Psyc 03_The Call of the Mild (33 page)

“As if that’s something you’re worried about,” Gwendolyn said.

“Standing next to you, I am,” Balowsky said. “Why don’t you just get it over with? I’ll even let you have your favorite target.”

He turned his back on her—and then whirled around quickly to see if she was aiming a knife at it.

Gus looked at Shawn. Wasn’t he going to stop this? But Shawn wasn’t paying attention to the bickering lawyers. He didn’t seem to be paying attention to anything outside himself. He stared off into the far distance, the beginnings of a smile on his face.

“Shawn?” Gus said.

“Rushton brought us into the conference room apparently so we could learn what you all were like,” Shawn said. “And you didn’t disappoint. Gwendolyn Shrike attacked immediately, only to retreat when there was clearly no hope for victory. Kirk Savage hid behind legal technicalities. Morton Mathis was scared we’d reveal his real identity. Reggie Balowsky sat back and waited to see who was going to win before he chose a side. And Jade Greenway, poor, sweet Jade Greenway, bravely stood up for us.”

“Bravely!” Gwendolyn almost spat the word. “Is it brave to suck up to your boss?”

Gus stared at Shawn. What was he doing now? What he was saying still seemed like a stall, but there was confidence in his voice and a glint in his eye that hadn’t been there when he started the reveal.

“Not to speak ill of the dead or anything,” Balowsky said.

“The only reason you don’t speak ill of the dead is because you can’t do them any more damage that way,” Gwendolyn said.

“Personally, I’m all in favor of sucking up to the boss,” Shawn said. “Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that I run my own business and I end up sucking up to myself. Which isn’t really as easy as it sounds. Anyway, there’s sucking up and there’s sucking up. It’s one thing to lavish praise on your boss’s new pet detectives. It’s another thing to do it before you even know they exist. This is the point where you ask what I’m talking about.”

If it was, neither Gwendolyn nor Balowsky was taking advantage of the opportunity. They were glaring at each other, unmoving.

“I’ve had enough of you to last a lifetime,” Gwendolyn said. “So if you’re going to try to kill me, go ahead.”

“No point pretending with me,” Balowsky snarled. “We both know I didn’t do it, and that only leaves you. And I’d like to see you try it now.”

Balowsky opened his hand, revealing the Swiss Army knife he had palmed. It was opened to its largest blade, and the three inches of forged steel trembled in Gwendolyn’s direction. Gus didn’t see her move, but somehow she had a large rock in her hand, which she was holding up as a club.

“They seem pretty busy,” Shawn said to Gus. “Maybe you should ask what I’m talking about.”

“Do you know?” Gus said without taking his eyes off the lawyers.

“You should try me and find out,” Shawn said.

The bright tone in Shawn’s voice gave Gus a small hope. Maybe they could get of this with a minimum of bloodshed.

“Okay, Shawn,” Gus said. “What are you talking about?”

“You sure you don’t want to lecture me here about how I always drag these things out and make you ask questions instead of just giving you the answer?” Shawn said. “Because I figure we still have a couple of minutes left.”

“Before what?” Gus said, a shiver of dread going up his spine.

“One question at a time,” Shawn said. “So let’s get back to the first one, and the answer involves Hank Stenberg. Which is really remarkable, because this is not the first time that kid has helped solve one of our most baffling cases, and he really is kind of a tard. But if he hadn’t written that Wikipedia entry on us, we never could have figured out the truth.”

“Why, did he put the solution to our final case in there?” Gus said, beginning to wonder if Shawn had simply lost his mind.

“How could he?” Shawn said. “We couldn’t tell him what was going on in the mountains because we have no way to contact him, so he’d have to be up here with us to know about it. And even if he was, he couldn’t access Wikipedia, because there’s no cell service and no Wi-Fi up here. So how could anyone access Wikipedia in a place where there’s no cell service and no Wi-Fi?”

Gus tried to slog through the layers of verbiage Shawn was spewing out to find the point. He even managed to keep himself from chiding Shawn for the inappropriate use of the slur “tard” as he searched for the point. What difference could it possibly make to point out that there was no Wi-Fi up here, especially since no one had a cell phone? And yet Shawn seemed to think there was something significant about the availability of Wikipedia in the mountains.

Something began to click in Gus’ brain. It wasn’t here Shawn was talking about. It was about receiving information where there shouldn’t be any signal. He knew this meant something, but he couldn’t quite place it.

He turned to Shawn, expecting to see the triumphant grin that would accompany Gus’ admission that he needed Shawn to carry the explanation out another step. But Shawn wasn’t smiling at him. In fact, he wasn’t looking anywhere near Gus. He wasn’t looking at the lawyers, either, even though they seemed to be frozen in place.

Shawn was staring off into the woods, his attention riveted to a space between two large trees.

“What are you looking at?” Gus asked.

Shawn didn’t take his eyes off the space. “I think I was wrong.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Gus said. “You haven’t explained what you were talking about, so I’ll never know if you change your mind now.”

“Not about the killer’s identity,” Shawn said. “I’m right about that. But when I said we had a couple of minutes, that was all wrong.”

Gus felt a flash of fear run up his spine. “Couple of minutes until what?”

“And I was wrong about something else,” Shawn said. “And this is the big one. I told you to fight your fear. I told you not to give in to panic. That was absolutely backwards. You need to panic. You need to panic right now.”

“I don’t understand,” Gus said.

“Look around you, Gus,” Shawn said sternly. “There’s nothing here but trees and sun and mountains and cliffs. You’re alone in the wilderness and there’s no one who can help.”

“Stop it,” Gus said. The panic was rising now. Even though Gus was clearly not alone, his brain was having an increasingly difficult time convincing his muscles of that fact.

“It’s your dream finally coming true,” Shawn said. “You’re going to die and there’s nothing you or I or those two freaky lawyers can do to stop it.”

Gus squirmed as a spasm of terror flowed through him. His feet pawed at the ground as if trying to shake off the shackles of his will and start running blindly. “What are you doing?”

“There’s nothing any of us can do to stop it,” Shawn said.

Gus’ head was spinning, or maybe it was the ground. He tried desperately to hold on to reason. “Stop what?”

“That.” Shawn pointed at the gap in the trees. For a moment, Gus saw nothing. And then it was there. Just a flash, barely enough to settle on his retinas, but Gus saw it and he understood what Shawn had been trying to tell him.

Just a flash, but that one flash told him everything he needed to know. That one flash of bright, brilliant green.

 

 

 

 

 

 

G
us ran.

The branches tore at his arms, the jagged rocks dug into his feet, his lungs screamed in pain as he gasped for breath. At least it wasn’t night, as it had been in the dreams, but the trees were so dense they nearly blocked out the sun completely.

How long had be been running? It could have been hours; it could have been months. He had no idea where he was; the trail was a distant memory. At first he’d tried to remember landmarks so he could find his way back if he survived, but rational thought was the first cargo he’d jettisoned as he realized he needed to go faster.

And where was Shawn? They’d started running at the same time, along with Gwendolyn and Balowsky, and for a little while they were all together. But somehow they had split up, apparently on the philosophy that Jade couldn’t track four targets at once. At the time, that sounded like a good idea. No matter how many times he reordered the priority of their deaths, Gus always found himself near the bottom of the list. Shawn would be an intellectual threat to Jade, Gwendolyn a physical one. So Jade could pick them off, then take her time going after Balowsky and him.

It was only after he heard her footsteps behind him that he remembered Jade’s philosophy—take the weakest one down first, and then use that failure against the stronger. No matter how fast he moved, how cunningly he changed direction, she was always there.

How was this possible? He’d had this dream so many nights in his life, and every time the thing chasing him was a hideous, demonic monster. That’s one reason he’d been so fast to assume Gwendolyn was the killer, because she could fit that description.

But Jade Greenway rescued puppies and kittens. She preserved English folk songs. Unless she was preserving them to hum while she ate those rescued pets, this was not the portrait of a cold-blooded killer. What right did she have to be complex?

Gus could see the plunge just ahead of him, the cliff falling off hundreds of feet to a roaring river far below. There was plenty of time to stop or turn away, but no matter how hard he willed his feet to change direction they kept pounding inexorably towards the edge. He pummeled his thighs, tried to throw himself to the ground, grab hold of a tree, anything to slow himself down. Nothing worked. His feet kept propelling him forward.

It was the moment he always knew would come. It was the end. He felt his foot take one last step and hit nothing beneath it but empty air.

He was going to die. But at least there was this. At least now he understood why his body insisted on taking him off the cliff. It was because he couldn’t run anymore, and because he wouldn’t let the killer who was chasing him have the satisfaction of finishing him off.

A hollow victory, but as much of a victory as he could hope for, Gus thought. But as his left foot began to come down on open air, something happened that never happened in the dream.

In the nightmare, he didn’t know what was chasing him or why. But in reality he knew it was Jade Greenway, and he knew why—she was a crook who was going to use their deaths to help her escape. In the dream Gus felt only terror and hopelessness. But now there was something else.

There was anger.

If he went over this cliff, then Jade would win. If he didn’t go over the cliff, she’d probably kill him easily, and she’d still win. But Gus would not let that happen without a fight.

As his right foot, still propelled by his momentum, began to lift off the ground to join its mate in space, Gus stretched out his arm, reaching for a branch that hung out over the chasm. His fingers closed around the limb.

And then they opened again. The rough bark tore at the skin of his palm as the branch slid through his hand.

Gus was falling. Part of his mind tried to calculate exactly how long it would take for him to hit the rocks so many hundreds of feet below.

But the other part still refused to give up. He reached out blindly and his hands hit a root that had grown out of the cliff face. He grabbed it tight and felt the pain blast through his palms to his shoulders as he stopped his fall.

Gus let himself hang for a moment, allowing the pain to fade a little. Then he looked up. His head was about a foot below the cliff’s edge. He scrambled with his toes for a foothold, but the cliff fell away inwards and he couldn’t touch it. He tried to pull himself up, but his arms were so shocked with pain it was all he could do to dangle helplessly.

He heard something moving at the top of the cliff. Before he could do anything, there was a flash of green and Jade stepped to the edge.

“Let me help you.” She crouched down to her knees and extended a hand. “Take my hand.”

“So you can drop me?” Gus snarled. “I don’t think so.”

“If you’re holding on to my hand, I don’t see how I can drop you,” Jade said, looking puzzled. “Also, why would I want to?”

“For the same reason you killed Archie Kane and Morton Mathis and Kirk Savage,” Gus said. “To cover up your conspiracy to sell stolen technology from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.”

She gave him a little frown. “If that were true, it wouldn’t be very smart to bring it up right now,” Jade said. “It would be much wiser to tell me how delighted you are to discover I’m alive, and to pretend you have no idea I’m the killer. That way I might actually help you up, thinking that you weren’t a threat.”

“You need us all dead,” Gus said. “It’s the only way to convince the world that you died out here, too, so that no one will bother to look for you.”

“Unless you’ve got this whole thing figured out wrong,” Jade said. “Has it occurred to you that Morton Mathis wasn’t the only one who was investigating Rushton, Morelock? A crime that big brings in lots of agencies. Some are secret, even from the FBI.”

Gus tried to put this together. Was it possible? Could she be some kind of federal agent? It seemed so unlikely. And yet if it were true, it would solve all his problems.

And those problems were getting worse by the second. Because his hands were beginning to slip off the root. He wouldn’t be able to hang here for more than a few more seconds.

“Prove it,” Gus said.

“I didn’t exactly bring my badge, unlike that idiot Mathis,” Jade said. “It’s kind of a tip-off on a deep-cover operation. But if I’m the mad killer you think I am, why didn’t I take you out when you were all together on the trail?”

“I don’t know,” Gus said. “Why did you chase me through the woods if you didn’t want to kill me?”

“I was trying to save you,” Jade said. “It’s dangerous to run blindly around here. You could even step off a cliff. Now, come on, give me your hand.”