“Take a look at this.” Dane picked up one of the sudoku books from the stack on the bookcase. He flipped through the pages to show Roselita the penciled-in pages. “Not a single mistake in any of these.” He picked up another one. “Here.” He handed the books one at a time to his partner. “Look for yourself.”
Roselita flipped through the magazines, unimpressed or uninterested with what she was seeing. “You’re going to have to give me more.”
Dane handed her the stack of drawings with the renderings of different roosters and what appeared to be statistical information listed across the pages. “What do you make of this?”
Roselita didn’t make anything of them. She handed them back to Dane almost immediately. “What are you trying to say, here, Dane? Seriously. This shit makes zero sense to me.”
“Okay,” Dane said. “I know what you’re going to say, but hear me out. What if Arnold didn’t create a system to beat the Slasher? What if it’s his brother?”
“Okay, so you’re saying he used the kid’s big brain to create a system to cheat the other players?”
Dane shook his head dismissively. “No, I don’t think he used the kid to create a system.”
“Then what?”
“I think the kid is the system. Seriously. Think about it. He took his brother in under his care. He didn’t give a shit about him before. He didn’t even want him at first, but now he goes to great lengths to protect him. He buys separate airplane tickets. They fly separate. He stashes him so he won’t get caught. I mean, why even take the kid with him in the first place if he didn’t actually need him to be there? It can’t be because all of a sudden he became brother of the year. It makes more sense that he went through all the extra trouble to protect his meal ticket.”
“I don’t know, Kirby.”
Dane said it before Roselita could. “It’s a stretch, I know, but if I’m right, and the kid was able to do what he did at the Slasher without a single person there able to pick up on how he was pulling it off, then imagine what he’d be worth to those people, or to anyone smarter than his idiot brother.”
“That’s an interesting theory, Kirby, but it doesn’t answer the main question we’re here to find out. Where the hell is he? That’s what we need to know.”
Dane leaned his weight into the doorjamb and rubbed at the scruff on his chin again. “I don’t know yet, but I do know where we can start looking.”
“The Farm?”
“The Farm.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Fenn was not inhuman. He felt pain just like anyone else. He didn’t have any specialized training. He wasn’t on any type of drug that altered his mind, enabling him to shut down all the same receptors in his brain that other people had, letting him know when he’d been hurt. He’d been shot. The pain was excruciating. He was badly hurt and he was well aware he was dying. The difference between Fenn and most people who found themselves in this position was his tolerance—his instinct to survive. It took discipline to endure pain. It took discipline and focus to work through it. Most people Fenn encountered lacked enough discipline to keep their emotions in check, to keep from acting out of impulse, much less the ability to move through pain and use it to their advantage.
This country was the worst. Americans were soft. It was a nation of children, spoiled and fat, who blindly followed leaders whose intent was clearly to keep them that way. That is why Fenn had been such an effective tool in the United States. But Fenn was not a tool. He was a soldier. Fenn had been a soldier his entire life but, unlike these fat and spoiled Americans, he followed no one blindly. Fenn had also been a prisoner once. His imprisonment at the camp in North Korea where he learned about discipline—where he learned about pain—had been a direct result of following leaders who didn’t have his best interests in mind. He’d been subjected to some of the most intense and horrific torture imaginable, and although what he learned there was exactly why he was still alive right now, he knew then that it would be the last time he followed anyone. It’s why he wore the vest, although Smoke had told him not to. Smoke said Fenn was weak to take such precautions, but now Smoke was dead. Fenn would’ve been, too, if he had listened to Smoke—if he had followed.
The wound in his shoulder still throbbed and shot fire through his whole body with his every movement, but he moved anyway. It had taken everything he had to push himself off the floor back at the American woman’s house. He had considered staying and ambushing the man who attacked him—the man who killed Smoke—but it wasn’t important. He had what they’d come for. He’d taken the money and made it to the car. He was able to stay conscious all the way to the address he’d taken off the fool he killed at the airport motel in Florida. He thought perhaps he’d find the boy here, the second objective he’d been tasked with. He blacked out in the bathroom. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been out, but he was able to get out before the other men arrived. He left through the back door before he was seen and made it back to the car. There were most likely American police in the house now. They were not with the man who killed Smoke. The man who attacked them last night was a professional killer.
Fenn was still bleeding, and the blood loss was making him too light-headed to drive anywhere else. Discipline was one thing, but science was another. He knew the limits of the human body, and he had reached his. The man with the baseball cap went back into the house, but the other one—the female in the nice clothes—remained outside in the yard. Fenn watched them carefully from the tiny car until the woman went inside, and then drove around the block to the next street over. He could not allow himself to be seen but couldn’t afford to black out again. He was in no condition to take on anyone—even weak American police like the ones inside the house. Fenn stopped the car. He began slipping in and out of the blackness again. White light snapped and sparkled at the edges of his vision. Unless he took care of himself quickly, nothing else would matter. Dead was dead.
Fenn stayed as calm as possible as he unbuttoned his shirt and unpeeled the Velcro straps of the Kevlar vest. Fresh patches of dark yellow and eggplant-colored bruises covered his entire chest. He was sure a few ribs were broken, too, but none of that concerned him. It was the bullet wound from the hit he took in the shoulder that was going to cause him to bleed out all over the front seat of this silly car. Fenn had already carefully torn the sleeve off his shirt, starting at the rip where the bullet had hit him, and wrapped the material around the wound, but it was blood soaked and needed to be changed and redressed. He ripped another large piece of the plastic trash bag that held the money he’d taken from the redheaded woman’s house and wadded it up to plug the leaking hole three inches up from his left bicep. He pushed the black plastic in deep and could feel himself passing out, but he didn’t. He thought of Smoke instead. He thought of all Smoke’s big talk and flashy suits. Smoke didn’t like the way the thick Kevlar vest made him look under those expensive clothes, so he never wore it—vanity—stupid. Smoke might as well have been American himself. Fenn didn’t care how he looked. He just wanted to take his money and find a way home. He pulled himself out of the car with his good arm, and slowly walked around to the trunk. He grabbed the shotgun Smoke had put back there and walked in between the houses and entered the toolshed out back.