He was not … pleased.
Dent looked into the lying man’s eyes, with the dark circles just below giving the sheriff a positively beaten look. “You want to tell me what that was about, Bobseyn?”
The girl stirred at Dent’s authoritative voice, shooting a warning glance his way. But Dent was beyond pretending and playing games with social niceties. This man in the bed before them had been holding back information from the start, information pertaining to The Ranch. And it was time the man told Dent the whole story.
“You know damned well what that was about,” the sheriff rasped.
Fifth put a hand on Bobseyn’s and gave it a squeeze.
Dent said, “The two men arrested at your house told your deputies they were acting on orders from someone up at The Ranch.”
Bobseyn didn’t say anything. That led Dent to surmise the sheriff knew this already. Had known it before the events of that night had unfolded.
Raising his voice, slightly, Dent said, “You put yourself in danger for the bastard who tried hurting Kasumi.”
“And you put innocents in danger by acting so rashly!” Bobseyn tried sitting up, but at a touch from Fifth he settled back down in his hospital bed.
If the girl had not been present, Dent would have stepped forward and strangled the injured man for being so irrational. The man defended an enemy, an enemy that had held Fifth at gun point. In Dent’s book, the sheriff deserved to die. The only reason Dent was here was the information the sheriff was hoarding.
As if she could sense his murderous thoughts, Fifth scooted her chair even closer to Bobseyn’s side, putting herself as close to being in between the two men as possible. Dent couldn’t believe that after what had just happened, the girl was still willing to defend the idiot sheriff.
Oh, if the girl weren’t there right now ….
Dent relaxed his hands, uncurling the fists he was holding at his sides, and took a step forward. Looking over the ashen-faced man, Dent tried asking again, this time with what he believed was a bit more tact.
“Why did you stop me from killing that man, Bobseyn? I don’t know how you see things, but when someone intends to harm Kasumi or myself, I see them as a threat. And threats are dealt with accordingly.” He stared at the man, making sure his meaning set in.
Bobseyn looked away from Dent, his eyes traveling over the machines monitoring his health.
Dent took that as a refusal to answer. He balled his fists again, ready to beat the information out of the sheriff, when Fifth stirred, drawing his attention. The way her eyes had narrowed and her lips were set, Dent assumed she was upset with him. He pointed at the sheriff in response, trying to clue her in to how obstinate the man was being, but she refused to budge. She even went as far as to hold up a silencing finger Dent’s way when he opened his mouth to argue his case.
He kicked the bed. Hard. That wasn’t arguing, that was expressing his thoughts in a visual manner.
“Dent!” she snapped at him.
He turned away from the bed. Apparently it was perfectly fine for her to act out, but when he did it, it was inappropriate. The term “double standards” came to his mind.
Now that Dent was a less formidable force, cowed by the young girl, she took over and asked the sheriff, “What happened, Sheriff? Why were you so intent on protecting that man at your house? He’s a bad guy.”
Dent heard a rustle and turned back to the bed. Bobseyn had adjusted himself so that he was facing the girl.
“He’s not a bad guy, young miss. He really isn’t.”
Her voice was light when she responded. “He pointed a gun at my head, Sheriff.”
“He’s just mixed up, that’s all.”
Fifth looked up, caught Dent’s eye, and then concentrated on the sheriff once more. She took his left hand in both of hers. She was silent and still as she looked into the sheriff’s eyes. Finally, with a heavy squeeze of the man’s hand, she said slowly, “Tell me what’s going on, Sheriff. Ignore Dent. It’s just me. You know I trust you, and you know you can trust me.”
Dent saw the man’s eyes waver and water. They started to travel Dent’s way, but a small sound from the girl brought the sheriff’s attention back to her.
“Please, Sheriff.” Her voice was so soft that for a second Dent thought maybe he had imagined it.
But the sheriff had heard it too. And he responded to it. “The kids from tonight — and they were kids, the oldest not even twenty-six — they’re locals. Only one of them I didn’t recognize as growing up in Graftsprings.”
“But they’re devotees now,” Fifth reminded him. “They’ve sided with people from The Ranch, with the killers.”
“I can’t believe that, young miss. They’re good people.”
“Good people with firearms,” Dent commented, possibly too loudly. He realized his mistake when Fifth gave him one of her looks. He shrugged something that could be considered an apology.
Turning back to the sheriff, Fifth urged him to ignore Dent and trust her, to tell her more.
“Why did you protect the man who’d held me hostage? He was ready to kill me.”
A soft shake of his head. “He wouldn’t have.”
“How can you be so sure?”
There was a long pause. “Because Terry used to date my daughter. I’ve known him since he was a babe. Not a deadly bone in his body. If there were, I’d have never let him near my Cherry.”
Dent remembered the picture of father and daughter back at the house. Bobseyn never spoke of his daughter, Dent never asked, never cared. But looking at Fifth, Dent began to wonder. Don’t most parents constantly brag about their children? Don’t they always find some random, unrelated excuse to bring up pointless stories about their children?
Dent kept his voice even as he stepped back up to the foot of the bed. “When we first came to your house, you lied, didn’t you? Your daughter isn’t off at school like you claimed she was, is she?”
Keeping his eyes on the girl, the sheriff gave a small shake of his head.
Fifth brought a hand to Bobseyn’s shoulder and asked, “She’s at The Ranch, isn’t she?”
A slight nod.
“That’s why you didn’t want Dent going up there.”
A nod, a tear.
“You’re afraid she’s become one of the devotees, that if you prove they’re behind it all ….”
“Then it means I’ve lost my baby girl,” he finished.
Dent had had enough. Bobseyn had been deliberately keeping the investigation away from The Ranch, had put his personal feelings above resolving the issue. That was unacceptable. Dent was through. He came around the sheriff’s right side and gripped his arm, just below the fresh bandages.
“Tell me what you know of The Ranch, Bobseyn. Tell me what you know so I can end this.”
Bobseyn was too weak on pain killers to pull himself from Dent’s grasp, but he tried anyway. “I don’t know anything about them.” He brought his left hand around, gripped Dent’s, but there was nothing he could do to abate the pain as Dent dug his fingers into the man’s arm. The monitors began to go crazy, discordant beeps in an unsteady cadence.
“Dent!” Fifth cried at the same time Bobseyn let out a pained curse.
“Let him go, Dent! You’re hurting him!” she cried, but Dent wouldn’t hear her.
Something came over him. He couldn’t explain it, but his thoughts spiraled out of his control and his eyes seemed to lose focus.
This man had put Fifth’s life in danger. And for what? To protect people that he thought were good? The foolish man didn’t realize that whatever was going on in the compound, the people there were warped now, manipulated into becoming killers. Bobseyn thought that by ignoring the facts the problem would somehow resolve itself, and by doing so had created more problems. Dent was used to being in danger. Hell, there might be a small part of him that enjoyed it, drove him toward it, but not Fifth. She was too young for all this. He was her guardian, and he’d be damned if some idiotic s
heriff risked her life because he was too scared to face the truth.
A nurse rushed into the room, took in the scene, and slammed her palmed onto a red button on the wall next to doorway. Alarms blared and an overhead a voice called out for doctors and security to the room they were in.
“They’re innocents, Dent!” Bobseyn wheezed out between pained gasps. His entire upper body shook as he tried to free himself from Dent’s grasp. “Whatever’s going up there is forcing them to act the way they are!”
“They’re killers, Bobseyn. Even if your daughter had no direct part in the murders, she is still one of them. That is a fact you need to accept.”
Fifth shot out of her chair and in an instant she was behind Dent, pulling and tugging, trying to pry him away from the injured man. Blood began to seep through the heavy bandaging on the sheriff’s arm and Dent’s fingers were becoming slick with the stuff.
Three people rushed into the room, two with batons, one with stethoscope, all three screaming at Dent.
With a final squeeze, Dent allowed the girl to pull him away from the sheriff. He crested the foot of the bed and came face to face with the male doctor.
“You have no right to treat my patient that way!” the doctor yelled at Dent while trying to circumvent him to get to the machines on the other side.
Dent didn’t budge.
“He needs me, dammit,” the doctor urged, trying, unsuccessfully, to work his way around Dent. “I’m a doctor!” he blurted.
“I’m bigger,” Dent countered.
The doctor whipped out something from one of his many pockets. “I have a syringe that will make you soil your pants before your body hits the ground in an unconscious heap.” He held the threatening syringe up before him. “Now, move!”
Dent did, letting Fifth drag him from the room. The two security guards parted before him, giving him plenty of space to vacate. Neither made a move against him.
It’s a sad world when doctors have more balls than hired security, Dent mused.
XXVIII
The ride back to Bobseyn’s house was tensely quiet.
The girl kept her face to the window, refusing to look his way. He didn’t need to be overly perceptive to know that she was upset. He even went so far as to ask her if she was feeling okay, to which he received a grunt and a snort as a reply.
Sporadic street lights, some at regular half-mile intervals, some spaced out longer than that, illuminated her hunched form, and once or twice he thought he saw her small shoulders shaking. He turned up the car’s heater, thinking that perhaps she was cold.
The street lights became more frequent and they turned off the main highway and skirted eastern Graftsprings. They were nearing their destination and the girl still kept her peace. He pretended it didn’t bother him that she was upset at him for his actions back at the hospital. The girl simply didn’t understand how things worked.
Bobseyn was an idiot. Why couldn’t Fifth see that?
The man had put her in unnecessary danger, had forced Dent to act the way he had. For someone with all that emotion boiling up inside her, why did she ignore the callous way Bobseyn had withheld pertinent information regarding The Ranch? The man had inside information on the enemy, had chosen to keep it to himself, resulting in Fifth being put in direct danger. How can the girl not accept that glaringly obvious fact?
He turned right, slowed down as the road was packed dirt for the next couple of miles. Along this back stretch there were no lights at all, only the occasional backlit window in the distance, obscured by wild trees and raised fields of sweet corn. The car jostled along the uneven road and finally, after a sharp dip and recovering bounce, the girl stirred.
“If people are being controlled by eTech, it’s not their fault,” she whispered to the window. Though he couldn’t see her face, he could imagine the firm set of her lips, the deep furrowed brows that accompanied that particular tone of her voice.
“Actions have consequences,” he replied.
The dark fields of corn outside were still drawing her attention for some reason, but when she spoke, it was definitely directed at him.
“So you’d punish them for what they were coerced into doing?” It sounded like a question, but her inflection made him wonder if it was a statement.
“If need be, yes.”
Now she turned. A quick, sudden action, a rabbit bolting from its hole to come face to face with the fox. Except this rabbit had teeth. “How can you be so cold? He was protecting his daughter!”
“And I’m protecting you.”
“Not if it means you go around killing innocent people.”
This conversation was pointless, he determined. So he turned it around, threw it back at her.
“We came here at your insistence,” he reminded her. “We came to find the source of the problems, the eTech that we know has to be in use. We came here to take it out. We’ve wasted enough time playing at being cops. I need to go to the source, end it once and for all. Only then can Graftsprings get back to normal.”
“What are you planning?”
“I’m going to go through Bobseyn’s laptop and scour it for any information he has on The Ranch. It’s an old government facility so the basic layout of the complex shouldn’t be too hard to find online. Any defenses that are eTech-based will be ineffective against me, so the only thing I have to worry about is the human factor.”
“The human factor?” she snarled.
“Anybody that stands in my will be considered a hostile.”
“And you plan on killing any hostiles.”
“If need be, yes.”
The girl screamed into the car, her shriek attacking his eardrums.
After his hearing returned, he asked, “Something on your mind?”
“You know damned well what’s on my mind.”
“Language.”
With a raised middle finger, she told him what she thought of his disapproval of her choice of words.
Ignoring her crude gesture, he said, “Look, we came here for a reason. It may have been at Otto’s behest, but we’re here and we know something of what’s been going on. eTech or not, Chisholme has his hands in this and anything that man touches is poison.”
She looked back out the window. “Is this about revenge, Dent?”
There was that piece of him that wished to see Chisholme fall. The man had manipulated Dent from a young age, pulling the strings behind the curtain, making him the effective and heartless killer he was today. Chisholme may not have been the reason Dent was a sociopath — that was all nature’s fault — but he was the reason why Dent had been groomed to be the perfect weapon, a weapon which Chisholme pointed at his enemies, a weapon that never asked questions. And the man had designs on using Fifth, using her unique talents to create a new tide of emotional tampering devices — human, not technological, devices. Weapons to be used in a different type of battle, one of economics.
And Dent wouldn’t let that happen. He would not allow Fifth to become some experiment under Chisholme’s eye.
So was it revenge? Possibly. Was it personal? Not really. Was it about the girl? Most definitely.
“Well?” she asked, bringing him out of his thoughts.
“It’s not revenge, Fifth,” he assured her.
“Then what is it?”
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer.
She turned away from him again.
The only answer he could think of would have resulted in her becoming even more upset. He doubted the girl would like it if he said the reason that he planned on doing whatever it took to bring down The Ranch was sitting next to him.
Dent would kill to keep her safe, and he wouldn’t think twice about it.
XXIX
Kasumi crept through the upstairs hallway to the top of the stairs, taking care her feet didn’t make the wood floor creak or groan. She hit the landing, went to a crouch, and leaned as far forward as she could without tumbling down the stairs. She used the wooden railing as su
pport as she went still, leaning and listening.
She could hear Dent downstairs, in the kitchen, click-clacking away at the sheriff’s laptop. He was looking for any and all information the sheriff had accumulated regarding The Ranch, and he was probably gathering what he would call “intel” on the compound. He was planning on going in, guns blazing, as soon as he had all the intel he required.
She knew why he was going in. He may think he was doing it to hurt Mister Chisholme, that he was ridding the world of some illegal eTech facility, but Kasumi knew the real reason.
He was doing it for her.
And she knew that he knew deep down that was the reason he was going up there, to shut The Ranch down. The man said he was impervious to most emotions, but after his outburst at the hospital that night and spending so much time with him, she knew that wasn’t completely true.
For one, Dent stuck by her side after he had saved her four months ago. Granted, he was the one who kidnapped her in the first place and got the whole ball rolling, but that was beside the point. The point was that he was still here, with her, and in a weird sort of Dentish way, she knew he cared for her. How could he not? She was just that type of girl.
And, she had to admit, she’d grown fond of him as well. With her help, maybe one day he could meet a woman his age, maybe start a family of his own. Maybe. The laugh that escaped her lips made her freeze and throw a hand over mouth. Ears straining, eyes focused on the piano downstairs, she waited, hoping Dent didn’t hear her.
When they had gotten home, she’d stormed off upstairs to her room — well, technically she had stormed into the kitchen first, grabbed a soda and a cold piece of fried chicken, had then stormed to the cupboard, grabbed a box of crackers, and then had stormed upstairs — telling him she wanted to be left alone for the night. And knowing Dent, he would take her words at their face value and he would indeed leave her alone for the night. Exactly as she hoped. That man was so predictable some times.
Hard Wired Page 13
