Assured Destruction (13 page)

Chapter 22

P
eter.

Good, old Peter stares down at me, his face a mask of concern between intermittent coughs. I reach out to him, and he snatches my arm, dragging me from the stairwell and into the hallway. I scream in pain from his grip around my tender wrists. He kneels when we’re several feet into the hall. I fall against his shoulder and draw deep clean breaths of air.

He examines my purple and black ankle.

“We have to get you to a hospital,” he says. “What’s going on?”

I try to explain but my voice is hoarse. “How’d? How—”

He holds up his iPhone and the map indicating where I’d left my graffiti tags. The guy follows Heckleena on Twitter? I start to laugh, but hack instead. Smoke pours out of the stairwell, and Peter leaves me to slam the basement door shut.

When he closes it, Fenwick stands there.

My eyes still hurt from the smoke and it’s hard for me to speak. Only a rasping bark leaves my throat. Fenwick’s mouth twists into a snarl.

Fenwick grabs Peter around the neck with his beefy arm. Peter’s eyes fly wide and his hands clutch at his captor. He loses his footing and falls backward into Fenwick.

To my amazement, though, the fall is faked. Peter leaps back and shoves Fenwick into the doorframe between the kitchen and hall. Fenwick’s head glances off, and Peter rips free of the grip, delivering an uppercut to Fenwick’s gut. He doubles over. Peter brings his fists down on the nape of Fenwick’s neck, collapsing him to the floor. Peter breathes hard over top. Not bad for an old dude.

On the ground Fenwick’s palms are flat against the carpet in a push-up position. Then he looks at me. And smiles. His legs snap around Peter’s, catching them at the knee and twisting. Peter topples with a shout of surprise—he doesn’t have a chance.

“Go!” Peter screams. I begin to haul myself toward the front door, ignoring the pain. The smack of fists into flesh come from behind. I draw sharp quick breaths. Black scorches climb the wall of the living room; paint bubbles. This whole place is about to erupt. I enter the cool tile of the foyer, but the door bursts open and standing there is Foxy—with her gun.

As I stare into the barrel, smoke leaves the entry in a plume. It’s only a matter of time before the fire department is called, but it takes less time to pull a trigger.

“You’re a pain in the ass,” the woman says and reaches down to snare my wrist. Funny, but my ass is the one part of me that doesn’t hurt. I’ve got nothing left with which to fight. Foxy kicks the door closed and drags me into the living room. I lie motionless on the shag carpet. It’s hot and I imagine I’m just above the licking flames of the servers. I bite my lip when I see the bloodied face of Peter as he’s hauled into the living room semi-conscious, eyes fluttering.

“Why, Fenwick?” I ask. “Why are you doing this?”

For the first time I see the true Fenwick. His black eyes burn and his finger points like Foxy’s gun.

“Why? I nothing here.” He’s shaking. I doubt any of this was part of his plan. “Nothing. I do jobs. Lot of jobs. But … no money.” He shakes his head. “In Estonia I computer scientist. Here I paint house. I clean house. When I get job with your mother I see what I need. What you have …” He trails off.

“And you want it. You want to be a computer recycler.”

He squints and then begins to chuckle. It’s an ugly laugh and I want it to stop.

“I no want recycle. I keep like you. Social security numbers, passports, birthdays, hard drives remember everything. Then I make big server farm and let people look at pretty pictures.” He relaxes, hooking his thumbs into tight jeans.

I finally see it. He wants to mine the hard drives for identity theft. Worse still, to run a pornography ring. He’s started a series of porn sites and wants to grow it using old computers customers bring in to run them.

“But why hurt my friends?”

“You get caught with hard drives, mommy lose business,” he smirks. “She like me. I buy.”

I don’t know why he’s smiling in all this. He can’t get the business now. She doesn’t like him anymore. If he kills us, he’ll have to run. Surely they’ll know who it was.

He looks over at the wall. The scorch marks climb higher and thicken. I see the posters curling and it occurs to me that I could have figured this all out a lot sooner if I’d been a bit smarter. Chris Isaac has a song where the lyrics go:
Baby did a bad, bad thing.
It’s the same language Fenwick used in Frannie’s email—and the same song he was singing when I came home a few days ago. If I die here, I want to come back as an elephant so I’ll have a better memory. Unfortunately, what I deserve is to come back as a worm and not a very smart one.

Fenwick pulls out a phone and dials.

“I back. Have daughter and boyfriend,” he says. “Nice tries.”

“Mom!” I shout, realizing to whom he’s talking. Realize whom he must have been visiting while I fried his servers.

“Sign papers and give me business and I let them go.”

“Don’t do it, Mom!”

Foxy strides to me and slaps me across the face. Tears well in my eyes.

“Tell anyone, I find you.” His tone menaces. “Sign. Scan. Send to me. If ever you contact police, I be sure to kill your little girl—just try. I have friends.”

I swallow the lump in my throat.

“You’re going to jail whatever happens. You can’t run a porn business out of Assured Destruction,” I say.

“Oh, little computer girl? Porn not illegal. Not destroying hard drives illegal. Breaking into house illegal.”

Porn is wrong, but I realize I’ve got nothing. I can’t prove he hacked my network and did all those other things; they were designed to call attention to what I was doing, not to benefit him. I only have tapes showing his girlfriend coming into the store. We have a better run operation because of him, and I’d lied to the police. What could I actually prove? Even Peter’s first question to me was about what was going on.

“So, little, poor girl? You break into my house to rob me and cause fire. Very bad.”

My mom must be saying something back to him in the phone, because he clutches it tighter to his ear.

“Da,” he says into the phone, checks his email, and then grins at Foxy, who nods back. “Da.”

“Now we save you,” he grins at me. “Fenwick is hero.”

Fenwick bends and shoulders Peter, whose eyes are still partially rolled back into his skull. The carpet has begun to melt and Foxy drags me through scalding puddles of it. I cry out and suddenly I’m being lifted in strong arms while Foxy shouts at whomever is holding me, but at least her gun is gone, hidden away. Hidden until it’s needed again to enforce whatever my mom has agreed to.

I can hear other shouts and people; I try to look back at my rescuer but it’s smoky, my eyes are watering, and the man is hunkered down over top of me so I can’t see his face through the tangle of my hair.

We break into dusk. Fire trucks barrel down the block and a crowd of onlookers gather as smoke whirls into an evening colored red by the decaying sun.

“Janus!” someone calls.

I blink my eyes clear and brush away my hair. Ellie stands with the onlookers, and beside her I make out Hannah and Harry. What was everyone doing here?

Standing at the end of the walk is Jonny. His hands are tucked into his pockets and he’s gritting his teeth. But if that’s Jonny, then who is …?

I look back at my transportation, catching as I do the warning glare of Foxy at our side. A pair of startlingly blue eyes gaze down at me. My arms are wrapped around the neck of Karl.

“How’d you—?”

“Doesn’t everyone follow Heckleena?” His smile rends my heart in two. “We were all wondering who it was. So cool it’s you.”

When I look back toward Jonny, he’s already walking down the street into the flashes of oncoming emergency vehicles. Flames boogie in the living-room window of the house and I suspect nothing inside can be saved. Not the servers, not the evidence, not the happy-face laptop. My actions have cleared the way for Fenwick.

Karl lays me on to a gurney, and a worried paramedic inspects my ankle and another the burns on my arms. Nearby, Peter stares at me, lucid but with a trail of blood running from his hairline.

“Thanks, Peter.”

“Nothing to thank me for,” he replies and glances to see Fenwick lurking in the shadows.

“Don’t say anything, okay?” I ask and he studies my face. “My mom wouldn’t want you to say anything right now.”

“The police—” he begins.

“I know, but it isn’t over,” I vow as I’m lifted into the ambulance. Peter gives a little hopeless wave, either a goodbye or a signal of surrender.

Chapter 23

T
he operation on my ankle takes three hours but is over in a blink—for me at least. In post-op I’m drowsy when they show me an X-ray of my ankle with three pins through it. A cast wraps my foot and climbs up to my knee. When I see the cast, all I can think of is Jonny having a new canvas to doodle upon.

Finally they wheel me out of post-op, and from down the hall, the small squeaks of wheels steadily grow louder. A smile cracks my lips, and my mom shoots beside me, grabs my hand, and buries her face in it.

“Janus,” she says. “Janus.”

And I’m crying and she’s crying. “I’m sorry, Mom.” My throat hurts.

“You’re okay, you’re going to be fine.” Her tears are soaking the bandages that cover the burns that run from my hand to my shoulder.

“I’m okay.” But I know how I must look. I haven’t showered yet, and soot is thick over the areas not bound or cast.

She releases my hand enough for the orderly to pass through into the hospital room where I’ll stay for the next few days, and then my mom waits for him to leave.

In the next bed over, an old woman breathes through a chest tube. I wish I qualified for the pediatric ward where it would be kids and bright colors. The only flowers here whither in a yellow vase next to the old woman’s bed. Silence and wheezes fill the room until my mom draws a deep breath.

“Why’d you do it?” she asks. “What happened? Why didn’t you tell me about Fenwick?”

So I explain about Shadownet and where it came from. I tell her about Ellie and Tule and Harry and Hairy. I explain the missing abortion clinic laptop and about how the anonymous website really wasn’t mine. I say how I couldn’t tell her because she’d go to the police and the police would fine her, or worse, for not destroying the hard drives. I tell her about Jonny’s ultimatum and how everything made sense at the time. But it all went wrong.

“And now you’ve sold the business to Fenwick,” I cry. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t care about the business,” she says. “I’ll find something else.”

“Mom, you don’t have the money to start anything else and …” I look at the wheelchair.

“Of all the people who should know better,” she whispers. “You know I can still do whatever I want.” Her eyes cloud—not a filmy, senile cloud, rather a-storm-is-here cloud.

“I know,” I say.

“And if I didn’t know how to overcome a challenge myself, then you’ve certainly showed me how this week.”

“What do you mean?” I look up.

“Don’t you realize how amazing you are?” Her expression makes me shift around on the bed. “The app development, this Canvas—Peter says you’ve had thousands of downloads, it’s going viral—and hacking into someone’s WiFi, tracking down dangerous criminals. I can’t condone it, but it’s amazing.”

“But I—”
I almost died
, I was about to say. “Thousands?”

“Thousands,” she says. “And yes, what you did was dumb and you’re grounded for a year. But it was also very brave and smart.” She takes up my hand again. I’m so confused. “I was worried about you, who you were going to become, but Peter says I was worried about the wrong thing. I need to support you more. Support this passion of yours. If I had, maybe I’d have been able to help you do all this the right way.”

She laughs and I’m stunned.

“This Shadownet of yours,” she continues. “It wasn’t really those other people. It’s you, pieces of you fragmented on the Internet, but together it’s you. And it’s full of friendship and fans and followers. You’re very lucky. I’m very lucky.”

It’s funny because I’m not so sure she’s right. I do think of the Internet as real and the people on it are real, but it’s like there is a level of reality I’m missing. One of flesh and blood.

I lean over, feeling my skin stretch and crack like I’ve had the worst sunburn ever. I wrap my arms around my mom’s neck and kiss her cheek. “I love you,” I say. And it’s been a long time since I’ve told her so. “But I still want to nail those bastards.”

My mom draws back, her mouth pinched.

“And how do you intend to go about that?”

“I think I have proof of a felony, a real felony that wouldn’t be traceable to us. I just need some time on Shadownet.”

“I’ve already signed over the business.” She says this carefully.

“You don’t have my computers?”

“That was part of the deal.”

I glare at her, but she holds up the palm of her hand. “You were in a burning house and kidnapped, Janus. What was I supposed to do?”

“You’ve got a key?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“I have to get back in, just for a minute.”

“No way,” she shakes her head. “You’re hopped up on pain killers and are thinking crazy. Fenwick, whoever he is, has connections.”

I slump back in my bed. The hard line of my mother’s lips makes me realize I’m in over my head again. I need help.

“Do you trust me?”

My mother narrows her eyes, but nods.

“Can you find me a laptop?” I ask. “For homework,” I add with a coy smile.

“Right,” she says, “I guess I can manage that.”

I push my luck. “And I need your phone.”

She reaches to the back of her chair and pulls it out, but it’s not her old clunker, it’s an iPhone.

“Yeah, Mom!”

“It’s yours—or Peter’s, rather. He wants you to have it. Said you should see what people are creating on top of Canvas. Get some rest,” she says. She rolls to the door and then pauses. “I love you too.”

I settle on to my pillow and turn away from my wheezing bunkmate. After a few minutes I turn to a touch on the shoulder and open my eyes. It’s like I’ve gone to Heaven. Karl’s face shines beside a bouquet of roses.

“Hey,” I say. “My hero.”

He beams.

“How are you doing?” He places the flowers on the side table and sits on the edge of my mattress.

“Pretty good really,” I say. “Ankle still hurts but they keep feeding me stuff if the pain gets too bad.”

“Rough.” His hand slips across the sheets to hold mine.

I realize I need to say or do something. I’ve always liked Karl, but— “Karl,” I squeeze his hand and then let go. His smile twitches off kilter. “Can we be friends for a bit? I need friends right now.”

He cracks his neck before responding and pats the spot where my hand had been. “Sure,” he says. “We can be friends.”

“Thanks.”I swallow hard. “And for the flowers too, they’re pretty.”

“Something beautiful,” he replies.

We sit for another minute in silence before he stands and leaves with only a wave.

It was hard, but I feel good about it.

Four hours later, I have a laptop. A scratched-up Dell, but to me it’s a thing of beauty; it’s a prosthetic limb. My mom has also left me my copy of
The Bell Jar
.

By the time Constable Williams enters the room, I’ve got everything I need.