Survival Clause, стр. 78
“Your gramma’s fine. Gone to the homeless shelter with Mrs. Mullinax, her husband said.”
Curtis nodded. “Mondays and Thursdays. She OK? You sure?”
“I’m not sure,” Rafe said, “I haven’t talked to her, but I have no reason to think she’s not OK. That’s not why we’re here.”
“Why’re you here? Other than looking for my granddad?”
Rafe hesitated. And seemed to decide that he might as well put the cards on the table. “We have a missing federal agent. An FBI agent who came here from Memphis to work with us on a case. She was out at the Mullinax place this morning, and now she’s gone, and we can’t find her.”
“You think my granddad saw her?” Curtis sounded intrigued rather than worried, at least so far.
“Something like that,” Rafe said.
Curtis must have heard something in his voice, or maybe seen it on his face. I don’t know what; Rafe had his back to me. But Curtis’s face hardened, and I saw his hands curl into fists. “You think he took her. That’s why you’re here. Isn’t it?”
Rafe hesitated, and it was hard to blame him. “We think he might know something. If he isn’t involved, he might have seen her.”
Curtis shook his head. “You think he took her. Just tell me the truth. That’s what you think. Isn’t it?”
“We think it’s possible,” Rafe said.
It was Curtis’s turn to hesitate. For just a second before he said, “I lied, OK? You’re the cops, and I didn’t know what you wanted, so I lied.”
“About what?”
Curtis gazed up at him. “That I hadn’t seen him since he left this morning. I did. He was here. About thirty minutes ago. Just long enough to walk in and see that I was home.”
“You didn’t expect him back?”
“I didn’t not expect him back. That’s not the point, OK? He was here. He walked in, looking to see if the house was empty, and when it wasn’t, he left again.”
“Did he tell you where he was going?”
“He said he was gonna go fishing,” Curtis said, with a glance up at the sky, where the sun was burning down on us. “Like I’d believe anybody’d go fishing in weather like this.”
“Where’d he go, then?” Grimaldi wanted to know.
Curtis looked at her. “My boss,” Rafe told him.
Curtis gave Rafe a look, gave Grimaldi another one, and shrugged. “Not sure. Coulda been anywhere.”
“Surely you must have some idea. If he had an unconscious woman in the trunk of his car…”
“He drives an old pickup truck,” Curtis said.
“And he wanted to take her somewhere where he could…” Grimaldi trailed off, probably not quite sure how to frame the rest of the sentence for a seventeen year old boy.
“Don’t sweat it,” Curtis told her. “I’m not stupid. I watch TV. I’ve seen the kinds of skin magazines he keeps in the garage.”
Ewww.
“I’ll take you to a place where he might be. Although I guess maybe I oughta get a pair of shoes first.”
He turned around, brushed past Rafe and into the house.
“Think he’s going to call his grandfather?” Grimaldi asked, softly.
Rafe hesitated. “Nothing we can do about it if he is. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
Grimaldi nodded. Curtis came back outside less than a minute later, with a pair of Nike’s on his feet and a set of keys in his hand. He might have had time to make a call or send a message, but maybe not.
“It’s gonna be tight,” Rafe told him as they came toward the car. “You’ll have to share the back seat with Savannah and the baby.”
“I’ll sit in the back.” Curtis moved to the rear of the car, yanked up the hatch and crawled into the cargo space in the back of the SUV.
Grimaldi shrugged. I guess the fact that he wouldn’t be strapped in worried her less at the moment than getting to where we were going. “Take the wheel,” she told Rafe. “And you—” she glanced into the back at Curtis, “find something to hold onto.”
Twenty seconds later we took off like rocket down the driveway and took the turn onto the road on two wheels. Curtis let out a whoop as he tumbled sideways like an overturned beetle, but it sounded more like excitement than pain.
“Told you,” Grimaldi said over her shoulder. She was holding onto the door handle for all she was worth.
I’m used to the way Rafe drives—even if he only rarely drives like this—so I just swayed back and forth with the motion of the car. “You’re taking this pretty calmly,” I told Curtis, after he had gotten himself back into an upright position and was kneeling on the floor of the car with his arms braced on the back of the seat.
He gave me a sideways look. “He’s always been a bastard.”
It’s a long way from bastard to serial killer and rapist, but OK. “Rafe’s grandfather wasn’t much to write home about, either. He shot Rafe’s dad because he didn’t want his daughter involved with a black man.”
“My granddad wasn’t big on my dad, either,” Curtis said. “He never shot him, though. Just told him he couldn’t come around after my mom died and dad got outta prison.”
“That must have been hard,” I said.
Curtis shrugged. “My gramma, she’s all right. She took care of Christie and me. She didn’t let granddad beat on us too bad.”
Not exactly a ringing endorsement. “I think Rafe’s mother probably tried. But she was just a girl herself, when he was born. Old Jim beat her, too.”
“If we can stop talking about that for a second,” Rafe interrupted from the front seat, and his eyes met mine in the mirror, “mind telling me where we’re going, Curtis?”
“Not sure,” Curtis said. “He has a fishing hole down on the Duck River. He coulda gone there.”
“I don’t think he’s fishing,”