Page 21 of The Perfect Deception (Jessie Hunt #40)

Dallas Henry was laying low.

It was early evening in Bakersfield, California and even though he was itching to get back to Los Angeles, he knew patience was essential right now. This was a crucial moment for his plan and he couldn’t afford any stupid mistakes.

Tomorrow he’d be heading to L.A. to meet up with Hannah. That wasn’t the official reason. He was crashing at a buddy’s place for the weekend because the two of them were attending a concert at the Greek Theater on Saturday night. But Hannah had agreed to meet up with him for a bite the night before. It would be a great chance to see how she was doing emotionally two months after Finn Anderton’s stabbing. Maybe he’d even learn a little more about the guy’s current condition.

Of course, his goals when it came to Anderton were very different than Hannah’s. She wanted to see Finn make a full recovery. Dallas wanted him dead. After all, he was the one who had stabbed the guy repeatedly in the UC Irvine parking lot.

He’d had no choice. Anderton had accosted him in that lot and said that he knew Dallas was a fake. He said that he’d actually driven up to Bakersfield and talked to people from Dallas’s past. It seemed that they hadn’t been kind in their assessments of him, suggesting that his projected persona of a strapping but sensitive guy who cared about women’s issues wasn’t the real him.

That was true, of course. The image he presented to Hannah and the rest of the UC Irvine community was a carefully cultivated fa?ade. The truth was that women were the enemy, the cause of everything that had gone wrong in his life, starting with his own mother.

She was the evil snake who had cheated on his decent hard-working father with her boss. She was the one who somehow managed to bleed his dad for alimony and child support when her new beau was infinitely more wealthy than Dallas’s father. Emotionally at least, she was the one truly responsible for the drunken car “accident”

that had killed his dad when Dallas was fourteen, an accident that the police didn’t realize was actually a suicide. But Dallas did.

After that, he went into an emotional tailspin. That is, until he started going on dark web message boards, finding like-minded men who had been wronged by females of the species. He was all in for the war of the sexes. That was all he could think about. His grades faltered. He got into some fights at school, leading to detentions. He even had a brief drug-related suspension.

But after a rough freshman year of high school, he had an epiphany. He could do more for the cause from the inside than the outside, working as a kind of double agent. He would make the skanks and whores think he was their greatest advocate even as he was undermining them.

So h.

“turned it around”

in the middle of his sophomore year, finding the strength to move forward, despite his personal tragedy. At least that’s how it looked to an outsider. He pretended to forgive his bitch mother, who had destroyed their family and ultimately his father’s life.

His grades improved dramatically. Instead of joining the football team, he played mixed doubles for the tennis team. The girls were fond of him, and not just because of his muscles, dark hair and blue eyes.

They loved how he regularly proved himself to be an ally. In fact, he helped create the Allies Club, which provided pre-approved high school students—always teams of one guy and one girl—to walk or drive teenage girls home if they felt uncomfortable in a situation.

He was biding his time for the perfect opportunity to make a difference. And he found it when he learned of Mark Haddonfield. After that brave soul was captured and forced to recant his manifesto, the one that asked supporters to destroy those close to Jessie Hunt, Dallas took up the call. He even wrote to Haddonfield—under a pseudonym, of course—to promise that he would finish the job that his hero couldn't.

He'd determined that the best way to do that was to win over Hannah Dorsey, then betray, and ultimately end her. They were nearly the same age and both in college. It was the perfect cover. So he’d transferred to her school and over the course of several months, slowly wormed his way into her life. It was all going so well. Until that night in the parking lot with Finn Anderton.

Dallas thought that he’d killed the loser but he was wrong. After he escaped the parking lot unscathed, some do-gooder apparently came by, saw Anderton bleeding out on the asphalt, and kept him alive long enough to get him to the hospital. Yes, the guy was unconscious. But that could have changed at any moment. And what was the first thing Anderton would reveal once he woke up? The identity of his attacker. That wasn’t acceptable.

So for three weeks after the stabbing, Dallas tried to find a way to access Anderton’s hospital room so he could finish him off. But security guards were posted outside the room 24/7, making it impossible to get in alone. He was able to go inside one time, but it was under the guise of accompanying Hannah. He couldn’t very well kill Anderton with her in the room with him. That would defeat the whole goal of trying to hide the fact that he was the threat.

Thankfully, the situation resolved itself five weeks ago. That’s when Anderton’s family moved him from the hospital to a hospice facility. There’d been no word on his status since then, but why would there be? Was the Anderton family supposed to give regular updates saying how their son was permanently unconscious, slowly withering away? No, they’d make an announcement when he died, and not before. But until that happened, Dallas couldn’t help but always be a little on edge.

The situation had been a blessing in one way. Hannah had increasingly leaned on him for emotional support during the last two months. Her sister, Jessie Hunt—the one who had put Mark Haddonfield in prison in the first place—was out of the country on a sabbatical of some kind, and unavailable. That was one resource lost.

Kat Gentry, a private detective who often served as a sounding board for Hannah, wasn’t much help either. According to Hannah, she was constantly travelling around the southwest, trying to find some hitwoman who had once come after her. Hannah said that this Kat person was obsessed and that she was worried about her. Dallas didn’t care about that, but he did care that another person was emotionally unavailable to her, making him even more important.

She was living at her old house, along with Hunt’s husband and her de-facto stepfather, an LAPD detective named Ryan Hernandez. But according to Hannah, with Hunt gone, he was being taxed extra hard at work and didn’t have a lot of time to hang out. Seemingly every person she would normally lean on was otherwise occupied. That left Dallas.

It wasn’t all perfect. The summer had been complicated. They only got to see each other occasionally. Hannah was working in the research department at the police station where her sister’s unit operated and her hours could be unpredictable.

His job was less exciting than hers, but it served a purpose. He was currently working at a Bakersfield animal shelter. Hannah thought it was sweet, which was exactly what he’d hoped for. He neglected to mention that his favorite part of the job was watching animals get euthanized. He always made sure to be at work in time to see that. It was sometimes challenging to feign upset when they passed away but he pulled it off. He could fake tears. But while others got legitimately weepy, he always felt giddy at the sight of the light going out in the animals’ eyes.

That was something he hoped to see more of in the near future. Right now, things were long distance, and that had its benefits. It prevented him from inadvertently saying or doing the wrong thing. And absence seemed to be making her heart grown fonder. That was ideal, considering that he intended to break that heart and then break her. He couldn't wait to see the light go out in her eyes