Unleashed (7 page)

There was one other thing I’d gained—a message in my jacket pocket:
You know the Denny’s. Eleven
PM
. Be alone and waiting.

FIFTEEN

Same Denny’s as before. Same location where I’d once believed no one from the mansion world would ever see me.

But my faith had been shaken by seeing my own father in the stands during my fight. How had he discovered that I lived a separate life, where the world was gritty and real and people didn’t solve their problems by hiring other people to take care of the dirty work?

And what had Jo been doing there with him?

Instead of salad and water, I ordered two hamburgers and two chocolate milk-shakes and left my full glass of water
untouched on the table. There was no point in trying to keep my weight down for the next week or two. I could always work it off later.

When the hamburgers and shakes arrived, I was still alone, facing the door on the opposite side of the booth and still wondering who had left the note in my pocket. The person who’d burned my hands with curling irons? Or Raven and Jo? Or, as I still half suspected, were they one and the same?

I was just finishing my second chocolate shake when Raven and Jo pulled open the door and walked inside, scanning in both directions with their usual feral alertness.

They sat across from me in the booth.

Jo broke the silence. “Never thought you’d get up from the mat. That dude smoked you. In the video on my phone, I keep replaying that bomb that knocked you on your butt, and every time I hear the impact of his glove against your face, I smile all over again.”

“How about we move past the social niceties?” I said. “Why were you there with my father?”

“Why have you lied to us?” Raven said. Her eyes were intense with anger. “That Mustang was a rental. You had me break into your own family’s vacation house. You’ve been playing us from the beginning.”

But I was just as angry. “You promised you’d both be out of my life after the hospital. I did my part to run and distract the security guard. You escaped. I didn’t ask you back into my life. So why don’t you both leave? Starting now.”

Raven answered by pulling her phone out of her pocket. She entered her password to unlock it and slid it across to me. “Hit
Play
.”

The video player was set up on the phone, so I did.

I saw a grainy image of me sliding through the window of Dr. Evans’s office. I pushed the phone back at her.

“So,” Raven said. “We talk. You listen. You follow commands. Or that’s the video that reaches people who can hurt you.”

I’d already been back in Dr. Evans’s office. As Jace Wyatt, the smiling, nice son of the hospital’s most beloved surgeon. I’d already taken the video-cam pens and downloaded all the video.

“May I?” I asked as I pulled the phone back to me.

I took her silence as a sign of consent. I pulled up the YouTube app and found a link to a video that I’d posted on my private channel. I tapped the link and waited for the video to upload.

I pushed the phone back to her. Jo leaned in and watched with Raven. Both were seeing some artful cut and splice. First came Raven’s voice from the base of the hospital wall.

“Jo is here to stand guard, so that means you can climb and bring down the risk factor for me. If I go up alone, all you’re risking is whether you can outrun
a cop or security guard while I’m stuck on the wall. With you on the wall with me and we get caught, all we need to do is ditch the painting and pretend it was some kind of urban-climbing stunt dare.”

Then came equally grainy video of Raven lifting the window to break into Dr. Evans’s office, taken from the pen I’d left behind earlier that same day when I’d gone in to make sure the window was unlatched.

I had carefully edited myself out of the videos.

Both of them glared at me.

I smiled as I spoke. “I’ve got some software rigged so that if I don’t put in a special password every twenty-four hours, this link goes public, and all the people who matter will get an email inviting them to the YouTube link.”

Life, to me, was a combination of chess and boxing. You had to think everything through a couple of moves ahead and also be prepared to punch hard and often.

“You might think your video against mine makes for a stalemate,” I said. “But that would be incorrect. Given the sordid past that each of you has tried so hard to avoid, the authorities would be a lot tougher on you than on me. And even if the authorities wanted to come down hard on me, I can access a lot better legal help than you can.”

Each of them showed a face as rigid as those of some of the old women at my father’s tennis club who’d had too many shots of Botox.

“So,” I said, “tell me again the part where you talk and I listen and follow commands? That will give me a chance to tell you both to kiss my—”

“Raven and I followed him,” Jo said. “Your father. We had your house staked out.”

“One of your houses, silver-spoon boy,” Raven said, her voice dripping with disgust. “Not so easy, deciding where you might be. The uptown luxury condo?
Perhaps the West Vancouver mansion. Or the vacation property a half hour down the road on the coast.”

“Don’t forget Paris and New York,” I said. “And Hawaii. Then it’s a private-helicopter ride to the private jet, and foot massages the entire flight. It would be far too stressful to land without relaxed feet.”

Raven grabbed my full glass of water and threw it into my face.

It was satisfying to see how I had pushed her buttons.

“We through here?” I said as I began to stand, letting the water run down my face as if it didn’t exist.

“Sure,” Jo said. “As long as you don’t want to know what we found out about your father. And a detective named Vince Crowther.”

I sat.

As they say, that was
check
and
mate
. With me watching my king topple across the board.

SIXTEEN

When Jo smiled at my sudden lurch back into the booth, it didn’t appear to be tainted by the vindictive triumph that I’d been happy to focus on them.

“We really do have information you want and need,” Jo said. “If the two of you can behave in a civilized manner, maybe we can get all of this sorted out. And Raven and I need it sorted out, because we don’t want any of the crap that lands on you to fall on us.”

Jo turned to Raven. “We are both mad at his feeble attempts to play us, but I think the key thing to realize is that when he thought he had us because of his
videos, all he did with that leverage was ask us to leave him alone. Nothing more. I think that means he passed the test. We can trust him.”

“Look, he was a sneak, shooting that video.”

“Hypocrisy,” I said, “thy name is Raven.”

Jo said to Raven, “He has a point. He did it to protect himself—we did the same for us, for the same reason. He’s clumsy, but at least he thinks like us. Wouldn’t you rather be working with someone who has the beginnings of street smarts?”

“I just don’t like his attitude,” Raven said.

“Yeah,” Jo said. “He’s a rich kid. Get over it. He’s also a rich kid who doesn’t whine when his hands hurt or when someone beats the crap out of him in a boxing match. He doesn’t make excuses either.”

“Actually,” I said, “I had the guy where I wanted him until I looked over and saw you in the stands.”

Jo said to Raven, “So he makes excuses. All of us do.”

“He thinks he’s pretty,” Raven said. “I don’t like that either.”

“Um,” I said, “I’m right here. I’m not deaf.”

“Well,” Jo said to Raven, “he is pretty in a brooding kind of way, so get over that too.”

“Still here,” I said. “Across the booth from both of you.”

Raven said to Jo, “He’s not that smart. And he’s so not smart, he thinks I’m not smart. There were so many red flags when he faked like we were breaking into someone else’s home.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Jo said. “I’ve heard it a dozen times. He didn’t do anything about the video camera. You saw him from the window, chatting with the private security. He left the rental-car papers in the glove box. What can you expect? He lives in a mansion, not a homeless shelter. Some things take time to learn.”

Raven crossed her arms.

I crossed mine. I didn’t feel dignified, however. My shirt was soaked.

“Raven,” Jo said, “someday down the road, a guy like him could help us. And his brother can help. Right now he needs what we have. And I think he’ll honor an agreement to help us later if we help him now. So reach across and shake his hand, and later I’ll let you watch my video so you can enjoy the part of the fight where the dude smokes him and knocks him on his butt.”

I made the first move and held out my hand.

Raven stared, blinked and then shook my hand. But didn’t let go. She squeezed hard, probably guessing how much it would hurt my blisters, and said, “I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing it for Jo. You mess with us again and I’ll sneak into your room at night and mess you up so bad you won’t know if you’re a boy or a girl.”

“I think you’re pretty too,” I said.

For a split second, a smile struggled to break loose on her face, but she stomped it out in time with a glare.

“Why did you lie to me about the vacation place?” Raven said.

“Still don’t know who put my hands on curling irons,” I said. “You guys showed up at a time that was a little too convenient. I needed your help, but I didn’t want to give you leverage knowing it was my house.”

“It didn’t work,” Raven said. “It only made us dig deeper.”

“I know that now,” I said. “But I still don’t know whether it was the two of you in the gym trying to crack me and see if I’d spill your names. Secrecy seems like the way you operate.”

“It wasn’t us,” Jo said. “We only have one question for you. What made you want our help?”

“To learn about my father,” I said.

“What I meant,” Jo said, “was why now? You must have had questions about him for a while.”

I thought about whether I should trust them. “An anonymous email directed me to look into my father’s activities.”

This was not the time and place to mention that Bentley and I had learned it came from our mother, and that we still didn’t know why she’d sent it, or why she’d sent it anonymously.

“Why?”

“Don’t know,” I said. Which was disturbingly true. Why had our own mother done this? “Not yet. But when I learn what my father did, I’ll probably be able to figure out who wanted him caught.”

“Fair enough,” Jo said.

“Tell me,” I said, “why were you at the boxing match with my father?”

Raven said, “gps devices on him and Bentley. Easy to plant on your father’s car in the hospital parking lot, and easy
to plant in your brother’s backpack. We wanted to track their movements to find out exactly what you were up to.”

“Your father,” Jo said, “has had you followed by a private detective. Yesterday we followed him to the investigator’s office, and then we followed the investigator following you.”

“Vince Crowther.”

“Yeah,” Jo said. “Know him?”

“Hired him,” I said. “Obviously, he decided he could make more money by letting my father know what I was trying to do.”

I glared at Raven. “Before you call me an idiot, I didn’t let him know I was Jace Wyatt. I made him think I was just a kid trying to make it as a boxer.”

“Not guessing he’d look into your background anyway? Wouldn’t take much to figure out who you are,” said Raven.

“Looking back, I realize that,” I said, knowing how weak it sounded.

“Lesson learned,” Jo said. “Now you understand why Raven and I trust no one. That’s why tonight we tracked your father to the fight. He didn’t know who I was, so I sat beside him. In case he made a phone call that I could overhear. We were also worried he might try something again to hurt you.”

“Again?” I said.

“What if he was the one who put the curling irons on you?”

Maybe, I thought. His showing up at the fight to let me know he knew about my secret life was obviously an unspoken threat.

“Flash back to me descending the hospital wall,” Raven said. “We need to get to the point. I’m nervous here. Who knows how else Jace lets himself get tracked?”

Jo grinned at me. “Flash back to me introducing you to the ground, then sending the guard your way. Best distraction plan, huh? And isn’t it the
kind of stuff the best memories are made of?”

“Huh,” I said.

“All along,” Raven said, “it had been our plan to return later that night and break back into Evans’s office. He’s chief of staff. I wanted to learn what I could about your father. Try to find what you were looking for before you found it. Because if you were messing with us, that would be protection.”

“Huh,” I said.

“So with you scrambling to escape the security guard, all I did was climb back up into the office. You had those video-cam pens pointing at Evans’s desk, so it didn’t catch me on video. I dropped a cloth over the pens so movement wouldn’t trigger the automatic cameras, and then I searched around. Ready for something ironic?”

“Why not?” I said. I didn’t want her to know how intensely curious I was.

“In an age of technology, where the first thing we think of is hacking a computer,” she said, “sometimes the safest place to store information is in a filing cabinet. On paper. Right, Jo?”

Jo reached behind her back and pulled out two folders that she’d kept hidden beneath her jacket.

“You owe us,” Jo said. “Someday, we’ll be back to collect. I trust you. So don’t let me down.”

Jo slid the folders across to me.

I left the folders unopened as they stood up from the booth. They left Denny’s without a backward glance.

SEVENTEEN

I stood behind Dr. Evans’s desk the next morning. His smug perspective on the world was obvious to me in the enlarged trophy photos scattered across the opposite wall. Every time he looked up, he would see himself in smiling poses with various celebrities or high-profile politicians, including the prime minister of Canada.

I’d never liked this man, and over the years I’d had plenty of occasions to hone my dislike. He and his wife were constant visitors to our vacation home on the coastline. He dressed out of a fashion magazine and had a habit of snorting laughter at his
own jokes and constantly smoothing his thinning hair over his scalp whenever he was nervous.