Xenofreak Nation (22 page)

“Meters?” Chief Joe said. “How about giving us that in English?”

Scott handed him a slip of paper that had been included in the gun case. “This breaks it down for you.”

Lupus opened his holophone and increased the projection to maximum. After studying the documents Padme sent and coming up with a plan of action, each of them put on a vest and strapped on a reinforced nylon belt that held a dart case and a powerful miniature flashlight.

Lupus nodded to Chief Joe. “Shall we?”

Chapter Thirty-nine

The chair in Dr. Finnegan’s office would have been comfortable if the anesthetic wasn’t wearing off Bryn’s left buttock, which had been poked and prodded for glass fragments before being closed with four stitches. She’d arrived at the Milton P. Osborne Psychiatric Center four hours ago. There’d been no point attempting to get away from Padme. Even if she managed to escape, Lupus would probably hunt her down. Scott hadn’t even blinked when the horrible wolf-faced man separated them. Bryn felt sick to the bottom of her soul, but wasn’t about to fall apart. Something told her the less emotional she got, the better her chances of survival in her new environment.

Padme had been planning to drop her off at her father’s house, but Bryn begged her not to.

“How would you like it if someone sent you back to Pakistan—gave you to your uncle?” she asked.

Padme appeared unmoved, but she said, “I’ll take you to the mental hospital, then. What’s your psychiatrist’s name?”

She’d gone so far as to call Dr. Finnegan and put Bryn on the holo to tell her she was voluntarily coming in. Bryn’s shrink, accompanied by an orderly, was waiting out front when Padme drove up. Bryn got out and Padme drove off without a word. Bryn had turned to Dr. Finnegan and feigned remorse, staying calm and collected through the last humiliating hours.

Now sitting in the chair in a hospital gown, she said, “I’m not suicidal. I never was.”

“Bryn, I saw the note you left your father.” Dr. Finnegan opened the file on her lap and handed Bryn a sheet of paper. On it was one typewritten, run-on sentence.

In heaven I will get my hair back, I will be me again and I’ll be with Mom, so don’t cry for me, Daddy, I love you more than words can say.

“Wow, that’s touching.” Bryn handed the sheet back. “I didn’t write it.”

“Sure looks like your signature.”

“Yes, it does. I wonder how long it took him to get it right.”

“Are you suggesting your father wrote it? Look,” Dr. Finnegan sounded like she was losing patience. “Your father said you’d had what he considered a psychotic break. You told me yourself you felt there was no way out. That no one would ever love you. That you felt helpless and hopeless.”

Bryn thought about the choices she’d faced; staying with the man who’d ruined her life or going rogue and becoming a criminal. “You have no idea.”

Dr. Forrester leaned forward. “Tell me.”

Bryn leaned forward too. “My father is the one who arranged for me to be kidnapped in the first place. If I told you why, I guarantee you wouldn’t believe me.”

“That’s a serious accusation. Do you feel like everyone is out to get you?”

“What? Oh, you mean, am I paranoid? Um, no. Dr. Finnegan, you were there when my dad said he had my car towed. Would I have taken all my stuff with me if I was planning to kill myself?”

Dr. Finnegan’s chin came up and her eyes narrowed slightly. “Your father says you-”

“I’m sorry,” Bryn interrupted, “I don’t mean any disrespect, but you’re starting an awful lot of sentences with ‘your father said.’ He’s a very persuasive person. He needed you to think I was suicidal.”

“Alright, let’s step back and take your father out of the picture. Where have you been the last 48 hours?”

“Surviving.”

“Why did…okay, I said I wouldn’t repeat what your father told me, but for the sake of accuracy let’s clarify a few more things. He said you went out and found your kidnapper, and have been with him this whole time. Is that true?”

Bryn stared at her, unblinking, desperately trying to think how her father knew. Then the obvious struck her: Stan Berry. The smug insurance salesman had probably gotten a good look at Scott’s hands when they were playing tug-o-war with Bryn’s arms. It would have been easy for her dad to figure out who she’d been with, and then he must have contacted Nurse Vonda. Bryn and Scott hadn’t just run into Lupus at Bluto’s—he’d been waiting for them. If her father could be believed, Fournier had a stake in getting Bryn to cooperate. Then something else occurred to her. She remembered that overheard holo call where her father told the person on the other end, ‘You’ll get your money after the check clears.’ Was that about paying Fournier for his handiwork? Despite her father’s deflecting statements about embezzling donations, it was much more likely the check in question had been her mother’s life insurance.

Bryn was so intent upon putting the puzzle pieces in the right places she almost forgot Dr. Finnegan’s question. The doctor was patiently waiting for a response, so Bryn said simply, “Yes.”

“I hope you realize you’ve been engaged in extremely reckless behavior. There’s a phrase for someone who begins to relate to her kidnappers-”

Bryn rolled her eyes briefly up at the ceiling tiles. “Yeah, Stockholm syndrome, I know.”

“The XBestia are dangerous,” Dr. Finnegan said. “Xenofreaks are unpredictable. You know this.”

“That’s prejudice talking. People with xenoalterations are just expressing themselves.”

“In a way that’s very offensive to many people.”

“It’s impossible not to offend someone. Your preconceived notions of how everyone should behave offend me.”

“We’re not talking about me, Bryn. This is about you.”

“No,” Bryn said, struggling to maintain her composure. “This? Right here, right now, me talking and you not listening? This is about my father wanting to commit me so he can take my mother’s life insurance money.”

“Your father warned me that you’d fixated on that delusion, so I contacted the insurance company you attempted to rob and your mother never had a policy there.”

“What?” Bryn burst out in disbelieving laughter. “I didn’t try to rob them. This is insane. I assume you talked to Stan the man Berry? Dad knew I’d try to get that money, so he called Mr. Berry and offered the ten-thousand dollar reward if I showed up. The only deluded one in this room is you.”

Dr. Finnegan reached for her holophone. “I can call the corporate office, go over Mr. Berry’s head and verify it.”

“Please,” Bryn said as all traces of belligerence vanished. “Please do that for me.”

Dr. Finnegan hesitated, searching Bryn’s face. She finally shrugged and turned her attention to the holophone. After a few minutes, she said, “Here’s the number.” She tapped and put it on conference. The torso of a pretty female automaton appeared. “Thank you for calling Provincial Mutual. Please enter your account number or stay on the line and an operator will be with you shortly.”

“I don’t suppose you have the account number,” Dr. Finnegan said.

Bryn shook her head and bit her lip, worried now that Berry had somehow deleted the entire account.

A ring tone sounded and the holo of a live woman appeared. “Provincial Mutual customer service, this is Erica, how may I help you?”

Dr. Finnegan pushed the phone across to Bryn, who told Erica the same thing she’d told the receptionist at the office on West Trill. She answered a set of similar questions and waited nervously as the customer service rep entered the data.

“I’m sorry, Miss, but this case is closed,” Erica said. “A check was issued…today, in the amount of $364,023.00.”

Bryn’s voice was barely audible. “Payable to?”

“Harold Vega.”

Bryn met Dr. Finnegan’s eyes. The psychiatrist said, “That son-of-a-bitch.”

Chapter Forty

It was full dark by the time the truck’s headlights illuminated their targeted section of fence next to the main gate. Chief Joe swerved into the empty oncoming lane, turned the truck 90-degrees to the right and slammed the accelerator down. Scott and Lupus braced for impact, but the heavy truck made short work of the old barbed wire fence, and the saplings beyond either bent or snapped beneath it as Chief Joe dodged the bigger trees to get to the gravel driveway. The truck barreled down the lane to a large clearing surrounded by the main house and outbuildings. Before Chief Joe veered sharply to the left towards the barn, Scott determined from the lights in the windows which of the two outbuildings was occupied. Before the truck came to a full stop, Scott opened the back and he and Lupus were out and running.

Scott headed for cover behind the trunk of a tall maple, barely making it before the first ARA soldier burst out of the housing unit. The night vision on his scope was unnecessary since the clearing was well lit by lights mounted on high-mast poles, like a prison yard. He aimed, but heard Lupus in his ear, “Got ‘im.” A ‘pfuft’ sounded to his right and through his scope he saw the dart’s red stabilizer puff seemingly bloom like a flower against the soldier’s throat. The darted man stopped cold and threw his head back as his rifle slipped from his grasp. His knees buckled and he keeled forward just as a second man came more cautiously through the door.

ARA soldier number two didn’t have a rifle. He saw his comrade lying prone and began firing into the trees with a semi-automatic handgun. Scott said, “He’s mine,” and darted him in the right leg. The guy swung his gun in Scott’s direction, but couldn’t get off a shot before the drug entered his blood stream and began to paralyze him.

“Two down,” Lupus said for the benefit of Chief Joe and Liz, one of whom would be breaking into the barn to locate the panda, while the other covered the back of the main house.

If there was a third man in the housing unit, he was either not coming out or had exited from a back door and was circling around. The main house, between the barn and the outbuildings, had yet to produce Kareem.

Scott reloaded his dart rifle and said, “Report.”

“House all quiet,” Chief Joe said.

“Barn-” Liz began, but Scott heard a dull retort in his ear, as if Liz had clapped a hand to her own head, boxing the ear that had the bug in it. He began running back toward the barn, using the trees as cover. Just as he reached the closest maple, the barn door opened and Liz stumbled out with her hands in the air. Scott lifted his dart rifle and looked through the scope. Liz had a dark smudge on her cheek that could have been blood. The barn was softly lit from inside. He saw the silhouette of a man in the doorway, one arm raised with a gun pointed at Liz’s back.

“Testing, testing. Is this the xenofrequency?” Scott recognized the voice in his ear, which sounded amused at the pun. Kareem must have confiscated Liz’s earbug.

“Roger that, Kareem,” Scott said. “You are in my sights.”

Scott saw Lupus in his peripheral vision, working his way tree by tree to the back of the barn.

Kareem raised his arm to place the barrel of the gun against Liz’s head. “Xenobitch gets it in the back of the head if you don’t drop your weapon.”

“And as soon as she falls, you won’t have a woman to hide behind,” Scott said. He saw that Lupus was about to step out into the open to get to the barn. A shadowy figure just beyond him flitted from one tree to another; at first Scott thought it was Chief Joe, but then he caught sight of the Indian between the house and the barn. Scott dropped to one knee, dialed his dart rifle up to maximum, aimed high and fired. The lowest branches on the stand of maples grew well above a man’s head, so there was nothing to hinder the flight of the dart through a break in the tree trunks. It struck the third ARA soldier in the thigh just as he was sighting on Lupus.

Scott loaded another dart into his rifle and adjusted the CO2 pressure. “Third man down.”

“I will do it.” Now Kareem sounded significantly more stressed to Scott, which tended to confirm there’d only been three gunmen on the property. “One less xenoscum won’t be missed!”

Scott saw Chief Joe come around the corner and flatten himself against the barn wall. He began inching closer to Liz. Lupus crossed the space between the trees and the barn and came up from the other side.

“You’re surrounded,” Scott said. “All we want is the panda.” He was watching through the scope; he didn’t have a clean shot, and Kareem held the gun steady against Liz’ skull.

“Cops are going to be here any second,” Kareem responded.

“You don’t want ‘em here any more than we do. We haven’t killed anyone and don’t plan to. Let her go,” Scott said. He needed the ARA leader to keep talking and stay distracted from his surroundings. Chief Joe had moved to within a couple of feet of Liz and even though she held still and faced forward, from her expression it was obvious to Scott she knew he was there. If Kareem leaned forward a few inches, he’d see him, too, but he clung to the partial protection of the barn door frame. Lupus reached the other corner of the barn. Chief Joe raised a hand and held it poised palm-up toward Kareem’s gun, which told Scott he was about to make his move. Scott angled the barrel of his dart rifle until the crosshairs centered on Liz’ midsection. He maintained silence, since any claim to the target would alert Kareem.