Nine Minutes

by Beth Flynn

  “Grizz, please stop this. I’m asking you to stop it for me.”

  Grizz nodded at the guy he was talking to. I recognized him now. His name was Chico. I’d noticed him at the motel once or twice before. He didn’t wear a gang jacket.

  “Miguel, end it now,” Chico said to one of the guys sitting in a lawn chair. Grizz and Chico went back to their conversation.

  Thank God, I thought, willing my hands to stop shaking. Before I could thank him, I watched the man called Miguel walk over to the girl who was lying on the ground and sobbing. I jumped. Miguel then walked over to the young man who had just been beaten and was also lying on the ground.

  His way of ending it was by putting a bullet into each of their heads. I’d just witnessed my first executions.

  ____________

  It happened so quickly I couldn’t even react. I was in shock but knew better than to show any hysterics to Grizz in front of these people.

  I walked quickly back to number four and shut the door behind me. I leaned against it and was taking deep breaths and battling nausea when it opened and I fell backwards into Grizz’s arms. He caught me and took me inside.

  “You shouldn’t have come out.”

  “Really? Really Grizz? What the heck was that? You were just standing there while a guy was being tortured and his girlfriend was raped?” I struggled to control my rising voice. “How could you let that happen?”

  “Wasn’t my problem to deal with, Kit.”

  “This is your place, Grizz. These are your people.”

  “Chico and his crew aren’t my people. Miguel is his guy. They were setting up a delivery. Those kids were collateral damage. Not my problem. Not yours, either.” He stepped past me to the couch and sat down.

  I followed, hands on my hips. “So what you’re basically telling me is you had no problem blinding Monster to save a kitten, but you wouldn’t stop the execution of two innocents? Grizz.” I paused for effect, my heart pounding. “You nodded your head and two people were executed.”

  “Kit, they weren’t mine to deal with,” he said and flipped on the TV. “You asked me to end it. Not my problem how he chose to do it. You don’t like what goes on out there, then stay inside. Got it?”

  I couldn’t believe it. I thought I’d seen a different Grizz. A sympathetic Grizz who rescued kittens and listened to my kind of music. Someone who made sure his young wife went to church every Sunday.

  I couldn’t believe how naïve I was. He was all of those things, but I kept forgetting that he didn’t get to be the leader of this gang by being soft. He was hard. He was cold-blooded. He was ruthless in his pursuit of what he wanted.

  I took his advice. I stayed inside as often as possible.

  ____________

  I racked my brain for days afterwards, trying to figure out if I could’ve done something different. Of course I could have. I could’ve walked into that motel room and called the police. But would it have saved those two people? No.

  More than likely, Grizz would have received a tip of his own before the police got here, and I might have ended up in the swamp with the others. I didn’t really think that would happen, but I couldn’t let myself imagine what Grizz would do to me if I really made him mad.

  I went over it and over it in my head. If I told, would it save future people from being murdered in cold blood? Maybe. But what else would happen? Did I want to go back to my old life with Delia and Vince? Did I want to see Grizz, Moe, Chowder or Grunt in prison? Did I want to see Blue go to jail and his family fall apart? What about Fess?

  The truth was I didn’t know the extent of the criminal activity that went on here, but it couldn’t have been worse than murder. Could it?

  I tried to engage Grizz in conversation about it, but he never indulged me. “It’s better for you if you don’t know certain things” is all he said.

  After the incident with Chico and his crew, I noticed Grizz was trying to be more accommodating with me, if that was possible. He already spoiled me. But there was something different in the way he treated me after that day. I can’t explain it, but I certainly felt it. I think even though he put his foot down and refused to discuss it, he secretly worried that what I saw that day might have put me over the edge. Maybe he was concerned I would stop loving him. I wasn’t sure.

  But then something happened and I knew my suspicions were correct.

  It was a Saturday afternoon a week later. We were getting ready to leave for the west coast for church. I was packing an overnight bag. The weather was supposed to be good, and Grizz wanted to take his bike. He was standing at the foot of the bed and had just asked me if I would rather drive my car. I told him no. I loved my car, but I loved riding with him more. That seemed to make him happy, but quite honestly, it was true.

  Just then the door burst open and Moe ran in, frantic. Tears ran down her face. She grabbed Grizz by the arm and pulled him towards the door. She didn’t have to do much pulling. We both were on high alert and ran outside as quickly as possible.

  When we got outside we followed her over toward the edge of the motel, and that’s where we saw him—Damien. The big dog was lying on his side, and Lucifer was prancing around him excitedly, crying and whining. We heard the problem before we saw it.

  A huge rattlesnake was coiled and made a lunge for Lucifer. Lucifer was able to avoid it and just kept barking and pacing. As soon as we got close enough, Grizz put up his left hand and waved me back. Before I realized it, he pulled out a gun that had been shoved into the back of his jeans. He killed the snake in one shot.

  “Probably protecting her nest,” he said. “Otherwise, she would’ve bit him and slithered off. Not stayed around for a fight.”

  I didn’t know anything about snakes, so I just nodded like I knew what he was talking about.

  He told me to get my car. I ran for number four and grabbed my keys. I ran to my car and got in. I started it and drove toward him. He was carrying Damien. He told me to get in the passenger seat. I put the car in park, jumped over the column and waited for him to lay Damien across my lap. Just then, Chowder came out and asked what the commotion was all about.

  “Call the vet, tell him rattlesnake bite. Looks like two bites, maybe. I’ll be there in ten minutes.” Grizz turned to Moe and said, “You can’t come.”

  I think she was already expecting this, but I could tell she was hurt and worried about Damien. It made more sense to me when we drove up to the vet in Davie. Of course Moe couldn’t come. If she had been part of a rural community and raised horses, it was likely someone from the vet might have recognized her.

  Chowder must have talked to someone, because they were waiting for us when we pulled up. Grizz parked and came around to pick Damien up off my lap. They were waiting with a gurney, but Grizz ignored them. After realizing Grizz wasn’t going to lay Damien on the gurney, they ran up the front steps past him and opened the door. We followed the two vet technicians in and passed through the waiting room and into one of the treatment rooms, where Grizz laid Damien on a table. The vet was there and told us to wait outside.

  We didn’t go back out to the waiting room, but instead sat in two chairs just outside the door. I didn’t notice if there were other patients waiting when we rushed in, but it didn’t matter. I would think a deadly snakebite would take precedence over the other appointments.

  We waited for what seemed like forever, but wasn’t really long at all. The vet came out and explained he was treating Damien intravenously with anti-venom and heavy doses of antibiotics. Damien had to stay at the clinic for at least a week. They would watch the area around the bite marks and make sure he continued to respond positively to the treatment. He expected Damien to make a full recovery, but it was still too early to tell. He told us to go home and give him a call in the morning. It was going to be a long week.

  Grizz shook his hand and opened the door for me to go out into the waiting room. He stopped at the reception desk and told the girl we would handle the bill the following
day. She batted her clumpy mascara eyelashes at him and said that would be fine. We made our way through the waiting room, not really noticing anyone who was there.

  Grizz was holding the door open for me to go outside when I heard a voice.

  “Ginny? Ginny Lemon, is that you?”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  You always hear about people who think they are dying and how their life flashes in front of them. You secretly wonder, how can that be? A whole life in a matter of seconds? You might hear about someone who witnessed an accident say everything happened in slow motion and they recount every detail.

  I never believed those kinds of stories until that day.

  That day, I heard a name I hadn’t heard in almost a year.

  I read the look on Grizz’s face immediately. In that instant, I knew he thought he’d lost me. And I also knew I was correct in thinking something had been different about him since the executions.

  Grizz knew there would be no going back from what I’d witnessed that day in the pit. He’d worried I might want to leave him, and now he was faced with that possibility. The threat to hurt Delia and Vince would no longer hold water. I wouldn’t be trying to escape if someone recognized me. All I had to do was turn around to the person talking to me and say, “Yes, it’s me,” and it would be done. There would have been plenty of witnesses in that waiting room.

  Grizz would have two choices: grab me and drag me out to the car, or take off by himself and hightail it out of there. One choice meant he risked losing me; the other way meant he risked not being able to come back for Damien.

  That’s when time stood still. That’s when, not my whole life, but the past year, flashed before my eyes. I met Grizz’s glance and knew instinctively what I was going to do.

  Standing in the doorway I turned to see who was talking to me. I recognized her immediately: Diane Berger. She wasn’t a close friend, but we’d shared a couple of classes. She was a nice girl. Kind of like me. Not real popular, but not an outcast either.

  With an extremely convincing British accent, I answered her, “Me, luv? Are you talking to me?”

  That surprised her.

  “Uh, yeah. You look like a girl I went to school with. She’s been missing. It’ll be a year next month, I think. You could be her twin.”

  “My name is Amelia. I’m visiting my cousin,” I lied with my phony British accent.

  “I’m so sorry. I just can’t believe you’re not Ginny. The similarities are unbelievable!”

  “No, luv, it’s me that’s sorry. I wish I was your friend. I hope you find her some day.”

  Grizz grabbed me by the hand and walked me to the car. He didn’t say anything. We headed back to the motel and I spoke first.

  “Do you think she believed me?” My voice was quiet.

  “Actually, I do. Hell, I think I believed you,” he said, incredulous. “Where did you learn how to do an accent like that?”

  “Oh, you know how much I love Masterpiece Theater.”

  “I wasn’t sure what you were going to do,” he said, giving me a sidelong glance as he drove.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You know I wouldn’t have let you go, don’t you? I would have hauled you out to the car and kept driving. I would’ve taken you somewhere else. No one would have found us.”

  This surprised me. “What about the motel? Your car, your bikes, your money, your dogs?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I have a way to get all my stuff back eventually, if I needed to.”

  “You’re telling me that if for some reason I was recognized and there was a chance of me being rescued or found, you wouldn’t give me up?”

  “Never, Kit. Never.”

  We drove the rest of the way back to the motel in silence. When we arrived, he asked if I wanted someone to take me to church in the morning. He was going back to the vet to see Damien, but he didn’t think I should go with him.

  “No, I can miss church tomorrow. I want to be here for you.”

  I know this made him happy. I put together a quick dinner, and he went out to the pit for a little while. When he came back I was already in bed. He climbed in beside me and pulled me into his arms.

  “You awake?” he whispered.

  “Am now.”

  “Good,” he replied, nuzzling my neck.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I want you to talk dirty to me.”

  This was new, and I laughed. “Oh, you do? And what exactly do you want me to say to you?”

  “Ah, I don’t care. Use your imagination.”

  “I don’t have any dirty talk experience, but I’ll try,” I teased, my cheeks hot in the darkness.

  “Can you do me a small favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can you talk dirty to me with that British accent?”

  ____________

  Damien’s recovery was quicker than expected and uneventful. Before the snake, I’d never considered the dangers that lurked in the swamp. Other than keeping an eye out for the occasional alligator, I never gave a second thought to other harmful creatures. I did now.

  We fell back into a routine, and I stayed busy with my correspondence course. Before I knew it, it was 1977 and Ann Marie Morgan O’Connell was the proud owner of a high school diploma. Ginny Lemon wouldn’t have graduated for another year. I was a good driver and was getting to go to most places I set my sights on, but I still had to follow Grizz’s driving rules. That would change in a couple of months.

  Still, it wasn’t enough. I needed more. I was bored. I needed a mental challenge. And I found it quite by accident.

  I’d been living at the motel for almost two years. One day, I was sitting on the couch painting my toenails. Grizz was doing paperwork at his desk. I’d never concerned myself with the type of paperwork he did. I figured it had to do with his criminal activity, and like he’d told me more than once, the less I knew the better. I’d just finished my nails and was twisting the lid back on the bottle of nail polish when Grizz slammed his fist down hard on the desk. I jumped.

  “Damn it!” he yelled.

  “What? What’s the problem?” I was glad I’d finished my toes. His outburst was so loud I might have messed up my paint job.

  “Just trying to get these damn numbers to work, is all. Numbers aren’t my area of expertise.”

  “Well, what exactly are you doing with numbers?”

  “Balancing this fucking bank statement. Hasn’t balanced for three months, and I can’t figure out why.”

  I immediately perked up. “Bank statement? Why don’t you let me look at it? I can help you. I love working with numbers.”

  “Nah. I’ll figure it out eventually.”

  “Seriously, Grizz. I’d love to help. I bet I can figure out the problem.”

  He turned around then and looked at me. I could tell he was weighing his options. He was just frustrated enough to let me help, but he had also been very careful to keep me away from his business.

  “I could be like a secretary or bookkeeper. I don’t have to know any details or where these numbers come from. Believe me, I’m just interested in the numbers, Grizz. I’d like the challenge.”

  I knew I’d won when he didn’t say anything right away. I jumped up and walked over to him while balancing on my heels, trying not to mess up my pedicure.

  “Okay, Kit,” he said at last. “All yours. No questions, though. You just balance the checkbook. Old statements are right here.” He pulled open a drawer.

  I sat down and got to work. I figured out the problem very quickly. An old entry had been calculated as a minus instead of a plus. In addition to about $21.65 in other combined entry errors, I could see why he was having trouble finding the problem. He could have found it easily enough if he’d had more patience.

  That’s how I started taking care of Grizz’s finances. I soon came to learn he had more than one alias. Each one had a substantial balance in their account.

  I started diving in a little
deeper and casually asked him one afternoon, “Why do you just let all this money sit there and not earn a decent return? Why don’t you invest it?”

  Within the year, Grizz and his many aliases had a decent stock portfolio. I was earning him a good amount of money. I secretly hoped if I could help him earn money another way, he would cease his criminal activity.

  Another naïve assumption on my part.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  One day rolled into another, and before I knew it, I’d been living at the motel for almost three years. Not that those years were uneventful. I remembered one day the previous summer. It was a couple of months after I’d started balancing Grizz’s bank statements. Sarah Jo and I had planned a day at the beach. I drove to her house, and we were going to take her car from there. Grizz had business at Eddie’s, so he followed me until he got there. I went the rest of the way by myself. It wasn’t far at all. But I still considered it a small victory, and that day was the beginning of the end of Grizz’s driving rules.

  Sarah Jo lived in a really nice neighborhood on the ocean side of Federal Highway. The homes were older, but well maintained. I pulled up about eleven o’clock that morning and parked my car in her driveway next to hers. She had the garage door up. I got out and put my beach things in her unlocked car. I approached the front door and knocked. This particular day was a weekday and her little brothers were at camp. Fess was teaching a summer class at the college. She was home alone.

  “You ready?” I asked as soon as she opened the door.

  “Yep. I just need to get the beach chairs out of the garage.”

  I told her I needed to use her bathroom, and she told me she would start loading up her car. It was a little car. A Pinto, I think. It was perfect for her. When I came out she was standing in front of her car with the hood up and two guys I didn’t recognize were talking to her.