Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: Please see Chapter 1.
MILES TO GO BEFORE I SLEEP
Chapter 11
Dr Field took in their looks of worry at his precipitously early visit and rapidly explained that he had just taken on an urgent case that would take up most of the rest of the day, in order to allay their fears. Ruth Castle had found him last night with a pleased expression on her face to let him know that the bar on John Barnes visiting his elder son had been lifted by the same person who had instigated it – the younger boy Samuel.
Dr Field was also pleased; he found himself liking the trio. Though with gruffly matching macho exteriors, their care and concern for each other was evident; they listened to medical instructions without truculence and despite friendly flirting, neither of the young men had treated Ruth Castle with anything less than the respect due her position as a highly accomplished nurse, instead of the lewd and overtly racist commentary she often received. They also called their father 'Sir' with a genuine respect all too often sadly lacking in today's egocentric brats. Dr Field Senior was the kindest and most softly-spoken father a man could ever wish for, but Dr Field Junior's butt would have been blistered red raw for a week if he'd ever whiningly called his Pops 'man', 'dude', 'guy' or 'Frederick' as a lot of the ungrateful brats he encountered these days petulantly did.
He reassured them that due to how well Dean was healing, the physiotherapy would only need about a week to ten days – it was just to ease Dean back in gently after spending nearly a week in bed and ingesting nothing more than soup and soft foods. If Dean tried to stand up right now he'd keel over like a felled pine and his startled stomach would forcefully eject a burger or anything too complex for it to handle.
"We can get you started tomorrow," Dr Field assured Dean heartily as he left to start on his new case.
"Um…thanks…" Dean and John exchanged anxious looks as Castle and Field departed.
"I've got a cash-stash in my trunk," John mused half-to-himself, "and there are shelf-stacking jobs going at the local K-Mart…" But he knew it wasn't nearly enough; in the United States, life was cheap…being seriously ill or injured was hideously expensive.
"The Finchley credit cards wouldn't have covered medical insurance anyway," Dean fretted and glared at Sam, "We're going to have to do a runner the instant they realise we can't pay."
"We have paid," Sam told them both flatly, "There's no problem with the insurance."
"Did you pull that bank robbery in Springville three days ago?" asked John with not entirely joking facetiousness.
Dean stared at his brother and then went deathly pale. "Lift up your shirt!"
"What?" Sam recoiled from the barked command.
"I want to see your back, lift up your shirt, right now!" Dean's tone edged perilously close to hysterical.
Utterly confused but not willing to prolongue his brother's evident and acute distress, Sam obediently turned his back to Dean's bed and crossed his arms over, gripping the hems of his T-shirt and loose over-shirt each side of his torso at the waist as if he were about to pull them up and over his head. Instead he raised the garments up until they were level with his chest, allowing Dean and by extension John Winchester to look at his spine and lower back.
"No scars, thank god." Dean slumped back into his pillow in relief. "I thought for a minute you'd done something really stupid like sold a kidney…"
Sam released his hold on his clothing and tugged them back into place as he turned to face his brother; even Dad had gone a little white as the implications of Dean's statement sank in. Sam shook his head at the pair of them, knowing he would have to tell them…not that Dean's sudden terror had been entirely out of the ball park – he would have sold his internal organs, hell he would have sold himself in every piss-reeking back alley from here to New York had it been necessary to fund Dean's recovery.
He sighed exaggeratedly, folding his arms like he was the stern father and they were naughty schoolboys…like some guy had said it's all in the delivery…"Samuel John Barnes has sufficient medical insurance to pay for his brother's medical care."
"How?" John asked his son.
Sam shrugged. "At college after I was legal I gambled…once. I placed a series of accumulator bets on some horse races…and I won."
Dean's eyes narrowed. "How much?"
Sam blew out a breath, "A bit over $20,000."
"U.S.?" Dean exclaimed.
"Yeah."
"Wow." Dean shook his head, "and that was before you got The Shining?That settles it – dad, we have got to go to Vegas."
John shook his head. "Sam…that's amazing but twenty-k…" isn't even a drop in the ocean of what this is costing.
"I created the Barnes identity and put the money in offshore long-term accumulation investment trusts." Sam explained, causing a prolonged pause of baffled silence.
"Do you speak nerd?" Dean asked their father hopefully.
Rolling his eyes at Dean, Sam replied, "The financial minutia of it all isn't important. What is relevant is that Samuel John Barnes is bona fide. He lives a bucolic life at a PO Box in Stanford; he has a bank account and pays tax on it and he has top-rate medical insurance for himself, his brother Dean Thomas Barnes and their father, John Dean Barnes. I'll give you each a Pacificare® Card this afternoon."
"All three of us are covered?" John asked in astonishment.
"Yes…" Sam hesitated, "…just try not to get injured too often."
"How 'not' often?" John pressed.
"About once a year…" Sam shrugged at Dean's glower, "…it's accumulation investment – the less you take out the more cash accumulates for later when you might really need it."
For a moment he allowed himself to bask in their admiration, then Sam suggested, "Dad, let me take your car to the motel and I'll get the cards, you stay with Dean and see if you can get the specifics of the physio?"
John nodded agreement and gave Sam the keys, moving to sit back by Dean as Sam left and exchanging a relieved look with his eldest son. They'd survived for years by cash-in-hand jobs, cheques from grateful clients, hustling pool and credit card fraud; being able to lie in a hospital without worrying about how he was going to wangle skipping out on the bill had long ago been related to the drawer marked 'impossible fantasy' in John Winchester's mind.
Chapter 12
Sam stopped off at the dry cleaner's en route to dad's old clunker in the hospital parking lot, buoyed by a sensation of relief. What was that old saying…Truth, shielded by a bodyguard of lies…Fortunately Dean and Dad had bought the story, but Sam had been acutely aware of how precisely he'd needed to mix truth and lies together to get it past not just Dean's but Dad's finely-honed BS-meter, and unlike Dean, lying wasn't his forte.
Although it wasn't exactly Dean's either, Sam acknowledged in his brother's defence as he put his jacket in Dad's car and started it up. It was just the different styles of deceit. Dean was no good at straightforward lies, but excelled at complex duplicity.
That wasn't so much because he was lying but because he was acting. Dean became the character he was pretending to be – cop, US Marshal, FBI agent. Sam knew that in Dean's head he had created entire family backgrounds and character scenarios for these fictitious individuals and that meant Dean was able to make them 'real' in a sense that just trying to bluff his way through wouldn't have.
In a way, Dean was a chameleon, a sort of emotional shape-shifter, shedding one character to become another as needed. It was something he was good at because it was something he had always been able to do. Sam remembered Dean's rolling stone gathers no moss line back when Sam had insisted they go and help out Zack, and in hindsight had realised that Dean had always, essentially, been alone.
He certainly hadn't been unpopular or bullied during their intermittent periods of formal schooling. Dean was bright and charismatic and witty; students and teachers alike reacted well to his quips and his lazy charm and boyish grin. Even when he was a teenager he'd never inspired hostility from other boys due to his burgeoning good looks and incredibly he had even been accepted by parents. Moms and dads knew that Dean was a safe 'bad boy', like The Fonz after two seasons of living in close proximity to the Cunninghams.
He had just enough James Dean Rebel Without A Cause attitude to make a girl feel thrillingly risky, yet they and their daddies knew he would never push any girl into anything she was not comfortable with, nor tip a vial of Rohypnol into a woman's drink. Indeed, at the last high school Sam had ever properly attended, when he was twelve, seventeen-year-old Dean had come to pick him up in his then 'new' Impala (as usual with the Winchesters, Dean's Driver's Ed pass paperwork had been forged by Dad's friend, Pastor Jim, ironic considering he was an excellent, instinctual driver). It was the night the other kids were all enjoying the Junior Prom.
Already his pride and joy, the car had been obtained for him from a client as 'payment' by John Winchester who, for once, had seen the naked longing in his eyes that faithful, obedient, good son Dean would never verbalise. Money had been a rare commodity during their childhood and Sam had no memory of Dean ever asking their father for any toy or present. Somehow there was always a trinket or a candy bar for Sam's birthday and Christmas, and nowadays Sam wondered how often Dean had gone hungry himself or how young his brother had started working in violation of child labour laws to get money for Sam.
Sam had lingered in the school, resentfully knowing that John Winchester would be uprooting them again within days, and spitefully hoping one of the jocks would take his keys to the Impala's paintwork. But Dean had gone up to them with his usual smirk and good-ole'-boy charm and had them eating out of his hand – right up to the moment Dean had suddenly shot across to the buffet and got hold of one kid, a handsome but spoiled brat named Willis or something. He'd called the kid out there and then for slipping something in a girl's drink. 'Willis' had kicked up a My-daddy's-the-Mayor stink but had tried to smash the glass when Dean picked it up and handed it to the Science Ed teacher for testing. The test had come back with an illegal sedative, and three girls from the poorest part of town came forward to accuse the kid of rape, stating he had told them nobody would believe 'white trash ho's'. Several parents in the town had given John Winchester large cheques as a leaving gift as thanks for his son's sharp eyed-vigilance.
But people who thought they knew Dean Winchester well had no idea that they were basically looking into a mirror, that they never breached the surface. Dean simply reflected back what he knew they expected or wanted to see, the real him untouched as if behind one of those double-sided mirrors where you can see out but nobody can see you. When we killed Mary, Dean's eyes bled too…Before that, Sam would have bet his life that he knew Dean better than Dean knew himself; he'd never asked his brother, but had acknowledge he didn't know everything about Dean as he'd assumed.
John Winchester had had his obsession, Sam had had Dean, but Dean had been alone…and always braced for the day Sam would abandon him like their father essentially had for longer and longer periods. I'm know I'm a freak and one day everyone will leave me – the words had been spat at Sam by the shape-shifter, but the thoughts – the belief – had been Dean's.
Sometimes Sam wondered if Dean had had imaginary friends to keep the loneliness at bay, but of course if he had Dean would never mention them. It would have been all too likely that John Winchester would have tried to take them out with that old .45 revolver of his.
Speaking of which…Sam turned his father's care into the parking lot of the motel next to the bay where the Impala would be once he collected it from the garage. When it came to his duplicity, Sam always made sure to stick as close to the truth as possible; being a plausible liar wasn't about dishonesty, it was about presentation. When he was a kid in some town somewhere, there'd been an old Sunday School teacher who'd explained sin to the children with a simple yet effective illustration…The reason we all sin is because sin is served up deliciously! Sin is not nasty or ugly to our eyes nor tastes bitter on our tongues. The Devil does not plonk down before us a dirty plate of cold, raw cabbage and a wooden spoon and bark at us to eat; Satan lays the table with linen and silver and candles and fine china; he presents us with a bowl of hot cherry pie and fresh cream and whispers in our ear, "'Go on…just one bite.'"
That was it – it was all about how you presented the illusion; smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand; get everyone focussing on what you're saying about Point A here so they're distracted when you skim over Point B there – always serve them cherry pie and cream, never cabbage.
It was imperative neither Dean nor dad was aware of the full situation, that the 'bit' over $20,000 had amounted to $82,700. Nor had those sedate long-term investments come first. He'd taken the lot, all $102,000 of it bar the $700, to investment bankers Goldman Sachs and gambled on repeated high-risk-high-return investments and re-investments. When he stopped six months later, his 100-K had become $12.7 million, U.S. He'd used $1.7 million to set up the Barnes identity and everything he might need: offshore trust funds that dribbled income in a monthly bank account, top-flight medical insurance for three men, long-term Blue Chip stock investments and even pension-index-linked savings accounts.
It was of course highly unlikely that John Winchester or either of his sons would live long enough to be old age pensioners. It was highly likely, assuming Dad or Dean wasn't killed outright, that they would be permanently disabled or left needing 24-hour-care in their lifelong war against evil. As things stood, they would have nothing to look forward to except for soup kitchens, VA charity hospitals – in John's case – or wheeling themselves round back-alleys on wooden boards in the middle of winter. This way, that nightmare would never happen.
It had taken a further five million to clear John and Dean's criminal backgrounds. It had taken finesse and time to hack into credit card company databases and locate police warrants and credit blacklists for the Winchester terrible twosome. Then Sam had written hefty cheques as Barnes, coincidentally placing the blame on a now-deceased, mentally ill cousin – the same get-out clause they now used when anyone connected dead murder suspect Dean Winchester (really the shape-shifter) with the live, genuine article.
Some of the companies had banked the cheques but spitefully kept the warrants/blacklist, so Sam had had to go back in and erase these. It had taken another million and change to match up the Winchester men's arsenal – enough to invade Iraq…again – of fake licences and permits to computer databases. Of course, if anyone felt that neither the permit nor what their computer screen was telling them was sufficient, they would find no paperwork in the basement paper files, but Sam knew it wasn't likely. People tended to trust the screen in front of them, and a good fake gun licence was indistinguishable from the real thing in the 'flesh' so to speak.
The rest of the money had been split in several ways. Making Sam, John and Dean Barnes 'real' and legal without resorting to criminality or forgery had cost a pretty penny, as had the complicated route giving Sam complete Power of Attorney over Dean's person and welfare – and vice versa – just as he had yelled at his father when he'd initially banned him from Dean's hospital room.
As long as Sam didn't use the funds for illegal purposes, he was committing no crime in using the surname Barnes instead of Winchester, but the legalese had given him headaches for weeks. The most important aspect was making sure the money went to where it was supposed to in the case of Sam getting killed – a not unlikely occurrence. Once a month, Sam placed a phone call to a firm of highly respected lawyers, informing them that Samuel Barnes was alive and his current location. If the firm did not receive that phone call, they were to wait forty-eight hours after the deadline and then go to Samuel Barnes' last location. Details of Dean and John Winchester's appearance, vehicles, etc., were locked in the firm's vault. Once it was established that Samuel John Barnes Winchester was deceased, his entire estate (less a hefty fee to the firm for enduring the current shenanigans) would be split evenly between two very rich men – John Dean Winchester and Dean Thomas Winchester – or it would all go to the survivor.
After that extravaganza had been settled, the remainder paid for Sam's college costs and he had placed the last bit back into the Barnes' accounts, intending to use some of it for his and Jess's wedding…
Sam veered away from too painful reminiscence as he placed his father's gear on the bed in the room. The point was that he had no intention of revealing any of that to his father or brother. Belief that they were wanted felons for credit card fraud in over a dozen states, a healthy concern for medical expenses and a lack of knowledge that they were 'legally' able to tote around all that weaponry would keep Dad and Dean sharp and on their toes and make sure they didn't become complacent. The fact they thought there was no safety net would have them trying a lot more carefully to keep their balance on the tightrope.
Calling a cab and locking the room, Sam went back to the garage, where he found that they had been true to their word. Dean's car looked like it had just rolled out of a 1967 Chevy showroom instead of being battered by the vagaries of human society and its latest eccentric owner for over thirty-five years.
Paying them a hefty tip for their trouble, Sam got in and started her up, finding the Impala to be a purring panther of a car powerfully devouring the mileage back to the hospital. Dean's going to be drooling all over the leather for weeks when he sees this, Sam thought happily as he pulled into the hospital garage.
Continued in Chapter 13…
© 2006, Catherine D Stewart
