Hot Shot (61 page)

Yank gazed at the game controls with distaste. "I don't think so. I don't like playing this game, Sam."

Sam slapped him on the back. "Tough shit, hombre. This was your idea."

Victors was the most complex of the early target games. It provided a miniature history of the development of weaponry, from the stone age to the atomic age. On the first screen, primitively shaped men threw stones at small four-legged creatures and dodged lightning bolts from the sky. On the second and third screens, they shot arrows at running men and then fired guns at a platoon of soldiers while they avoided return fire. The final screen featured a moving city skyline. The players controlled an airplane that dropped bombs down onto small targets as skyborne missiles moving in erratic patterns tried to blow up the plane. If the player survived all the screens, a mushroom cloud appeared with the final score and a message:

CONGRATULATIONS.

YOU HAVE SUCCESSFULLY WIPED OUT

CIVILIZATION.

NOW WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?

That message had knocked everybody out.

Sam had none of Yank's reluctance about playing a practice game. As he stood in front of the machine in a white shirt and trousers, with his necktie pulled loosely down from his open collar, Susannah remembered all those nights at Mom & Pop's. Mom & Pop's was now a vegetarian restaurant called Happy Sprouts. They hadn't been there in years.

"Okay, I'm ready," Sam said. "High score wins. Let's toss to see who goes first."

"Go ahead," Yank said gloomily. "You're ready. You might as well play."

Sam limbered his fingers and gave Susannah a cocky grin. Then he turned back to the machine. "Come on, baby. Don't let me down."

Paige couldn't help it. She stepped forward to watch. Susannah seemed certain that Sam was going to win. Maybe when that happened, it would trigger something inside of Yank.

Maybe he would fall out of love with Susannah and in love with her. Maybe they would get married and live at Falcon Hill…

And maybe cows would fly over their wedding.

Sam Gamble was a superb video-game player, she'd give him that. He concentrated so intently on the screen and the controls moving beneath his hands that she doubted if anything could distract him. A lock of straight black hair tumbled down over his forehead as he moved through the first three screens with a ruthless efficiency. The machine beeped. The beeps got faster and faster. He hit the final screen. The muscles in his forearms spasmed as he maneuvered the controls. Missiles flew, bombs dropped. His face blazed with excitement.

Sam gave a victorious roar.

The mushroom cloud appeared and the screen flashed its message. He had scored 45,300

points out of 50,000.

He turned to Yank and grinned. "In my heyday, I made 48,000, but I guess I can't complain."

And then Paige watched while he ran his eyes over Susannah's body. The way he did it wasn't exactly creepy—Paige could see that, in his own way, he really did care about her sister. But still, the possessiveness in his appraisal made her skin crawl. Only someone who was entirely self-absorbed could be so arrogant. What a terrible man to have fallen in love with.

Yank, looking completely miserable, walked over to the machine. He sighed and stared at the screen. For a moment he did nothing, and then he turned back toward them as if he were about to say something. Apparently he reconsidered. Clamping his jaw tight, he returned his attention to the machine and pushed the button.

Sweet.

It was so sweet watching him work.

He kept his hands loose, his attention focused. Every motion was precise. He did nothing at random. One by one the screens surrendered to him. Every projectile found its target.

Arrows flew, bullets whizzed. He dropped his bombs with deadly accuracy and dodged missiles before they even came close. It was as if he had envisioned every event before it could happen. Nothing was random. He was all-powerful, all-knowing. No man could be so perfect. Only God. Only the Mighty Creator Himself could play so perfectly.

Fifty thousand.

Fifty thousand perfect points.

"You son of a bitch," Sam said. Over and over. "You son of a bitch…"

"She's mine, Sam," Yank replied, looking even more miserable than before the game.

"We have a deal, and you have to live up to it."

Sam stared down at the floor. Long seconds ticked by. He gazed at Susannah. "Do you really want him?"

"A deal is a deal," she whispered.

Paige could feel this great, awful sob rising up from the very bottom of her soul. She couldn't breathe for fear it would burst from within her. She had to hold it back and hide her grief in a deep secret place where it could never be discovered. Somehow, she had to find the generosity of spirit to give these two people she loved her blessing. And then she would disappear from their lives because she simply could not bear to watch them together.

"I love you, Suzie," Sam said hoarsely, with an expression of desperation on his face.

Slowly, sadly, Susannah shook her head.

Sam felt it then. Deep in his guts. He finally understood that he had truly lost her. That no sparkling oratory, no offensive he could launch, regardless of how brazenly conceived, how aggressively implemented, would ever bring her back. For the first time in his life, he had been defeated by a will greater than his own. And then he had a glimpse of something dark and unpleasant hovering on the edge of his unconscious. A glimpse of something Susannah had once tried to tell him—that vision wasn't enough. That it wouldn't stave off loneliness or keep old age at bay. That there was a kind of love in the world of which he was incapable. Susannah understood that love, but he didn't. And because he couldn't give it to her, he had lost her.

He blinked his eyes. Picked up his suit coat. Screw her. He didn't need Susannah. He didn't need anybody. The world of ideas stretched before him, and that was enough.

He ran the collar of his suit coat through his fingers. Then he lifted his eyes to Yank's.

"Victors is your game, isn't it?"

Yank nodded slowly. "It was the last game I invented. Right before you made me leave Atari."

"Why didn't you ever tell us?"

"You all kept going on about it. I was embarrassed. I meant to tell you, but then I waited too long, and it got awkward."

Sam could have cried foul, but Yank was the greatest engineer he'd ever met, and he deserved respect. "It's a good game, Yank," he said huskily. "A real good game."

He turned to walk out the door.

And collided with Mitchell Blaine.

Mitch exploded into the office. His face was flushed, his blue dress shirt stuck to his chest with sweat. His light blue eyes held a savage, awful gleam none of them had ever seen before. "What in the goddamn everlasting
hell
is going on here?" he roared.

Paige's feet seemed to move of their own volition as she raced toward him and threw her small body into his arms. Safe, solid Mitch. He was as good as a daddy. The only force of stability in a world filled with familiar people gone crazy. She had telephoned him right away, as soon as she had realized they were actually going to play this crazy game. But he hadn't gotten here in time.

"You're too late," she said. "It's over."

Mitch circled Paige's shoulders and hugged her against him. His arm was strong and protective, like her father's should have been when she was a child. She wanted to cuddle up against him and let him keep the wolves away.

"Somebody'd better start talking fast," he hissed, hugging her close. "Right now.

Susannah, tell me what happened."

She shrugged with all the nonchalance of SysVal's unshakable corporate president—the valiant female warrior who had taken on everything and everybody who had threatened her company. But as she watched her sister cuddled into Mitch's big arms, her bottom lip began to quiver. "Yank won me."

Mitch's eyes shot to Yank. He pierced him with an icy gaze as deadly as any of Victors'

missiles. "What does that mean?"

"It's very simple, Mitch," Yank said. "Sam refused to accept the fact that Susannah no longer wanted him in her life, so he and I had a contest. Whoever won got to take her to bed. I won."

Somewhere in Mitch's solid thirty-eight-year-old body, the reflexes of an Ohio State wide receiver still existed. With a muffled roar, he released Paige, shot over the corner of the desk, and charged straight for Yank Yankowski.

Yank went down immediately.

Paige screamed, Susannah yelled, both women raced across the small office and threw themselves on Mitch, one of them pulling at his legs, the other at his arms.

"Get off!" Paige screamed, straddling his hips. "Get off, you'll kill him!"

Susannah grabbed a handful of blue Oxford-cloth dress shirt (light starch only) and pulled. "Stop, Mitch. No! Don't do this!"

Sam stood by the doorway and watched the four of them grappling on the floor. God, he was going to miss this place.

Susannah lost one of her high heels. Paige knocked a Rolodex to the floor and the cards went skidding everywhere. The glowing screen of the Victors game flickered above them.

Mitch shook off the women, pulled Yank to his feet, and slammed him against a dividing partition. The partition promptly collapsed, sending the men crashing into the next office.

Sam watched it all, took in the expressions on their faces, and finally understood how these people fit together. This was the vision that had escaped him, the one he had been too preoccupied to see. He shook his head at his own stupidity.

"Let him go, Mitch!" Susannah cried. She had a death grip on one of Mitch's arms. But something distracted her, a small movement in the periphery of her vision. She twisted her head and caught sight of Sam just as he was turning to leave the office.

He gazed back at her. She sucked in her breath as she saw the resignation in his eyes, and realized that he had finally let her go. "So long, babe," he said. "See you around."

For the briefest of moments, their eyes locked, and then she nodded her head in a final gesture of farewell toward her first true love.
Good-bye, Sam Gamble. Godspeed
.

His mouth curled in that old cocky grin, the grin of the motorcycle pirate who had stolen her away from her wedding and reshaped her destiny. Then he turned his back on all of them and set out to conquer another brave new world.

The loudspeaker began to play "Twist and Shout."

"Fight, dammit!" Mitch ordered. He sounded mean, but he was having difficulty summoning the will to smash in the face of an opponent who was proving to be so pathetically inept. "Fight me, you son of a bitch!"

But Yank was mystified when it came to physical violence. Although he found he rather liked the
idea
of finally being in a fight after all these years, he didn't really like
fighting
.

There was no time to think anything through. No time to ponder or plan.

In actuality, Mitch was having more trouble with the women than he was having with Yank. The Faulconer sisters hung onto him like burrs. No sooner had he shaken off one than the other came back again. Paige had him by the neck, Susannah was pulling on his middle. His knee was starting to hurt, and he had banged up his elbow when the partition collapsed. What in the hell was he doing? He was thirty-eight years old, father of two, a member of the United Way Board of Directors. What in the sweet hell did he think he was doing?

He let go of Yank and loosened Paige's grip from around his neck. When Susannah realized he had stopped the fight, she relaxed the arm that had been clamped around his waist.

Yank was blinking his eyes. Mitch glared at him. "You're not taking Susannah to bed."

"No." Yank blinked. "No, I don't think that would be a good idea at all."

There was a long silence. Mitch stared at Yank. Then at Susannah. All the tension left his body like air from an overinflated balloon.

Yank continued to blink. "I'm sorry, but I seem to have lost my contact lens."

Then they were all down on the floor, relieved to have an excuse to pull themselves back together while they crawled around to find Yank's lens. Paige located it, still intact, under one of the Rolodex cards. Mitch straightened his necktie and rubbed his sore elbow.

Susannah looked for her shoe.

"It's difficult…" Yank said, after he had inserted his lens and inspected a scraped knuckle. "It's difficult to see exactly how we might extract ourselves from this. Sam and I had a deal. I'm not proud of the fact that I didn't behave in an entirely honorable fashion. I should have told him I'd invented Victors, of course. But in any case, two wrongs don't make a right. Sam and I had a deal, and I have a certain obligation."

Now Susannah was the one who wanted to smack him. She stalked toward Yank, wobbling because she still hadn't found her shoe. "Yank, will you let it rest? It's over. The contest was meaningless."

To her astonishment, Mitch began to yell at her. "Shut up, Susannah! You may be dynamite when it comes to running a corporation, but you're hopeless when it comes to organizing your love life. I've let all this go on far too long. For six weeks I've been walking around with my tail tucked between my legs waiting for you to stop looking like you're going to break in half. Well, I've had enough!"

"Don't you dare talk to me like that!"

"I'll talk to you any way I like. Right now, I'm in charge." He spun toward Yank. "Let's make a side deal."

"A side deal? Yes. Yes, I think that's a good idea."

Paige's heart began an arhythmic thumping against her ribs.

"How do you want to go about it?" Mitch asked, all business now that he was once again in control. "Your deal, your call."

Yank was thoughtful. "Perhaps you could make me a monetary offer for her. That should make it official."

Mitch had cut his teeth on making deals, and he knew how to go for a quick kill. "I'll give you five dollars."

"Five dollars!" Susannah lurched toward them. "Did you say
five
dollars?"

"That would be fine," Yank replied. "If you don't mind, I'd prefer cash. I lose checks."