Tribulation House: Reloaded

Chapter 32

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- 32 -

Back at the KCPD, Griggs and Charlie were filling out paperwork. Griggs signed a form and placed it in the stack. “This is the life. None of that running around fighting crime.” Closing the folder, he pushed it aside. He grabbed the baseball off his desk, adjusted his fingering for an imaginary pitch. “It’s all about forms and printouts and schedules.”

“Now, now.” Charlie looked up from the laptop. “We had a car chase the other night, didn’t we? The witness made it to court, the bad guys are on the run, the good guys win the day.” He went back to typing, that crazy two-fingered lightning typing that he did. “Now it’s all over but the paperwork.”

“We didn’t have a car chase.” Griggs, feet on the desk now, started rolling the baseball casually from one hand to the other. “You had a car chase. I was the one who had to go home and explain to his wife that you wrecked her car.”

“You don’t worry about rubbing the autograph off that?”

Griggs looked at the baseball in his hand and sat up suddenly. “Maybe.” He set it back on the plastic stand. “It’s one of the only presents my dad ever gave me.”

Charlie stopped typing. “Uh-huh.”

“The signature is probably fake anyway.”

“Who is it?”

“Bob Forsch. Pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals back in the day.”

“Do you want it authenticated?”

Griggs put elbows on desk, rested his head on his arms. “No.”

“Shouldn’t be hard. I could probably—”

“No.”

“Is it—”

“It’s better to wonder than to know.”

Charlie snapped the laptop closed and pushed it toward the middle of Griggs’s desk. He sat back in the plastic chair. “I thought you resolved all that.”

“I tried, man. I tried.” There was a long silence, Griggs staring out the window at the lights of Kansas City. Then he turned back and stared at the desk blotter. “Do you know I have this whole box of unopened letters from him?”

“Sure.”

“When he left my mom, he told her a lot of lies.”

“There might be two sides. You know, it’s always—”

“Not a difference of opinion, Charlie—lies.” Griggs sighed loudly and sat back up. He leaned back in the chair, swiveling left and right. He told her there was not another woman. And then went straight to the woman’s house. He said it was spur of the moment, that he had not planned it. But his bags were already packed. Papers had already been signed. Plane tickets already bought.”

Charlie did not know what to say.

“I lost a promotion because of him.” Griggs looked back down at the blotter. “I was up for a promotion when we got the report that my dad had embezzled all the money from that used car dealer and run off with that wh—” He struggled with the word choice. Finally sputtered, “With that woman.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Given the circumstances—I couldn’t stop my own father from being a crook and a liar—the higher-ups said maybe I wasn’t ready to make lieutenant yet.”