Home Grown by Ninie Hammon

Author:Ninie Hammon [Hammon, Ninie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ninie Hammon
Published: 2014-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

Donnie pulled off the highway onto a gravel road that wound into the woods. He went about 50 yards down it and stopped. They had picked this spot because even though there were houses fairly close by, you couldn’t see the van from the highway. And they couldn’t go very far. One of those kids was going to have to go to wherever they’d hidden the money and bring it back.

Jimmy Dan cut to the chase. He’d been designated “bad cop.” Doodlebug was “good cop.”

“I’m not talking about the $5,000 you turned in,” he said. “I’m talking about the rest of it, the other $30,000. You got it hidden somewhere and we want it back!”

The children exchanged a confused look.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mister,” Adam said. “We found that money in a box by the side of the road and—”

“You didn’t find no money in a box,” Doodlebug cut him off. “You found it in that shed in the woods. We know, ’cause we put it there. It’s our money, not yours, and we want it back. Now, where did you hide the rest of it?”

“There isn’t any more,” Adam said. He looked at the other two children. “Is there?” They both shook their heads frantically from side to side. “We found the money on the floor in that shed, gathered it up and put it in a box. Then we took it home and counted it and turned it in. That’s all there was.”

Not once in all their careful planning did it ever occur to the three men that the kids might deny they had the money. That they might try to hold onto it, to keep it. It threw them totally off balance.

Donnie turned around in the driver’s seat so he could see and yelled at Adam. “Don’t you lie to us, son!”

“There was another $30,000 in that shed,” Jimmy Dan snarled. He’d started getting edgy as soon as he got into the back of the van. He hated cramped places with no windows; the growing menace in his voice was genuine. “What did you do with the rest of the money?”

“I’m not lying,” Adam said. “There wasn’t any more money.”

Eddie spoke up for the first and only time, his voice high and reedy. “We looked.”

Listening to those snot-nosed little brats talk back to him made Jimmy Dan’s head pound. A sudden, blinding pain pierced his temples like an ice pick, then shot down his neck into his shoulders. There were too many people jammed in here and not enough air! He reached his hand behind him and pulled out a .25 caliber pistol, its broken hand grip held together with a mound of dirty duct tape. When he’d stuck the gun down in his pants, he’d had to cinch his jeans tight with a belt to keep it from falling through.

Doodlebug was just as stunned to see the gun as the kids were.

“Hey, we said there wasn’t going to be any rough stuff,” Doodlebug began.

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