Page 99 of The Big Fix

“What happened when you were eighteen?” Jing asked.

“I was messed up and—”

“You weren’t messed up,” I growled at him. “You just needed some—”

“I was messed up,” he corrected me. “By then I was a serious hacker and had apparently wound up on the FBI watch list.”

“Apparently?” I snapped at him. “Are you kidding?”

He shrugged. “I was going to jail.”

“Ohmygod,” Arden gasped. “Owen.”

“Listen, I was Robin Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor, and the rich didn’t even know I was skimming.”

Dante scoffed. “I seem to recall you removing all the money from a dirty pharmaceutical company that was sending a cancer drug to market that would have killed a lot of people.”

“Yeah. See?” he told me. “I was the good guy. I leaked the information where they stated, in writing, that they would rather pay out for lawsuits than take a hit to their bottom line and fix the tainted product.”

“That seems like a very good thing,” Arden concurred.

“Right? And I had memos and—”

“Or,” I countered, “instead of doing all that illegal hacking, you could have allowed the FBI agents—who already had a whistleblower from that company in protective custody and ready to testify—to do their job.”

He squinted.

I pressed on. “Your way was bigger, flashier, but the same justice was served in the same amount of time, was it not?”

“Yes,” Owen muttered under his breath. He had to agree because it was the truth. There had been no reason for him to interfere.

“And for that, and many more transgressions—”

“So many more,” Owen added with a sly chuckle.

“—you were in a world of shit,” I finished, scowling at him.

“I was,” he said with a sigh, then smiled at me. “And you showed up. Again.”

I had gotten a call from Sara’s mother. She didn’t know what to do. Owen was sad one minute, in a rage the next. He was fighting at school, he was failing twelfth grade, he wasn’t eating, he wouldn’t talk to them, and there was, she was fairly certain, a strange van parked down the street from their house.

When I got there, he’d already been taken into custody and was sitting in jail awaiting formal charges. He’d hacked into the Department of Defense database and was moving money from military projects to fund Planned Parenthood and Veteran Affairs and a slew of other very worthy causes, but the NSA had him dead to rights and pointed out that since he’d be eighteen in a month, he should be tried as an adult and go to jail for half his life. An example needed to be made.

Owen grimaced. “I was going to jail for at least twenty years, if not more.”

“Jesus, Owen,” Jing groaned. “This is why Jared was so up in arms about the DEA database thing, wasn’t it?”

“Can we not bring that up again?” Owen muttered.

“Keep going with the story,” Arden prodded him.

“Well, so they let Jared into the jail cell, and I was like, was he always that hot?”

I shook my head at him as Jing nodded and Arden laughed.

“That’s sick,” Dante said with a rakish grin. “That man could be your father.”

I turned to him. “What?”