Chapter 11 #7
Back upstairs, they found Tobias frowning over an old laptop of Roger’s. He looked up at them. “Jake, I finally looked at that flash drive she gave us, and it looks legit. There’s some solid stuff here, including current blueprints. I think we have to call her.”
Jake looked intrigued. “No shit, huh? Well, I guess it’s now or never, all chips in.”
Roger narrowed his eyes at them. “And who are you calling?”
Tobias looked away, and Jake shifted. Neither answered, and Roger felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. Finally, Jake answered with feigned casualness, “We might’ve had a run-in with Alice Dixon a few months back.”
“You what?”
Tobias winced.
“She sprang at us outta nowhere in Montana.” Jake scoffed. “Gave us this sob story about seeing the error of the ASC’s ways, wanted us to team up like some knockoff Justice League to bring down Lex Luthor and all his pals. ’Course we trusted it as far as you’d ever trust the mouthpiece of the ASC.”
Roger dropped his box onto the table with a thump. “And you melon-heads didn’t think to ever tell me?”
“We’re telling you now,” Jake snapped.
Tobias said quietly, “We didn’t even look at what she gave us until just now. I didn’t want to put it in our laptop, that’s why I used your junker. But take a look.”
The flash drive had current blueprints, death records, and dirt on ASC officials that Roger never dreamed of having access to. It made his eyes cross and for the first time made him think that they had a chance, if this Dixon came through for them.
Jake’s eyes started to glaze over the fine-print forms and blueprints a couple hours in, and Tobias bullied him into bed. “You serious now about listening to me? Try getting more than four hours of sleep for once in the past four days.”
Roger and Tobias kept working for a bit afterward, but Roger’s heart wasn’t in it, and Tobias clearly had something on his mind.
Jake would push and push hard for a plan, any plan with even a hint of success, but on that night of fraught emotions and pain, Roger didn’t have it in him to try to make the pages and numbers and possibilities fall into any kind of order.
Finally he sat back. “I’m going to throw something in the crockpot for when he wakes up, or when we get hungry, whichever comes first. You want to come with?”
“No, not yet,” Tobias said. “I’m going to go through this one more time. Thank you, though. I’ll put these back in order when I’m done.”
Roger figured that the moron would work until his eyes fell out and went to get a roast and potatoes cooking. After the food was in and the dishes were done, he couldn’t go back to that little room with a thousand boxes, none of which had the answer that Jake wanted.
And, any other day, he could have also roasted Tobias for making him the arbitrator of what was sane in this fucked-up situation.
He was surprised when he stepped out onto the porch to find Tobias sitting on the steps, rolling a beer bottle between his hands.
Roger leaned against a pole across from him, not feeling the need to speak. Plenty had been said that day, plenty for them all to think on, without adding to it.
But perhaps that silence on his part was what led Tobias to clear his throat. “Roger—” He paused, doubt clear on his face even in the limited light that filtered from the house to the porch.
“Yeah?” When Tobias said nothing for a long minute, Roger sighed. “Just spit it out. We’ve bulldozed through enough shit today, might be better to flatten out the whole thing now.”
Tobias dipped his head in acknowledgment, but his voice was still halting. “I was just—just wondering. Why it was, when Jake said—said that he wanted—to get me. Get me out, I mean. Why did you let . . . that is, I mean, it would’ve made sense if you’d told him it was a—a bad idea.”
Roger took a minute to absorb that hit, grateful for the sturdy wood wall at his back.
When he was sure of his words, he said briskly, “Because—and this is what Leon should’ve known, the stupid bastard—if you were that important to Jake, well, I know his instincts are good.
With something that big, I know they gotta be good. ”
“You didn’t—” Tobias faltered for a moment, then said low, “You didn’t think I might’ve laid some mojo on him?”
Roger snorted dismissively. “I’d seen you. And I knew by then what fuck-ups were running the whole asylum, and what kinda admission policies they had. Nah, I figured even if you had, we’d sort that out later. But I didn’t think so, else I wouldn’t have called him.”
After a moment, Tobias asked tentatively, “You called him?”
Roger hesitated. “Guess it was the last time I was there. Knew you weren’t gonna last much longer, so Jake had better act quick if he really meant to get you out. And ’course he did.”
Tobias stared out across the yard as the silence stretched. Roger’s discomfort grew—balls, that was not something he’d meant to share, at least not like this—and he was searching for a joke to break the silence when Tobias spoke.
“I hope I never give you a reason to regret it.”
Roger snorted, scuffing the peeling paint of his porch with his shoe. “Not likely, unless you stop making that sweet potato pie for Thanksgiving. Can’t cut a guy off like that.”
Tobias huffed in amusement, but Roger still felt the joke weigh too heavily between them—it didn’t feel like that long ago when Tobias wouldn’t have recognized it as a joke.
“More seriously,” Roger said. “Jake makes stupid-ass decisions sometimes.”
Tobias nodded, face serious as a coffin in the low porch light. “Yeah.”
“But, stupid as they are, those decisions are usually the right ones. I sure as hell don’t want you boys getting killed, but I can’t exactly say that he’s wrong. Neither of you has ever given me a reason to doubt you on the big stuff, and I don’t see that changing.”
The quiet felt better now, more thoughtful, less broody. Maybe that was the last damn revelation for the night.
“Thank you, Roger,” Tobias said. “Thank you for everything.”
“My pleasure, kid. Now you just think of a way to blow up that damn camp that isn’t going to carry either of you morons with it.”
* * *
Alice kept the burner phone with her all the time.
Not because she lived in hope, but because she had had at least one nightmare where the call finally came in and cousin Jonah was the one who answered it.
That said, she almost fell off her chair when the chorus from “One Headlight” started blaring from her purse.
“I have to take this,” she told her aide even as she fumbled for the phone. “It’s a contact. Reschedule for half an hour.”
Eyes wide, he nodded and booked it out of her office, closing the door behind him.
Alice waited until she heard the lock click, praying that whoever was calling wouldn’t get bored before she was in the clear. This office was regularly checked for bugs, but the soundproofing was only good when the door was closed.
She finally snapped the flip phone open. “Hello?”
“Alice Dixon?”
She’d only given this number to two people, and she was still fucking surprised to hear Jake Hawthorne on the other end, sounding as testy and pissed as the last time they’d met.
“Who else would it be? You check out that flash drive I gave you?” Maybe he or Tobias had finally looked at what she had put together and would be willing to work on a solution.
“Yeah. I got a proposition for you.” His tone was aggressive and challenging. Alice’s heart rate kicked into high gear, but she kept her voice steady.
“What would that be?”
“How would you like to burn Freak Camp down to the last brick?”
The shock that went through her tasted like adrenaline and triumph and panic, like a firefight she was sure she would win, or a press conference when she knew what the worst question would be and had her response perfected down to the last syllable.
“That sounds . . . pretty damn good,” she said. “What changed your mind?”
“I saw the tapes.”
She couldn’t stop laughter bubbling up, but she kept it to one sharp, brutal, exclamation. “The interrogations? If I’d known that was all it would take, I would have played them for you months ago.”
“Did you send them?” Jake’s voice was tight and infinitely more dangerous.
Alice snorted. “Everything I gave you was on that flash drive.”
A long pause. “So. You in?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “What do you need?”
“We need a plan where we make it out alive. And without getting thrown in the slammer.”
Alice felt the grin growing on her face, and she knew it came through in her voice. “I think I can help with that.”