Fifteen ♥
*
Grant waited for the person on the other end of the line to explain himself.
"You didn't take my call."
"You know I screen my phone calls," Grant said. As far as he was aware, the person on the other end of the line had never met him before, but that didn't stop him from pretending that they knew him well.
There was a vague feeling in his gut that the person was very serious about something. Something that Grant strongly suspected he wasn't going to like one bit. He took a deep breath and pressed his lips together, and rubbed his eyes with his free hand.
"That's a very good practice to have," the voice on the other end of the line. "And besides, I know it's rude to answer someone else's phone."
"Who is this?"
"What?" The voice on the other end of the line tried to sound hurt, but instead he just sounded mocking. "You don't know?"
"I'd rather you just told me, so I didn't have to guess."
"That makes a lot of sense," the voice said. There was a pause. Grant wondered for a moment if they were screwing with him. But then he decided that they were, and that they obviously were. There wasn't any other way to interpret it.
"So you're not going to tell me?"
"Guess," the voice said.
It had a mechanical tone to it, but it was too natural to be a person. Probably, it was someone using a voice-changer. It didn't help Grant identify the voice. Not enough to arrest them, anyways.
"You're one of those hackers."
"Wow," the voice said. "Very specific, too. First guess. I'm impressed."
"What are you calling me for?"
"For? Why, I'm not calling you for anything at all, Mr. Ex-Sheriff."
"You're being awfully smug, for some punk kid."
"Is that what I am, Sheriff?"
"You know as well as I do that is exactly what you are," Grant answered. "But I take it you didn't call to trade barbs with me."
"Guessed it again, Mr. Holloway! I'm very impressed. You should have been a detective, or something, don't you think? You're awfully good at these deductions."
"So why don't you tell me what you're calling for?"
"And spoil the fun of teasing you? Boo."
"I could always hang up," Grant offered.
"The police would be on their way before you can sneeze."
"You haven't called them yet?"
"We're still considering," the voice on the other end of the line said. "Some of us think you're just like any of them. Like that mayor of yours. But, you know, some people think that you might just be saved."
"Saved?"
"I'm not going to sit here and explain it all to you on the phone. I'm sure that I'm eating up your hotel bill as we speak. This was just a courtesy call, you know. From the ones who want to keep seeing the rat running the maze. Nobody likes being in a cage."
"Are you–what? Is someone you know in jail? Wrongfully imprisoned? Is that what it is?"
"Goodbye, Mr. Ex-Sheriff. Have a good day. The clock is ticking."
Grant looked at the phone and frowned, set it down on the cradle and put his face in his hands. "We've got to get going."
"You don't say," Misty answered dryly. She was the only one ready to go, of course. Grant slid out of bed and pulled some clothes on in a hurry. She went outside. He didn't watch her through the window, because he didn't want to know what she was going to do next. He had a good feeling he wasn't going to like finding out about it.
When he left, he left quietly and took all his things with him. The room was left with the lights off, looking almost the same as it had when they checked in off the street the night before. Grant looked around the parking lot for only a moment before the car pulled up in front of him.
The truck had been big enough to stand out, and the car that Misty had stolen was expensive enough to be ostentatious. This, on the other hand, was as unremarkable as a vehicle could get–a small four-door Ford sedan, painted gray. A car that anyone who saw it might forget the moment that it left their line of sight.
"Do I want to know?"
"Get in," Misty said. It was an answer, in her way, and it was probably the answer he would rather have had.
Grant pulled the driver's side door out. He kept his eyes on the horizon. It made it easier to keep his nerves at bay, and it made it a lot easier to keep from noticing that the car had been stolen.
"We've got trouble," he said. The sound of sirens was audible with the shifting wind, and he knew that any minute now, a cop was going to come sliding around the corner, and they'd be trapped.
Misty kept moving, slowly but surely.
"I think they're working together," Grant said softly as they pulled onto a country road. He figured that a few miles down the road, they would rejoin the interstate. He just wasn't about to ask, for fear that he ended up looking downright stupid.
"Who's that?"
"The cops and the bad guys."
"The cops are the bad guys," Misty said.
Grant knew in his gut that she didn't mean anything by it. He tried to tell himself so that he believed it. It almost worked, in its way. Misty read the expression on his face, and her own expression soured to match it. He let a breath out through his nose and tried not to feel as irritated as he was.
"The hackers," he said.
"Hackers, huh?"
"I told you about them," Grant suggested.
"Right," Misty agreed, with a voice that said that she didn't believe it, but wasn't willing to argue the point. Grant didn't bother to fight her on it. He had other things on his mind that were a little more pressing than whether or not she believed he'd already gone over everything.
So he gave her the short version of it again. Misty nodded as she listened, though he had no doubt that if he brought it all up again, with the listening that she had just done, she was going to be telling him a second time that she'd never heard anything about it.
"My point is this. We're fighting two fronts. We've got the government, with all their powers, and all their tools, on one side."
"Sure," Misty said. This had already occurred to her, he knew.
"And on the other side we've got these kids. Guerrilla tactics. We're trying to protect ourselves on all sides, and it's not going to work."
"No," she agreed.
"So we need to take somebody out. To give us a fighting chance."
She looked over at him, then, and for the first time she seemed to be thinking seriously about the question of how they could get out of the situation they'd found themselves in.
"Sure," she said quietly. "But how are we going to do that?"
"You know about computers," Grant said. He let the comment hang in the air, hoping that she would get what he meant without needing it explained in detail. He wasn't sure that he could count on it. The silence suggested that maybe he needed to spell the whole thing out, in the hopes that it would turn into a dialogue rather than spouting his ideas with no feedback.
"I don't know how to deal with these guys. I've been floundering for weeks on this thing, and it just keeps getting worse. I saw you the other night. You know what you're doing."
"What's your point?"
"You think you can hit them where they live?"
Misty let out a breath, rocked her head from side to side. "I mean, I think I can try."
Grant's expression soured.
"Okay," he said, feeling very much like he was being forced to swallow an entire, living frog. "So what do you need?"
It was never as simple as it seemed like it would be, and there was never an easy answer that made everything so much better. That was a given; it was how life worked in the world, and there was nothing unexpected nor unusual about it. What he didn't like was the look in Misty's eyes. The look that said that what she really needed in 'a computer' wasn't something that they could get for a couple dollars used at a pawn shop, or something they could use in the library.
Not, of course, that they could afford to stop in at the local library to use their computers, even if it would be adequate. It would be tantamount to telling the police to come and arrest them, and they had already taken enough risks in the past week.
She started to talk about computer specs like she knew what she was saying, and Grant started to think about how much money that was all going to cost. How little they had, at this point, to spend. The two weren't going to meet; the cost was going to skyrocket a thousand times higher than their ability to pay for it. But the issue remained, even still. His lips pressed together sourly.
"Yeah, okay. I get it."
"What's that supposed to mean? You don't want to do it any more?"
"No," Grant said. He hated to do it. Hated it. "I have one idea. There's a guy I know."
"And he's… what?"
"He sells that sort of stuff. He's an informant, sort of."
"What do you mean 'informant'? What do you mean, 'sort of'?"
"I mean that he's involved with the hacking kids, and I managed to catch his name in some digging. So far, he's been cagey, but I've been thinking that if we let him off of some charges, give him immunity where we can, then we could get him to talk."
Misty didn't ask what he was implying by that. It was obvious on the face of it. Grant's jaw kept tightening so much that it hurt. Then he would have to force himself to relax. Trying not to think about it was the best way, but he had to think about it.
"Does that mean we need to go back?"
"No," Grant answered. "At the very least, we don't have to do that."
"How were you going to offer him immunity, then?"
"He was aiding and abetting known felons, Misty; he doesn't necessarily have to be living in the county for me to come after him."
"No," she agreed finally. "I suppose he doesn't."
Grant gave directions, but the important thing was getting everything set up in advance. There was no way that they were going to be able to go in without a prelude. It was something, at least. He let out a long, low, frustrated breath, and made a call. The phone picked up on the third ring.
"R.T.C. P.C. Repairs, this is Jason."
"Jason Wright?"
"That's me," the voice said.
Grant had heard his voice before, but only in private conversations. The sound of his voice, professional and friendly, was almost sinister in its tone, because it implied something that Grant had always known and had never been a big fan of: the fact that it was impossible to tell a criminal apart from anyone else, unless you caught them committing a crime.
"I'm Sheriff Grant Morrison, with the Franklin County Sheriff's Department."
The other line was silent for a moment before Jason managed to catch himself. "Is there a problem, Officer?"
"There is," Grant said.
"What is this call regarding?"
"Are you busy?"
"I don't understand why you're asking."
"I know about your... extracurricular activities, Mr. Wright. And while you may not be concerned about a Sheriff's department in Idaho, I'd be willing to bet that you're doing enough that if I put some Feds on you, they'd be on you like white on rice."
There was another moment of silence. Grant guessed that he was collecting himself. It never sounded good when you denied charges with a trembling lower lip.
"I don't know what you're talking about," he said, in a voice that would have failed to convince anyone.
"I'm prepared to make all that go away, though."
"How is that?"
"I need computer access."
"Computer access?"
"Access. To a computer."
"I don't understand."
"I didn't ask you to understand, I asked you to let me use a computer."
Grant pointed at an exit, a quarter-mile up the road. Misty pulled over into the right-hand lane, and then smoothly pulled off of the interstate and onto the surface street, not asking which way to go from there. She pulled off and meandered down neighborhood roads.
"Alright," Jason answered finally. "That's not such a high price to pay, I guess. You know where the place is?"
"I've got a pretty good idea."
"Alright, then. And when you're done, you're done. You leave me be, and you don't come back around later trying to claim that you get to give me more shit later. Fair?"
"Completely fair."
Grant hung up the phone and started giving directions. Twenty minutes later, they were sitting outside of a P.C. repair shop that looked almost respectable. There weren't many around, but if he'd passed this one on the street he might not have given it a second glance.
"You know what you're doing?"
"Don't worry about what I'm doing," Misty answered.
Grant let out a breath. "Alright, then. We'll get going."
They went inside, and Grant put on his best sour expression. The guy in back was taller than he'd looked in the photos that Grant had seen, and the two men had never before stood face to face. It made his thin arms look even thinner. He was a slender guy, and might have been handsome if it weren't for the pallor of his skin.
Then again, he probably wasn't dealing with someone threatening to burn down his entire life under normal circumstances.
"Look, you can use the computer I've got back here, but I don't want any trouble, okay guy? Just do your thing and get out."
For a moment, every cell in Grant's body wanted to give the guy a piece of his mind. The moment didn't last long before he realized that there was nothing he could do but get himself into even worse trouble. "Of course," he said finally.
He turned back to Misty. She had already started working, not bothering to deal with the posturing or questioning. There was something pleasant in that. Something that Grant liked. He watched her work, the way that people might watch a mechanic work.
She looked at home doing this. More comfortable with it than she had with anything else that they'd been doing for the past two days.
Half an hour later, she pulled all her stuff off the table, disconnected a couple of wires, and stood up. Her expression was serious.
"We should go now. Talk on the road."