The Call of the Mild p-3

by William Rabkin

  “I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have stepped into his own snare,” Gus said.

  “You’re getting awfully literal all of a sudden,” Shawn said.

  “I’m getting scared,” Gus said. “No, I take that back. I am scared.”

  “Okay, there’s a killer out there picking us off one by one,” Shawn said. “But look at the bright side. One more murder and we’ll know for sure who it is. And that’s halfway to safety right there.”

  “Unless one of us is the victim,” Gus said.

  Shawn stopped to think this over, as if the thought had never occurred to him. “That would be a problem,” he said. “Because if the killer took out you or me, that wouldn’t bring us any closer to knowing who it is.”

  “And because I’d be dead,” Gus said, panic rising in his chest. “Or you would. Or we both would.”

  “That wouldn’t make any sense,” Shawn said. “If we were both out of the running, then there wouldn’t be any question who the killer was. No, the next murder has to be a single, unless said killer is willing to take all three out at once.”

  “What if she is?” Gus said.

  “She?”

  “Oh, come on,” Gus said. “Only Gwendolyn could have set that trap. She’s the one with all the jungle lore at her fingertips. She’s the one who is obviously willing to kill without even blinking. And she’s coming after us next.”

  “It’s a good argument, but if we guess wrong-”

  “I’m not guessing,” Gus said. “I know. I know from my dreams. Because the thing that’s chasing me is always female. I just never realized until right now that it was a female human.”

  “This is based on your dream?” Shawn said. “Haven’t you learned anything from working for a fake psychic-detective agency?”

  “I know something has been trying to warn me of this day for almost as long as I’ve been alive,” Gus said. “I know that I’ve lived what happens next again and again-and I’ve never survived it.”

  “If you give in to panic and superstition, we are never going to make it home,” Shawn said. “We need to be intelligent. Rational.”

  “Says the psychic,” Gus said.

  “Exactly,” Shawn said. “We can get away with almost anything by claiming I’m psychic-because people aren’t intelligent and rational. They believe that stuff. We don’t.”

  “Then maybe you should start using that brain of yours,” Gus snapped.

  “I am,” Shawn said.

  “You’re using your feet,” Gus said. “You’re using your mouth. But you’re not using your brain. You’re walking along this trail, waiting for the killer to reveal herself, gambling that her preferred method of doing so won’t involve our decapitation. But what you’re not doing is the one thing you do well-putting together a series of microscopic clues and solving the case.”

  Shawn stopped, scowling angrily. “Have you considered maybe I’m doing this for you?”

  Gus stopped, too. “You’re keeping me stranded in the wilderness with an insane killer for my own good?”

  “Immersion therapy,” Shawn said. “You’ve got to get over this bizarre, superstitious fear of a silly dream.”

  “Even if it kills me.”

  “At least you’ll be cured,” Shawn said and started down the trail.

  Gus grabbed the top of Shawn’s pack and pulled him back. “Don’t you dare blame this on me,” he said through clenched teeth. “People are dead. We could be dead. You can’t be doing this to help me with my recurring dream. Even if you do have one of-”

  Gus broke off, realization dawning on him. Shawn saw it coming and tried to get away.

  “If that’s the way you feel, I apologize,” Shawn said as he took a step down the trail again.

  But Gus wouldn’t let go of his pack, and Shawn was jerked back like a marionette whose puppeteer suffered from Parkinson’s. “You never told me what your recurring dream was,” Gus said.

  “It’s really not important now,” Shawn said. “If you want me to solve this crime now and leave you emotionally crippled, then that’s what I’ll do.”

  “ This is your recurring dream,” Gus said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Shawn said. “This is your recurring dream. See? Wilderness? Lost? Big scary monster in the trees?”

  Again Shawn tried to get away, and again Gus held him back. “In your recurring dream, people are dying, there’s a killer right in front of you, and you can’t figure out who it is,” Gus said. “That’s your deepest fear, isn’t it?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Shawn said with a complete lack of conviction.

  He did. Gus could see it in his eyes. Shawn was afraid, and it wasn’t of the killer. He was afraid of a vision he’d seen in a dream over and over again. Gus let go of his pack and took him by the shoulders.

  “You can do this, Shawn,” Gus said. “You know you can. I know you can. It’s just another case, just another set of clues.”

  “It’s not!” Shawn said loudly enough for Gwendolyn and Balowsky to hear-and to stop walking. He moved in closer to Gus and whispered, “I don’t have clues here. I don’t know who the killer is, and I won’t until one of them is kind enough to eliminate the other one from suspicion.”

  “You only think there aren’t any clues,” Gus said. “But there are. There have to be. You’ve seen them, you’ve heard them. You just didn’t notice at the time. But they’re all in your head. All you have to do is put them together. And you’ve got to do it now.”

  Shawn still looked shaken. “Why now?”

  “I’ve seen you solve enough crimes to know that there are two elements you need before you can swing into action,” Gus said. “You need the clues-and you need an audience. If you wait much longer, there won’t be anyone left to be stunned by your revelations. And then you might never be able to pull it together.”

  Shawn looked up the trail at Gwendolyn and Balowsky, who were staring back at them. “They’re not much of an audience.”

  “Next time we’ll book the State Theater,” Gus said. “Right now this is what we’ve got. So go dazzle ’em.”

  Shawn took a deep breath. Then another one. Then he plastered a broad smile across his face.

  “Wait up, guys,” he called to the lawyers. “Let’s take a break and unmask a killer.”

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  The reveal wasn’t going well, Gus could tell. It had started ou t strongly. Shawn was full of his usual bravado as he launched into an explication of the case’s known facts. But even as he was finishing up the saga of their ordeal at Descanso Gardens, Gus could feel he was losing momentum-and with that, his audience. Even the revelation that the gun-toting mime was actually their late colleague Archie Kane didn’t elicit more than the slightest gesture of impatience from Gwendolyn and Balowsky.

  “So everything Rushton told us about you was a lie,” Gwendolyn said. “That’s a shock. Can we start walking again?”

  “We’re just getting to the good part,” Shawn said, a hint of desperation in his voice.

  The trouble was, Gus knew, he wasn’t getting to the good part. Gus had listened to enough of these summations to understand their structure. Shawn would lay out what seemed like a string of facts known to everyone, apparently at random. What his audience wouldn’t understand until it was too late was that there was nothing random about the selection. Shawn would pick out the precise pieces of information that built up, step by step, to his conclusion. As a technique, it was flawless. Even when Shawn was wrong-something that happened along the way before he hit the ultimate solution in the occasional case-the summation itself never was. The chosen clues would always lead inexorably to the determined conclusion. If that conclusion was wrong, it was simply that Shawn had selected the wrong pieces or put them together in the wrong way.

  But this time was different. Shawn didn’t have a destination in mind, so he had no guide in choosing his clues. He was spewing out everything he’d seen, heard, and done over the
last week, in the desperate hope that he could pick a pattern out of it. Gus suspected the lawyers had no idea how much Shawn was struggling, because they’d never witnessed the master at work. He could still put on an entertaining show. But Gus knew it was just a show, and he found it painful to watch.

  “Yes,” Shawn said. “Rushton lied to you all. For good reason. He suspected that one of you had killed Archie Kane. Or-”

  He broke off, trying to figure out where to go next. Gus gave him a nod of encouragement.

  “Or did he know?” Shawn said. “Know because he was working with the killer all along?”

  “Why do you need a driver’s license to buy liquor when you can’t drink and drive?” Balowsky said. “Why are their interstate highways in Hawaii? If you want to play rhetorical questions, we can be here until the mountain crumbles into sand, and then we don’t have to worry about walking down. Unless we’re murdered first.”

  “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?”

  “Tha
t.” 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.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Gus 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.