced around. “What’s out there? I mean, we’re in the middle of nowhere. What could be so dangerous out on the road that we can’t take a walk?”
Griff cackled. “You’re right, there’s nothing out there. It’s not so much them wanting to prevent you from getting hurt out there. It’s more about them wanting to keep you in here.”
“Why?” I asked again.
“Beats me,” Griff shrugged. “One thing I do know though, eventually everything leads to money for them. So whatever their reasons for keeping you here alive it probably has something to do with money.”
A shiver went down the back of my legs.
“Look around you, Ginger,” he said. “The big house in the middle of nowhere, the brutes with the guns. This isn’t a vacation, and these guys are definitely not tour guides. They’re crooks. All of them. Except for the kid, maybe—I think that Kid’s too young to understand, but he’ll eventually become like the rest of them. He has no chance of ever getting out.” A light seemed to go off in Griff’s head. “C’mon. I have to show you something.”
We quickened our walk to an almost jog and made our way back up the driveway. We passed the front of the house and followed the driveway down, going the opposite direction to where the driveway bent to the right. As we neared a bunch of bushes, I found that the driveway kept going through the trees and down a small hill. At the bottom, there was a large garage with another guard pacing back and forth by the tree line.
“What’s this?” I asked as we approached.
“This is where the no-rankers sleep.” He was proud of this.
We walked through the side door and into the garage.
The garage was more like a showroom. Parked side by side was an array of cars. I had no idea what kind of cars they were, but they looked really shiny. As we walked past each car, Griff rhymed off with passion the various car brands and explained in great detail each car’s particularities; make, model, horsepower, torque, engine. It was all beyond my understanding, but it sounded good.
I was told that the car parked nearest to the door was a silver Ferrari; it gleamed under the fluorescent lights that hung above it. Next to it was a lime green Lamborghini, followed by a red Porsche, a burgundy Rolls-Royce, a black Aston Martin and a canary yellow Maserati—a rainbow of expensive cars.
In some ways, Griff reminded me of my brother. Bill had also been a car aficionado. As a teenager, the walls of his bedroom had been plastered with pictures of cars that he had ripped from magazines. Of course, he also had pictures of half-naked women—though these women were usually straddling a car.
We reached the end of the showroom and walked through a doorway. Hanging off nails on the wall were masses of vanity plates from all states and even a few from Canada and Mexico.
“This is what I mean. These guys are real good at hiding, and I’d venture a bet that none of those cars were bought off a car lot,” Griff said.
Something hanging off the wall caught my attention. I moved in closer.
Stuffed in a clear plastic bag that hung off one of the nails were hundreds of driver identity cards. I was staggered. I immediately recognized the grinning face that was on the ID that was on top of the stack. It was Bill’s face, though the ID indicated that the man in the picture was ‘Buzz Killington’ from Arkansas. I pulled the bag off the nail and unzipped it. There were more drivers’ licenses that had my brother’s face. I also found cards from other states and countries with Cameron, Spider, and Carly’s pictures on them. Like my brother’s cards, they had different names attached to the faces.
I pulled one of Bill’s cards out of the bag and struggled to swallow.
There were few photos of my brother. The last picture I had seen was one taken when he was fourteen years old; one of those fake school pictures—awkward smile, neatly gelled hair, green and yellow cardigan worn only once for five seconds. This picture was stacked with the rest of the family stuff that my father strategically kept on one shelf in his office behind his desk—the clients could see the pretense of a family man, but my father’s back was turned away from the shelf.
The worst thing about this was that I couldn’t remember what Bill looked like as a grownup. In my mind he had been forever fourteen. Now I had a picture of my brother … as a man. He looked more tired as an adult, but at least he hadn’t lost his curly blond locks.
Griff looked over my shoulder at the ID in my hands. “I wonder who that is? I haven’t seen him around here.” He stepped away and added in passing, “A thug like the rest of them, I’m sure.”
I should have, could have, defended my brother, but there was a water balloon in my throat threatening to explode at any second. And deep down, I knew that Griff was probably right.
Griff made his way to the back of the room and disappeared behind another wall where a stairwell led to a second story. I stuffed Bill’s—or rather Buzz Killington’s—driver’s license in my pocket, put the plastic bag back on the nail, and hurried after Griff, who had already climbed up the stairs and waited for me at the top on the second story. As I climbed up to meet him, he smiled and, with a finger to his lips, motioned me to be quiet.
The second story was one big open space, covering the whole length of the garage. The space was dim, with curtains of black garbage bags and bedsheets covering up the six-foot windows that flanked both of the elongated sides of the floor space. About a dozen cots were lined up in rows, one row on each side of the room. Four of the cots were occupied by sleeping men, one of whom I recognized as a night guard. The sound of snoring and heavy breathing eerily echoed off the walls.
We tiptoed over to one of the cots in the middle of the room.
“This one is mine,” he whispered, color appearing on his cheeks.
Griff had things strewn everywhere under and around his cot. I sat on the empty cot that was next to Griff’s bed while he rummaged under his bed, and I noticed a box of magazines on the floor. The one at the top was called Cage Fighters Weekly with a caption in large red letters that read, “Griffin ‘the Grappler’ Conan: Best Pound-for-Pound Fighter in the World?” Under the caption was a picture of a black-eyed, bruise-faced, threatening-looking Griff, shot from the waist up. He had his gloved fists up and muscles seemed to bulge out of every part of his body, including his neck, which looked like it was the size of parking meter. One by one I picked up the other magazines that were stacked under it, most of which had Griff pictured on the front, in similar stances as the first magazine, or with him holding golden belts.
Griff finally reappeared from under his bed, pulling out fighting gloves similar to the ones that he had been pictured wit
h on the covers.
“This is you,” I murmured, holding one of the magazines up. Griff sat next to me on the bed and peered at the magazine in my hands.
“Yeah. It was me,” he said somberly. “It’ll be me again once I get back on my feet.”
“Don’t you need to be out there if you want to get back on your feet?”
Griff pressed his lips together. “There are a bunch of dodgy people who are waiting for me to pay them. I have to pay off all the bad debt before I can do anything else—otherwise I’ll turn up dead before I ever get a chance to hit the gym.”
“Don’t fighters make a lot of money, especially those who win?” I asked, tapping on the cover of the magazine where he was holding up a title belt.
“They do and I definitely did,” he told me. “But I also made a lot of stupid mistakes while I was on top. I got too used to people serving me wherever I went. You should have seen it, Ginger. I could walk into any hotel, and they’d put me and my buddies up in the executive suite right away. Gambling. Unlimited booze. Chicks. Whatever I asked for. I thought that I could get away with anything and that the money would never run out. That was true, for a while,” he said, his eyes distant. “I was spending more time partying and forgot all about fighting … especially training for fights. I started showing up in the ring unfit and hung over. Then I started borrowing money to keep up with the lifestyle. I lost all of it.”
He took the magazine from my hands, throwing it on top of the others and kicking the box back under the bed. He lifted his head and strained a smile. “Working for these crooks will get me the money I need to pay off what I owe. At least no one can come find me here, and I can stay alive long enough to get the dough.”
We got up and tiptoed past the sleeping guards, making our way back downstairs and outside in the bright sunlight. We walked up to the house and into the kitchen. Rocco was sitting at the table, halfway through a loaf of bread and jar of peanut butter. I fixed some lunch for Griff and me while Griff handed the black gloves that he had dug out from under his bed over to a thrilled Rocco. Rocco tried the gloves on, but they were one size too big.