After Riddick finished combing through the ruined house for signs that may spark suspicion, he went back outside, where he sat by the steps of the porch and waited for Sabrina's grandparents to arrive.
As he did so, Sabrina came out from the section of maize while clutching onto the edge of her blood-stained nightie.
She came to a stop a few feet in front of Riddick and kept her head lowered as she muttered, "I've covered Pa's body."
Looking at the young girl, Riddick could see she was visibly struggling to utter those words, holding back tears as she sniffed in a low tone.
Riddick patted the spot nex to him and gestured her over. "Good. Let's just wait for your grandparents to come okay?"
"Mm. Okay. *sniff*" Sabrina gave a small nod and proceeded to sit next to Riddick, continuing to mourn her parents in silence.
Several minutes later, Riddick's attention was caught when he could hear the sound of an engine not too far away.
A short moment later, Sabrina reacted by raising her head as she too could also now hear it.
She quickly stood up and looked ready to rush to the gate but Riddick stopped her from doing so by putting his hand in her way.
"Hold on, it could be more
It didn't take long for a car to appear right outside the gate, which was still open.
The 4x4's still parked on the gravel leading up from the gate made it hard to see clearly what type of car it was but considering it was only one car that arrived, Riddick wasn't overly concerned.
Immediately the car's engine was turned off, the sound of doors slamming could be heard followed by the collective yelling of a man and a woman.
"Sabrina!!" "Sabrina!!"
"It's them!" Sabrina once again rose to her feet and looked ready to bolt in the direction of the voices.
This time, Riddick didn't try to stop her. Although, he couldn't help but feel that her grandparents were a bit careless.
After all, they could've been walking right into a trap. Then again, considering the emotions likely swirling through their minds, it was completely understandable.
Soon, the figures of Sabrina's grandparents could be seen as they ran into the gate and passed the parked 4x4's.
Upon seeing them, Sabrina also launched into a sprint toward them, her arms wide open as tears began to run down her face again.
Riddick simply watched as the two sides met and locked into a long and emotional embrace.
"Sabrina! Are you alright? Are you hurt?"
"Oh come here baby, everything's gonna be alright okay?"
"Ma and Pa! Th-They're.. *sniff*"
"Shh, there, there, it's alright baby."
As the grandparents put on strong faces in front of the girl, their gazes momentarily shifted forward to look upon Riddick.
Once they did so, they immediately felt caution, with the grandpa quickly noticing the firearms in Riddick's possession.
He quickly turned his head to his wife and whispered, "Janice, you and Sabrina go wait in the car. I'll… I'll find out what happened."
Having heard her grandfather's whispers, Sabrina raised her head to look up at him and attempt to explain.
"Th-there was this monster grandpa… it hurt Pa. It was so scary… that mister was fighting it but it saw Pa and- and."
It was quite clear that the recollection of events being portrayed by Sabrina was untidy, but it did give her grandparents a general idea of what likely happened.
With
"Okay, let grandpa talk to that mister, you go to the car with grandma okay?" The man reassured.
Janice then picked up Sabrina and was about to leave but made sure to warn her husband, "be careful Jim. And hurry."
Giving one final glance toward Riddick, Janice quickly began to head for the car they parked outside.
Riddick didn't even need to analyze the situation to know that they were now guarded against him. An unsurprising response.
Riddick could only shift his attention to Jim, who quickly approached Riddick before taking off his cap and holding it against his own chest in a respectful mannner.
"I may not know what happened here, but I know the only reason our little girl is still alive is because of you, so thank you, from the bottom of our hearts. Can I just… can I just ask what happened?"
As Jim said those words, he looked incredibly frail. How could he not? He'd lost a great deal in such a small amount of time that it likely didn't even feel real to him.
All he really wanted now was answers.
As the only adult survivor, Riddick already expected such a question to be asked of him.
He didn't need to even plan for it. As long as he told the truth or aligned his story with Sabrina's, then it'd be okay.
"Well, everything seemed normal when me and Johnny arrived…" Riddick proceeded to retell the story of what happened from the time he and Johnny arrived in the compound.
He chose to take his time telling the story because he wasn't in a rush. For one, his body still wasn't back at 100%, plus there was still some time before Johnny's friend would arrive at the scheduled time for the job.
As Riddick told his crafted version of the story, Jim remained standing and listened, with a heavy heart.
By the time Riddick was done, Jim could no longer hold back tears as they ran freely down his face.
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However, Riddick wasn't done.
He soon reached into his pocket and took out Jaime's phone, which aside from a bit of dirt and scratch marks worked perfectly fine.
"As for why the
Riddick chose to be cryptic and not say because he knew he'd get nowhere telling Jim of Jaime's role in this using words.
Jim needed to see the cold hard evidence himself and choose how he proceeded.
Whether he believed it or not was irrelevant to Riddick. All Riddick aimed to accomplish by choosing this route was to not be the target of Jim's denial should he not believe the information presented to him.
Jim received the phone with a bit of confusion visible on his face.
He didn't question Riddick though and proceeded to the messages like he was asked.
After less than a minute of reading through, Jim clutched the phone firmly in his hands as he looked down in defeat.
This marked a crucial crossroads for Riddick in terms of his role in all this. Why? Because it was completely possible for a delusional person to still try and blame him for this, perhaps arguing that he planted the evidence.
So to avoid such a scenario, Riddick himself needed to act like the circumstances didn't seem right.
"I still find those messages hard to believe. The Jaime there and the one I met are not the same people. But I thought you seeing it would shed better light on all this." Riddick revealed.
To such a statement, even if one wanted to blame you? What cause was there for it?
Hearing Riddick's words, Jim felt he was nothing more than a victim in all this… a victim of his own daughter's betrayal.
He shook his head in disbelief but he didn't deny what he saw, simply muttering, "how could you Jaime?"
As Jim continued to go over the messages in Jamie's phone. He couldn't help but show a look of absolute heartbreak. "Just why?"
He soon exited the messaging app and started going through other parts of the phone, and sure enough, he kept on finding signs that pointed to it belonging to Jamie. Finally, he went into the photos and was quite disturbed by what he found.
The collection of incriminating tapes made by Jamie and Phil.
Jim barely got the app open before throwing the phone on the ground and putting his hand on his face while shaking his head. "No, no, no, no, why? Why would you do this?" he murmured, his eyes teary but his expression confused.
He began to pace around, clearly shaken up by what he found. "Fuck!" he yelled as he punched the nearby wooden pillar and began scratching his head. "Dammit, what am I supposed to tell Janice? This… this will break her. What a mess."
"Sabrina's own mother, my little girl... wanted to sell her out. She's the reason the whole family is broken apart," Jim vented to himself, understandably angry but at the same time sad.
Despite all the content he found in the phone, it didn't change the fact that Jaime was his daughter. Now, his mind became a spectrum of numerous thoughts: confusion, anger, guilt, and so on. Countless questions kept popping up in his mind: Where did I go wrong? What made her do this? How long has she been this way? How could we have not noticed?
It was often in times of tragedy that people really look back on how they took certain things for granted and how they didn't do enough. In Jim's case, he didn't even know where to find the fault. His daughter simply wanted to become a
Soon Jim slumped to the ground, and it was only then he took a moment to look around the house and the damage present. Then he looked over at Riddick and even saw the countless injuries he had and how torn up his clothes were.
It was then that realization struck. While he was complaining about all this, Riddick might have become a circumstantial fatality due to his daughter's actions. As the father, Jim felt he had to say, "I'm sorry." This was a hard thing for him to utter while shaking his head. "My daughter nearly got you and the whole family killed. *sigh* Just why would you do this, Jamie?" He wanted to say more, but Jim couldn't really find the words to describe how he was feeling. It was just simply too much to endure at this time.
Both Riddick and Jim turned their heads toward the door where the several steps of Janice and Sabrina could be heard, along with their whispered voices. Janice, although crying herself now, walked with Sabrina, holding her hand while providing comforting words and small whispers. "You will be fine, okay? You're going to live with grandma and grandpa now, right? Everything is going to be okay."
He then looked toward Riddick and said, "Please, I don't want Janice and Sabrina to know about what Jamie did. This is already hard enough to process. I don't want Sabrina knowing what kind of woman her mother really was, it’ll ruin her. And Janice, I can imagine, she won't believe it anyway. Heck, I don't believe it. Look, I know I don't really know you, or owe you anything, especially after what my daughter caused, but I beg you, I’ll pay if you want me to?"
Before Jim could say more, Riddick interjected and said, "That's fine. As long as my car isn’t damaged then I'm fine."
Jim showed a weak smile and gave a nod. "Thank you. You're a good man. Not a lot of people turn down money these days. They all seem to think it's the key to happiness, and look where it got my daughter." Jim shook his head one more time before turning away from the house and switching his attention toward the cars.
"I don't know how I'm going to handle this, but I think I'm going to have to move away from here. Johnny's clients are going to come looking for him. It's better they think he died and his family was killed. They'll be out for blood, and I don't want Janice or Sabrina experiencing any of that. You’re free to take the cars or anything else here."
In the OT’s, there was no proper system of law in place, so when it came to matters of inheritance or debt, it was simply natural for family to take over. Without Johnny, things would simply be left abandoned, which in itself wasn’t odd as many abandoned compounds could be found scattered all across the territories.
But for someone like Johnny, who was a car fixer, the owners would likely seek renumeration, and with him dead, the debt would fall to his closest relative, in this case, his daughter. And in such a cutthroat business, some of the individuals went to great lengths to get their way. So, Jim just couldn't see himself risking it.
It was better to just leave everything and take Sabrina. This showed how unmoved he was by the potential wealth he could gain by simply taking a couple of vehicles with him.
As for Riddick, although he was tempted by the offer, he chose not to accept, "Just the guns.”
For the same reason as Jim, he didn't want to attract any unwanted attention. The countless methods that existed for tracking cars did not guarantee he'd be able to get away with taking someone else's car in the long term unless the owner presumed that the car was destroyed.
At least with the Morgan, which was currently assumed to be destroyed, if he moved quietly, he could offload it to someone else who could flip it for a price closer to its actual value, without the risks of capture.
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A while later, Johnny's contact finally arrived. Stopping just outside the gate in front of the car Jim and Janice had come with.
The man driving the car had a similar style of dressing as Johnny, wearing grunge, old-school clothing. His features greatly resembled the stereotypical OT’s native—tanned skin with light brown hair and light brown eyes, and a full scruffy beard.
He came out of the large truck, which brought with it an even larger trailer behind it. He showed confusion at the presence of so many cars in front of the gate and he wondered if perhaps plans had changed.
Before he could step forward, Jim and Riddick's figures appeared in front of the gate near Jim's car. Looking at the man who just arrived, Jim recognized him, “Larry?”
Hearing his name, the man named Larry settled his gaze on Jim first and replied, "Uncle Jim? what are you doing here?"
Considering what time it was, it was very strange to see Jim at the compound at this hour, even if he was related to Johnny. Larry’s gaze then moved behind Jim, focusing on the 4x4s the
Larry, still clearly unaware of the full extent of what was going on, spoke in a casual tone, "So, what's going on? Did raiders try to jet Johnny's compound?" Larry let out a small laugh but quickly faded when he saw Jim wasn’t laughing. His expression then sank as a worrying thought dawned on him, "No... you don't mean…"
Jim nodded, "Yeah, Jamie and Johnny are dead."
Larry looked shocked, and so another series of explaining the situation followed. Something Riddick had already quickly grown tired of, but for appearances' sake, he couldn't look like he was in a hurry.
At the very least, he was glad Larry had finally arrived and was getting briefed on the story by Jim, who would likely sell it better than Riddick could have. After all, it seemed they were related in some way. Riddick left Jim and Larry to talk while he went to sit on the hood of the Morgan, which was still covered as he waited patiently.
After what felt like a very long few minutes, Larry and Jim finished talking things over, and Larry finally came over to Riddick.
"Hey, are you in a hurry? I wanted to help the old man move the bodies and get this place sorted."
Riddick understood the pressure they were likely feeling and the urgency to clear out evidence of any family Johnny could have on the scene. After all, if the clients or the
This, however, wasn't Riddick's problem.
"I am in a hurry. The longer I stay here, the more at risk my car is. So I'd like to leave as soon as possible."