Chapter 14 #3
She leaned over, gave him a big hug, and said, “You are most welcome, and I am so sorry for this madwoman’s crazy plan that she thought would work but was doomed from the onset.”
“I don’t even know what she was trying to do,” he said, with a sigh. “It seemed like everything went wrong when I lost this guy.” He leaned over, grabbing Khan and pulling him tight. He looked at the two people with him and asked, “Where did you find him?”
“We got him back from the couple who knocked you down and stole Khan from you,” Ashton replied.
His eyes filled. “Nobody would believe me when I told them what happened. Like the deputies, they all but accused me of lying, just making it up.” He shook his head. “I got to the point where I started to wonder if I had made it up.”
“No, it happened all right. I found the couple with the War Dog, and, with any luck, you and Khan can have many happy years together.”
Tears came to Sean’s eyes again, and he sniffled, trying to brush them away. “I don’t think I’ve ever cried this much in my long life. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.”
“No thanks are required,” Crystal stated. “It’s partly our family who did this to you, so we should be apologizing to you.”
He looked over at her and shook his head. “But you didn’t do it.”
“No, that’s not my style,” she confirmed, with a twinkle in her eye.
“If I have to tie up a guy to get my way, I think I’ll just keep looking.
Now you, of course,” she teased, “you’re kind of a cutie, and if you were just a little bit younger, I might have gone for you.
” With that, she leaned over and gave him a kiss on the forehead.
“Lady, you do realize you just kissed an old fart who’s been lying in his own piss for days?”
“Of course I do, and I’m so dang glad to see you that I’ll do it again!”
He looked at her for a moment, and then his face wrinkled up, and he burst out laughing, easing any tension in the air.
When he could settle down again, he smiled.
“Thank you for that. It’s been a long few days.
She wouldn’t talk to me. She wouldn’t tell me what she was doing.
Mostly endless silence with no explanation,” he told them, building on the same bewilderment he had felt earlier.
“I just didn’t even know what to do anymore. ”
“Well, the good thing is, you are free now,” Ashton stated. “I’m just wondering how she got you up there.”
He sighed. “She had two idiots helping her, but she was nagging them the whole way up here, telling them they weren’t doing it right.
It took both of them because they were so inept, but that whiny one was scared of heights.
I don’t weigh much more than one hundred pounds, particularly after losing the leg, and those two buffoons still had trouble moving me. ”
Ashton nodded. “It’s amazing how much difference that makes. I’m missing one myself,” he shared. “I was a Navy SEAL and just got out of surgery and rehab. I’m on medical discharge and am still adjusting to life in this new situation.”
“Sorry about that,” Sean said, “because ain’t no easy way to adjust.”
“No, there sure isn’t, but we do what we need to do, and we’ll find a way to make it because that’s what we do,” he declared, with a smile.
Sean nodded. “That we will, but it’s sure rough when the rest of the world seems to think you’re some sort of a joke and a loser for getting injured.”
“Of course they don’t understand, and we don’t expect them to because it’s too much of a strain on their poor psyches,” he quipped, with a smirk.
Sean stared at him and nodded. “You really do understand, don’t you?”
“I sure do. I’ve been up against way too much judgment myself.
There’s nothing quite like it, but here we are, and we’re sure glad to find you alive.
The next challenge is getting you down from this loft.
” He looked at the old man, looked at the ladder, and nodded.
“Yeah, we got this. The question is, do you need medical attention before I move you?”
“No, sir. I would much rather get out of this hellhole first, no matter how we do it,” he replied. “I can scooch down on my butt if need be, and that would probably a whole lot safer.”
Ashton laughed. “No way, we can do better than that.” In a move that surprised both Sean and Crystal, Ashton leaned over and lifted Sean up on his good foot, pulling him from that prone position over his shoulder, into a fireman’s carry.
Ashton stood tall with Sean draped over one shoulder and his back.
“You sure about this?” Sean asked.
“I’m sure,” Ashton replied.
Crystal offered, “I’ll go down first and spot you, Sean.”
Both men got a good chuckle out of that.
“Hey, you guys, I can wrangle a horse, so don’t test me.”
The guys laughed again, as Ashton backed up to the ladder. “Gotta shift you now, Sean, into a cradle carry, so just hook one of your arms around my neck. Tell me when you got a good hold there.”
“Got it,” Sean called out.
Then Ashton swung Sean around so they now faced each other, yet a little offset.
“Hang on, Sean. We’re going down.” Ashton hung onto Sean tightly with one arm, while his other arm steadied both of them on the ladder.
Ashton continued to talk to Sean, as if to distract him.
“I don’t know whether forensics needs to be here or not, but they’ll just have to work around our tracks,” he noted.
“God knows they won’t be impressed when I call them back out here again. ”
“You would think they would be happy,” Sean muttered. “At least I’ve been found.”
Crystal looked up at Sean and nodded. “I’m sorry to say a whole lot of people were not convinced you were missing.”
He shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he muttered. “How does the world find it so easy to dismiss people like me?”
Crystal shook her head. “It was Jenny. She was very good at misdirecting people into believing what she wanted them to believe. So, when you went missing, she would slide suggestions into conversations, making you seem depressed, things like that,” Crystal explained.
“That I would never do,” Sean declared indignantly.
“I lived through war. I lived through losing my leg. I lived through losing Khan, but I gotta tell you. That was the worst of it all. I was beside myself. Nobody would believe me that those people stole Khan from me. I kept telling people how that couple took Khan and pushed me over and ran off, but nobody would even give me a chance or would even listen to what I had to say. It was heartbreaking.”
Crystal nodded. “People can be so cruel. The good news is we found you both.”
At that, Khan barked loudly beside them, making everybody laugh. “Hell of a dog that can climb up ladders …” But at that moment Khan jumped to a large hay bale then another and suddenly he was on the floor. “He made that look easy.”
Piper and Joe milled around on the floor as they slowly made their way down.
Now at the bottom, Ashton noted, “I’ll need to check on her.”
“Looks pretty dead to me,” Sean said in a grumpy tone, as they stared at Jenny’s prone body.
Ashton sat Sean on a nearby hay bale. “I’ll grab you again in a second.
” With that, he walked over and checked on Jenny, but it appeared she had died on impact, just as he had surmised when he had first looked from above.
“Nothing anybody can do for her,” he said, “so we’ll just call law enforcement. ” Then he proceeded to phone Richard.
“I’m really busy. You do know that, right?”
“Well, as it turns out, I am too,” Ashton retorted. “Doing your job.”
After a moment of silence, Richard asked, “What are you talking about now?”
“We just found Sean. He was also a captive at Oliver’s place.”
“What?” Richard roared.
“Yeah, he was in the upstairs loft of another outbuilding, the smaller equipment barn. And, no, Oliver did not hold him there. You need to get out here now, and, while I’m sure Sean will argue about going to the hospital, I think he should be checked over.
We also have a dead body, so move it, will you?
” Ashton ended the call to now argue with Sean.
Hearing the word hospital, Sean stared at Ashton indignantly, but Crystal was determined. “No way,” she argued. “You need be checked just to make sure that in your excitement to get out of that place, you’re not hiding another injury.”
He frowned at her and asked, “Do I look like I’m somebody who would hide an injury?”
She gave him a cheeky grin and nodded. “Absolutely.”
He chuckled. “Fine, I’ll let them check me over, but that’s it. No way I’m staying in that hospital,” he declared. “I spent way too much time in a hospital to want any more of that.”
Ashton absolutely understood.
As they sat here and waited for the deputies, Ashton checked with the hospital for an update on his grandfather.
The report he got lacked any real details, but he at least got word that the patient was doing better and that they could visit him later today.
As it turned out, they wouldn’t be available until quite a lot later.
It took Richard twenty minutes to get out here, and he arrived still pissing mad, until he walked into the barn, took one look at Sean, and then followed their gaze to Jenny’s body on the concrete floor. He stared in shock and asked, “What the hell is going on here?”
“Yeah, we would like to get a few answers on that too,” Crystal snapped smartly, looking over at him. “We told you that this guy was missing, how his War Dog was stolen from him. And now we have found both Grandpa and Sean right here.”
Sean looked over at Richard and asked him, “Were you guys even looking for me?”
Richard frowned. “We had it on good authority that you may have possibly—” Then he frowned as he looked at the dead body on the ground.
Sean nodded. “That good authority wouldn’t be the dead woman before you now, huh? Or the Wilfords, by any chance? The ones who knocked me down and who stole my dog?”
Richard closed his eyes and muttered, “Shit.”