The Call of the Mild

by William Rabkin

  “Whatever,” she said.

  “That’s it, then,” Shawn said. “Eleven to nothing.”

  Gus suddenly knew what was wrong. “Twelve,” he said.

  “No, I just counted,” Shawn said. “Four waiters, one guerrilla commando, four lawyers, and the two of us. That’s eleven.”

  “There should be five lawyers,” Gus said. “Or at least four lawyers and one grumpy FBI agent.”

  The realization hit them all at the same time, but it was Jade who spoke first. “Where’s Mathis?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Gwendolyn said. “I didn’t feel the need to hook up with the nearest loser last night.”

  “Who was sharing a tent with him?” Shawn said.

  “I was,” Savage said. “But I chose to sleep outside last night.”

  “As did I,” Balowsky said.

  “Has anyone been back in that tent this morning?” Shawn said.

  Savage and Balowsky shook their heads. Everyone turned to stare at the blue-and-white-striped tent assigned to Mathis.

  “This is ridiculous,” Gwendolyn snapped. “He’s probably in there sulking because we wouldn’t all do what he wanted us to.”

  “Or he’s left,” Jade said. “Set out into the wilderness on his own.”

  “He wouldn’t get far,” Savage said. “He might be the reincarnation of J. Edgar Hoover, but in the mountains he doesn’t know which way is down.”

  “He didn’t leave,” Gus said. Mathis was willing to see them all die in the wilderness before he’d let his suspect get back to civilization. If there had been a second person missing, Gus could have believed the Fed had taken him out. But there was no way he would simply walk away from the rest of them now.

  “Statistically, we don’t need his vote,” Shawn said. “But in case there’s an inquiry from the Robert’s Rules of Order people, we should try to include him.”

  As the others watched, frozen, Shawn got up from the table and walked to Mathis’ tent.

  “You’re missing breakfast,” he said before he pulled open the flap. Then he stopped and stared.

  “What is it?” Gus said.

  “Well, the good news is we don’t need to save any bacon for him,” Shawn said.

  Gus jumped up from the table and ran over to the tent, followed by all of the lawyers. They pushed around Shawn so they could get a good look.

  A good look at Mathis lying peacefully on his feather bed. And at the kitchen knife protruding from his chest.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chris Rasmussen stalked the mean streets of Isla Vista. He’d loved this town, but now it seemed soiled to him. There had been a criminal conspiracy underneath its manicured lawns, eating at the roots of the community like a gopher destroys an entire field of grass.

  How had he missed it all? Had he been so busy writing jaywalking tickets he had let the real villains go free? Had they been laughing at him all the time?

  However it had happened, he could not let it stand. He’d called Lassiter repeatedly, offering his services, but the detective had said the task force was closed and had hung up on him. No doubt Lassiter was busily figuring out a way to pretend these murders had never happened. He was up against forces greater than himself—and he was folding.

  Henry Spencer had understood that. Rasmussen saw it all now. The great detective could tell that the fix was in, that when the rich and mighty got involved, the pursuit of justice took a backseat to the protection of power. That’s what he had been trying to tell Rasmussen at Ellen Svaco’s house. That’s why he walked away from the case. Detective Spencer thought he was protecting his new protégé.

  But Officer Chris Rasmussen neither needed nor wanted protection. He wanted to do his job. His duty. He wanted to see the guilty punished and the innocent protected. That was all that mattered to him.

  In a way he was touched by Henry Spencer’s desire to shelter him. He supposed the thought was that if Rasmussen walked away from this, he’d survive to protect and serve another day.

  But the law didn’t work like that. You couldn’t simply choose which criminals you’d stop and which you’d let go. Once you started down that path, there was no way back. You weren’t the law anymore. You were just a hired thug with a badge silk-screened on your chest.

  Years ago Rasmussen had rousted a bunch of students who were drinking on the beach long after closing. He confiscated their beer, smothered their campfire, and wrote them all tickets. Normally during an encounter like this he expected some mild-mannered abuse. But this time had been different. The kids were polite, even pleasant. And one of them had offered Rasmussen a bit of wisdom he’d treasured ever since: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

  That was the way Chris Rasmussen had always enforced the law, and the way he always would. When a crime was committed, it had to be investigated and the guilty punished, no matter who it was. Maybe the Santa Barbara Police Department didn’t work that way. But that wasn’t going to stop Chris Rasmussen. He had his badge and he had his gun, and that was going to be enough.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Just a few hours earlier, Gus had wanted nothing more than for the bickering among the lawyers to stop. Now that it had, all he wanted was for it to start again. What had replaced it was so much worse: a hostile silence marked only by suspicious glares and the tromping of feet on the forest floor.

  They were marching down the same trail they had taken before. It wasn’t just Savage and Gwendolyn. It was all the lawyers, along with Shawn and Gus.

  Shawn’s plan had been a good one. It would have sent the group’s two strongest hikers down the mountain, almost guaranteeing they’d make it to a rangers’ station. Even if one of them had been the smuggler or Rushton’s spy, the other would have made sure the mission was carried out. And best of all, it removed two of the most annoying bickerers from the campsite, ensuring that the rest of them could enjoy the time they spent waiting for rescue.

  But that plan couldn’t work once they found Mathis’ body. “We have to face the truth,” Shawn said. “One of our group is a murderer.”

  “You don’t know that,” Savage said. “For all we know it could have been one of them.” He waved a hand at the acting troupe, who were huddled together as far from the lawyers as they could get without leaving the safety of the camp.

  “Save it for the courtroom,” Balowsky said. “There’s no jury here to taint.”

  “It wasn’t one of them,” Shawn said.

  “How can you rule them out so definitively?” Savage said.

  “Do you even know their names?” Shawn said.

  “I know Miranda,” Balowsky said. “And I can vouch for her whereabouts all night.”

  “Which by some astonishing coincidence gives you an alibi, too,” Gwendolyn said.

  “That never occurred to me,” Balowsky said. “But I suppose you’re right.”

  “The fat chef is named Bram Tchaikovsky, or something like that,” Savage said. “The rest of them have some kind of cowboy names.”

  “Exactly my point,” Shawn said. “These are anonymous, faceless figures. Redshirts, actually.”

  “They’re wearing white,” Jade said.

  “It doesn’t matter what color their clothes are,” Shawn said. “You’ve got your three stars and one major guest player beaming down to the planet along with one security officer you’ve never seen before. Who do you think is going to get mowed down by space Nazis before the opening credits?”

  “They’re wearing white and they’re still alive, while Mathis is dead,” Jade said. “What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “He’s trying to say they’re bit players,” Gus said. “We don’t really know them except for the limited function they perform in the camp. We haven’t been able to differentiate them in any substantive way, and they are, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable. So there’s not much point
in assuming that one of them is the killer.”

  “Are you saying that you are ruling them out as suspects because they lack sufficient entertainment value?” Savage said incredulously.

  “Absolutely,” Shawn said. “Do you think it’s too early to start thinking about lunch?”

  “We can’t just sit down and eat lunch when there’s a killer among us,” Jade wailed. “One of us is dead. Don’t we care at all?”

  “We sat down and ate breakfast when there was a killer among us,” Shawn said.

  “We didn’t know,” Balowsky said.

  “One of us did,” Shawn said. “Which brings up an important point. We need to rethink our plan.”

  “It seems to me that the only change we need to make is to accelerate it,” Savage said. “Gwendolyn and I should leave immediately.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Shawn said. “If these two are our only hope of survival, we want them on the trail before the killer can get to them.”

  “Unless,” Gus said, “one of them is the killer.”

  “That would be a problem,” Shawn said. “Because if one of them killed Mathis, then it would only make sense for that person to kill the other hiker and escape, as we all starve to death waiting for a rescue that will never come.”

  “Go ahead, say it,” Gwendolyn demanded. “You mean me.”

  “It could be Savage,” Shawn said.

  “Standard English usage is to use the male pronoun when talking about someone whose gender is not known,” Gwendolyn said. “When you avoid pronouns altogether, you really mean ‘she.’ ”

  “Female pronoun there has a point,” Gus said.

  “I can prove it wasn’t me,” Gwendolyn said. “Because I wouldn’t have used a knife. I could have snapped his scrawny neck with my bare hands or smothered him with a pillow. Hell, I could have jammed a finger through his eye socket into his brain and he’d have been dead before he noticed I was in the tent.”

  The other lawyers moved a step away from Gwendolyn.

  “Well, that certainly sounds like the declaration of an innocent person to me,” Shawn said. “Who’s for sending her out on the trail with Savage? Show of hands?”

  Not a hand went up. Not even Gwendolyn’s.

  “What if one of them isn’t the killer?” Balowsky said. “Then do we just stay here waiting to be picked off one by one?”

  “There’s no reason to assume the killer is going to strike again,” Shawn said. “Of course, since we have no idea why that person killed Mathis, we have no way of predicting what that person will do next.”

  “There are other pronouns beside ‘he’ and ‘she,’ ” Gwendolyn said. “For example, there’s ‘I.’ And then of course there’s ‘you.’ How do we know you aren’t the killer?”

  “She’s right,” Savage said. “We don’t know anything about you two.”

  Shawn looked hurt. “What do you want to know?” he said. “I’m an open book. With pictures. And a table of contents. An index. Pull me off the shelf and check me out. And you don’t even have to reshelve me when you’re done. There are metal carts placed in the aisles for your convenience. Which is actually kind of annoying if you’re looking for a title and someone has stuck it on the cart and no one’s gotten around to putting it back in its place.”

  Gus could see the lawyers getting restless again. And worse—suspicious. If Shawn kept talking this way, it wouldn’t be hard for the real killer to plant a suspicion in the minds of the others.

  “Morton Mathis infiltrated Rushton, Morelock six months ago,” Gus said. “We joined the firm only a couple of days ago. Whoever he was hunting there, clearly it wasn’t Shawn or me.”

  “We don’t know he was searching for any of us,” Gwendolyn said. “All we have is your word on that. For all we know you were the criminals he was hunting all along, and you came along on this trip just to kill him.”

  “And a darned good plan that would have been,” Shawn said. “So many criminals are able to plot the perfect crime, but when it comes to the getaway, that’s where they slip up. So we designed a murder in which getting away was impossible from the beginning, so there was no chance of it going wrong.”

  The logic of Shawn’s argument, or at least the complete lack of it, seemed to quell the lawyers’ suspicion of the two of them. Gus took advantage of the opening.

  “Grab your packs,” he said. “We need to get going.”

  “Before lunch?” Shawn said.

  “No lunch for us,” Gus said. “We need to leave the fresh food for the Triton Players. They’ll stay here until we can get a helicopter up to them.”

  “All of us?” Balowsky said. “What if I want to stay here with Miranda until you come back?”

  “What if you want to stay here until we’re gone, then kill all the actors and make your escape in the wilderness?” Savage said.

  “Then at least there would be five fewer actors in the world,” Gwendolyn said. “Mathis wouldn’t have died for nothing.”

  “Gus is right,” Shawn said. “We all go or none of us goes. And if none of us goes, none of us is getting back home.”

  There was grumbling from the lawyers. Grumbling and more suspicious looks. But then Savage marched over, swung his pack up on his back, and fastened the straps. “Let’s go,” he said. “Those trails aren’t going to hike themselves.”

  One by one the lawyers put on their packs and headed towards the trail. Gus took a moment to tell the actors what was going on and give them a chance to join the trek down the mountain. Either Coty or Bismarck—Gus still couldn’t say which was which—looked like he wanted to come along, but troupe loyalty outweighed the desire to flee the meadow, and since there was no way the chef would make it past the first day, they all decided to wait for rescue. If nothing else, Helstrom reasoned, the owner of the costume shop where they had rented their terrorist outfits would report them missing if they didn’t return the clothes in a few days.

  Shawn, in the meantime, had been going through Mathis’ pack and dividing the packets of dehydrated food between his load and Gus’. When Gus came up to him, he swung his pack up on his back. “Race you to the bottom?” Shawn said.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  There was a pain in Gus’ left foot. At least that’s where it started every time he took a step. A dull, throbbing ache pounding across his sole, it pulsed a few times, then traveled up through his ankle to his calf on its way to his knee, where it knocked around for a bit before traveling up through his thigh. It stopped only when Gus lifted his foot. That’s when it started on the other side.

  How long had they been hiking? Gus had no idea. They had set out before eight in the morning, and the sun was well past midpoint in the sky by now. He could have checked his watch to see what time it was, but he’d misstepped while maneuvering through a stony patch of trail, and a rock had gone out from under him. He’d managed to keep his head from slamming into the ground, but only by using his watch to check his fall. At the time it had seemed like a fair trade-off, to smash the watch’s face in order to protect his own, but about now a spell of unconsciousness—even a permanent one—was sounding pretty appealing.

  Gus was once again taking up the rear position in the line of hikers. He’d volunteered for the job at first because he liked the idea of being able to see what everyone was doing. It was much harder for any of them to sneak up on him that way.

  But after all these hours, strategy didn’t have anything to do with his positioning. He just wasn’t keeping up, not even with Balowsky, who had started off limping and complaining about rocks in his shoes, but who had picked up his pace as the trail steepened. He had no idea how long it had been since he’d seen Gwendolyn. Maybe she’d managed to cut six days off the hike and was already down at the bottom. Or maybe she had run up ahead to dig pits and cover them with brush, so that the rest of the hikers would all fall to their deaths impaled on sharpened stakes. About now, even that sounded preferable to walking for most of another week.

 
; For what felt like hours, Gus had been hiking behind Savage and Jade, who whispered and giggled together like the newest couple on the junior high school campus. Gus had had to slow his pace in order to get out of earshot after he accidentally overheard them giving legal-jargon-based nicknames for the parts of each other’s bodies.

  Then something had gone wrong between the two of them. Savage said something, and Jade stiffened angrily. He tried to apologize, but she slapped him hard across the face and accelerated away from him. He marched along sullenly for a moment or two, then broke into a jog to go after her. They disappeared around a switchback, and Gus hadn’t seen them again.

  At first Gus hadn’t minded being alone. Under the blazing sun it was easier to let his mind focus on nothing but making sure that each foot hit solid ground at every step.

  But after a couple of hours the trail took that familiar turn, and scrub brush started appearing along the wayside. Within minutes Gus was entering the pine forest.

  That shouldn’t have been a problem, he kept telling himself. He’d been here already, and there had been no feelings of panic, no flashbacks to his familiar nightmare, no hallucinations.

  At the time, though, Gus had had plenty of more pressing issues to worry about. There was something about the prospect of imminent murder at the hands of insane terrorists to keep you from thinking about being lost in the forest. Now that threat was gone, and as much as he tried to convince himself he needed to stay wary in case the Triton Players were actually a front for a real terrorist band, and they had just been pretending to be innocent actors to throw off suspicion until they could make their move, he couldn’t help feeling that the trees were pressing in on him.

  Part of the problem was that they were. As the trail moved farther into the woods, it was growing narrower. Now it was just a slender track, sometimes completely obscured by heaps of brown pine needles. If he took his eyes off it for more than a second, if he lost his concentration and drifted off the path, would he ever find it again? Or would he be hopelessly lost, like he was in the dream, lost and chased by some hideous unseen monster?