“Sorry, Deck,” said Grinder, holding up his hands.
“There’s audio, Mila.”
Her eyes were as wide as Grinder’s had been.
I heard a chair push back and saw Grinder getting up from the table. “You’re a fucking wanker,” he spat.
That wasn’t the worst of it. When the man held his hand out to Mila, she took it. No flinch. No hesitation. They both walked out of the room.
“Not a fucking word,” I said to Edge, and then turned to look at Rile, whose eyes were hooded.
“Both of you go ahead and watch it. You can review the patent documents as well. If you have any questions, you can ask me when I get back.”
I stormed through the kitchen and out the back door. I didn’t know where Grinder took Mila, and I didn’t care. I needed to get the fuck out of there before I lost my temper completely.
Since when was I the fucking bad guy? I’d asked Mila if she wanted to stay, and she’d said yes. In fact, she’d snapped at me when I asked if she was sure. And then, after flinching away from me, she took Grinder’s hand like it was no big deal.
That, right there, was like a knife to my chest. I stalked into the office, grabbed the key to the Bummer, and walked through the barn to where we kept it.
I threw open the alley doors, got in, and started it up. Thank God, Boon had been driving it. If it hadn’t turned over, I might’ve smashed it to smithereens. Not that it would’ve been possible. This thing was built like a tank, mainly because, in part, it was one.
I took off through the closest pasture, back to the fire road where I could open the Bummer all the way up. I’d forgotten how fun this thing was to drive; the last time I had, it was because some fucking English footballers had figured out how to temporarily disable the ranch’s security system along with all of the vehicles they’d known about, and then kidnapped a woman who Z had moved here to keep her safe.
They sure as shit hadn’t known about the Bummer, nor did they know that even though they’d thrown a wrench in the system Burns and I had put in place, we had backups that no one could fuck with.
The kidnappers had ended up with bullets in their brains, the woman was now married to a former MI6 agent, and everyone lived happily ever after.
That was when Quint met his wife, too. For the second time in a handful of days, I felt the absence of my best friend. It wasn’t like we were joined at the hip, but if there was ever a time I needed his advice, now was it.
As I drove, I went over and over what had transpired between Mila and me in the last couple of hours.
After watching the surveillance tape of her attack, and then sorting through the patent files, I’d spent fifteen minutes thinking over the best way to tell her what I’d seen, that I knew who her attacker had been, and that Sybil wasn’t her father’s child.
Somehow, I’d gotten it so wrong that she couldn’t stand for me to touch her. What though? What had I said? How had I said it?
I thought back over her reaction to each piece of information I’d presented her with. She’d been shocked, but she continued asking questions. It was when I mentioned her parents’ divorce and my theory about what had caused it, that she first appeared angry.
The Bummer hit a big bump right when I crested a rise, sending it airborne. The back three rows of seats rattled around, since they weren’t all that secure, to begin with, but my beloved Frankenstein vehicle landed smooth as butter and kept right on going.
This wasn’t the first vehicle Quint and I had built. We’d started out taking one of the tractors apart and reassembling it so it looked more like a cross between a lawnmower and a go-cart. It was when I decided to make it radio-operated that Z took notice.
“Show me how it works,” he’d said to my then-fifteen-year-old self.
I’d showed him, and even though there were things I hadn’t figured out how to make work yet, Z had still been impressed.
The following summer, he took Quint and me on a road trip to California. We’d pulled that damn modified tractor all the way to the Central Coast. When we arrived, an old man came out on the porch of one of the coolest houses I’d ever seen.
When we got out of the truck, Z had put his hand on my shoulder. “This is the boy I’ve been telling you about.”
The man descended the steps so slowly, I thought maybe Quint and I should help him. When he reached the bottom, he walked around the trailer, looking at the tractor. He studied it for a few minutes and then walked over to where Quint and I waited with Z.
“My name is Laird Butler,” the man had said. “Although I’m also known as Burns.”
I remembered shaking the man’s hand, and then him saying, “Come with me, young man. You and I are going to figure out what else we can control by radio.”
At first, I felt bad that Burns hadn’t said anything to Quint, but later that night, before we went to sleep in the guest house the Butler family had invited us to stay in, Quint reassured me.
“I’d be pissed if he asked how you reassembled the chassis, because I’m the one who did that. Mr. Butler wasn’t interested in that. He wanted to know how you’d rigged the remote.”