The Call of the Mild

by William Rabkin

  Savage stared sadly into the fire, either thinking fond thoughts of the girlfriend to whom he never got to say good-bye or wishing he’d murdered the other female lawyer first. After a moment, Balowsky got to his feet. “I’ll go,” he said.

  “Like hell you will,” Gwendolyn said.

  “He promises not to peek,” Shawn said.

  “You’ve got that right,” Balowsky said.

  “I’d find that easier to believe if I didn’t have to wash off the slime tracks from his eyeballs every time I wore a low-cut blouse to the office,” Gwendolyn said.

  Shawn took a burning stick from the fire and handed it to Balowsky to use as a torch. “It’s this easy,” he said. “Either you take Reggie with you, or you sit there and pee in your pants. I know which I prefer, but we’ll leave the decision up to you.”

  She glared at them all, then turned back to the woods. “Come on, then,” she said to Balowsky as she disappeared into the darkness.

  Gwendolyn and Balowsky were gone for hours. Or maybe it was seconds. In the darkness Gus couldn’t keep track of time. He was about to propose that the rest of them go out and search for the missing lawyers when the nearest trees were lit by the orange glow from a torch.

  Gwendolyn tossed the flaming brand into the fire.

  “Where’s Reggie?” Shawn said. His hands closed around a rock as he waited for the answer.

  “Maybe he tried to kill me and I had to knock him out in self-defense,” Gwendolyn said. “Or maybe I made him turn his head and then slit his throat with a sharpened twig.”

  Around the campfire, everyone stared at her, waiting. Until they heard the sound of legs crashing through underbrush and Balowsky stumbled out of the woods behind her.

  “Or maybe his legs are even slower than his mind,” Gwendolyn said, and took her place by the fire.

  “I figured as long as I was out there I might as well take care of my own business,” Balowsky said. “So I turned my back on her for one second. And when I turned back, I saw the torch disappearing into the woods.”

  “Your prostate problems are your own,” Gwendolyn said. “I was cold.”

  “Enough!” Gus shouted.

  They all turned to look at him. Shawn looked particularly concerned.

  “We can’t keep bickering like this,” Gus said. “We’re just using up all our energy in meaningless backbiting. Meanwhile the killer is plotting how to take us out.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” Shawn said. “I mean, unless you or I turn out to be behind it all, then the real killer is using up his energy in meaningless backbiting, too. So it’s not all bad.”

  “It’s bad enough,” Gus said.

  “It could be worse,” Shawn said.

  Now the lawyers all turned to stare at him.

  “How?” Gwendolyn asked in a tone that was less a question and more a dagger aimed directly at him.

  “We’re all sitting around this fire not knowing which one among us is the person who has been systematically picking us off,” Shawn said. “Now imagine that while we’re sitting here, Reggie’s head falls off his body, grows spider legs, and runs away into the darkness.”

  The silence following Shawn’s remark was the quietest Gus had ever heard. Even the fire stopped popping and sparking for a moment.

  “Well,” Shawn said cheerily as he stood and stretched, “this is fun, but I’m going to bed. Who wants first watch?”

  “I’ll take it,” Gus said. He didn’t think he was going to sleep anyway, not with the image of the monster from The Thingin his mind. And if he did manage to doze off, there was a bigger threat. The dream.

  “I’ll stay up, too,” Savage said. “Two people on watch at all times, right?”

  “Right,” Shawn said. “You and Gus go first; then in six hours wake Reggie and Gwendolyn.”

  “What about you?” Balowsky demanded.

  “Can I help it if we have an odd number of potential victims here?” Shawn said. “If the one of you who is trying to kill us had done a better job today, we could divvy up the watches a little more fairly.”

  Shawn took the two steps from his seat to his sleeping bag, lay down, and started snoring within seconds. Savage and Gwendolyn followed him to their own beds.

  The next few hours passed surprisingly quickly for Gus. If Savage was the killer, he was doing an excellent job of pretending to be terrified. And while Gus envied Shawn just a little bit for his ability to sleep so easily, he was also happy that he hadn’t felt tired since they discovered what had happened to Jade. He knew that the next day’s march was going to be long and hard, and much more so if he didn’t get any sleep tonight. But he liked being awake. He liked being able to see what was going on around the fire—or what wasn’t going on.

  When Balowsky’s watch alarm went off and he woke up Gwendolyn and Savage so they could take their turn, Gus relinquished his job without much enthusiasm. He felt so much safer here by the fire. But he went to his sleeping bag and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the sun was breaking over the mountains.

  Except as the sun rose, it didn’t seem to give off any light. It shone hot and yellow in the sky, but the campsite stayed dark. Gus sat up in his sleeping bag to ask the others if they saw what he was seeing.

  The others were gone.

  Chapter Fifty

  It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet and Heidi Sansome was already having a terrible day. She’d slept through her alarm and had been so freaked about being late she was nailed for a speeding ticket on the way to work. That got her to the reception desk ten minutes late. She’d be lucky if she wasn’t fired before lunch.

  And to make everything worse, there was this ridiculous lifeguard in her waiting room. At least he was dressed like a lifeguard. He kept pointing at an insignia on his shirt and insisting he had something to do with feet, then demanding to speak to Mr. Rushton immediately. She’d explained a dozen times that Mr. Rushton saw no one without an appointment, which she would be happy to schedule for him. He just pointed at his chest and insisted he needed to see the boss now.

  Heidi pressed the red button on her phone for the fifteenth time. Where the hell was security? They should have had this nut out of here ages ago.

  Finally a side door banged open and Fritz the security guard came through. “What seems to be the trouble here?”

  Well, duh, Heidi thought. It’s the crazy lifeguard with the foot fetish. She was about to point out the obvious when she noticed that Fritz’s hands were up in the air and his face had gone white.

  Heidi turned to see that the lifeguard had pulled out a gun and was aiming it directly at Fritz.

  “I want to see Mr. Rushton,” he said. “Now.”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  The others hadn’t been gone long. Gus reached over and touched Shawn’s sleeping bag. It was still warm. And the fire was blazing in the ring, a pot nestled among the embers heating water for instant coffee and freeze-dried eggs.

  Gus looked back at the sun. It had climbed in the sky and it pounded him with its heat. But it still didn’t seem to give off any light. The only illumination in the campground came from the flickering fire. Shadows jumped, danced, laughed at the edges of the camp.

  “Shawn?” Gus whispered. Beyond the reach of the firelight something rustled in the underbrush. Gus tried to peer into the darkness, but he couldn’t see anything. “Shawn?” he whispered again, but there was no answer.

  Where had Shawn gone? Where had they all gone? And why had they left him here alone? He bent down to check one of the sleeping bags and his hand came back sticky and feathered. There was a gash in the bag, and as Gus stood up, the feathers flew out of the tear and swirled around his face. He shook his hand to get the feathers off, but they wouldn’t fall. He slapped at them, and his hand came back red with blood.

  The gash in the sleeping bag was bleeding.

  This wasn’t possible. Even as his rational mind was being consumed with terror, Gus knew that a nylon shell filled with
duck feathers couldn’t bleed. And that meant this couldn’t be real. He had to be dreaming. He had to be dreaming that dream. All he had to do was wake up.

  Gus squeezed his fist until his fingernails were digging into his palm. Then he looked down at the sleeping bag. It was still oozing blood. He looked up at the sun.

  The sun was oozing blood, too.

  There was another rustling in the bushes behind him. Gus turned to see who was coming after him. Whatwas coming after him. A branch tore off a tree and fell to the ground and a hand reached through the opening in the tree trunk. Except it wasn’t a hand, it was more like a—

  Gus woke up. His eyes flashed open. The sun was coming up over the mountains, and it was actually shining light down on the campsite.

  Shawn was sitting by the fire mixing something in a metal Sierra Cup with a plastic spoon.

  “I keep stirring and stirring,” Shawn said when he noticed Gus was awake. “But this still doesn’t look like eggs Benedict.” He tilted the steel cup so Gus could see the yellow-and-white soup floating inside.

  Shawn was here, but the lawyers were all gone. As he crawled out of his sleeping bag, Gus searched the camp for any trace of them. “Where is everybody?”

  “Bathroom break,” Shawn said. “They worked out some system where the three of them go into the woods together so no one actually has to look at anyone else. Or something.” He took a sip of his eggs and grimaced. “If I ever come up with a brilliant moneymaking scheme that revolves around eggs Benedict you can drink with a straw, talk me out of it.”

  Gus wanted to grab Shawn by the shoulders until his head fell off, grew spider legs, and ran away. How could he be thinking about anything so trivial right now?

  There was a rustling from the bushes. Before Gus had time to formulate the image of the creature in his head, the three lawyers stepped out into the camp. Savage and Balowsky stayed a step behind as Gwendolyn walked up to Shawn and reached for his pack.

  “We’ve taken a vote,” she said. “We’ve decided to share control of the map.”

  Shawn nudged the pack out of her reach with his foot. “I voted that if Quaker Oats was going to release a new flavor of Life cereal they should go for chocolate instead of maple-and-brown-sugar,” he said. “They seemed to think that my vote didn’t count, especially since they never had an election.”

  If Shawn had hoped to distract Gwendolyn into a discussion of the Quaker Oats company’s unfair decision-making process, he was disappointed. “We don’t trust you and your little sidekick.”

  Gus should let that go, he knew. There were monsters in the woods. They couldn’t start fighting among themselves. But he found himself taking a step forward, his hands clenching into fists. In the last few days he’d been held hostage first by a mime, then by a group of actors. He’d been stranded in the mountains and forced to hike a bazillion miles to save his life. He spent half his energy fighting to stay alive and the other half struggling against blind, irrational panic. Through it all he’d remained pleasant and polite. And what was his reward? To be insulted by a lawyer—a lawyer! Worse—a lawyer with a thirty-four percent chance of being a mass killer. He wasn’t going to take it anymore. “I am no man’s sidekick,” he said.

  “I didn’t say you were a man’s sidekick,” Gwendolyn said. “I said you were his.”

  “That’s it,” Gus said. “The last straw.”

  Somehow Shawn didn’t seem to share his anger, even though the barb had been aimed primarily at him. “I guess that makes you the camel’s back,” Shawn said. “That could come in handy on the rest of the hike. Which is what we should really be saving our energy for.”

  “I’m ready to hike as soon as I can see the map,” Gwendolyn said.

  “You want that map?” Gus said. “You can come through me to get it.”

  “Because that would be a long and exciting fight,” Shawn said casually. “After all, she’s only the Master of Sinanju looking for an excuse to scoop your brains out through your nose with her pinky finger. And you never came in lower than second when we played Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots.”

  “We’ve got to have this out now,” Gus said.

  “That’s a good idea,” Shawn said. “I mean, it’s not like they came up to us and deliberately tried to get us mad so that we’d start a fight, giving them an opportunity to kick our asses and take the map from our cold, dead hands. And when I say it’s not like that, I mean it’s exactly like that.”

  The blood pounding in Gus’ ears was almost enough to drown out Shawn’s logic. Almost, but not quite. He dropped his hands and felt the blood surging back into his fingers as they unclenched. “So by not fighting, we win,” Gus said. “It’s like a Zen thing.”

  “Wax on, wax off,” Shawn agreed.

  “That is the lamest excuse for wussing out on a fight I’ve ever heard,” Balowsky said.

  “Almost as lame as letting the girl do your fighting for you while you hide behind her?” Shawn said.

  “Even lamer,” Gwendolyn said. “They know who their strongest warrior is.”

  “I know I do,” Shawn agreed. “If there’s one of the three of you who’s tough enough to toss Jade off a cliff, I’d vote for you.”

  “And yet the other two want to give her the only map out of here,” Gus said

  “Nice try,” Savage said. “But we can work that out between ourselves once we’ve got the map. Now hand it over.”

  Shawn picked up his pack and slipped it over his shoulders. “Tell you what,” he said. “We’ll be the ones going in the right direction. You get moving, and we’ll call out the turns.”

  He headed out of the camp between two tall trees. Gus shouldered his pack and followed. There was a moment’s whispered discussion among the lawyers, and then Gwendolyn led the others quickly through another stand of trees and around so that they were positioned in front of Shawn and Gus.

  “You’re going to give us the map,” Gwendolyn said.

  “You couldn’t trick us into a fight; you’re not going to outsmart us,” Shawn said. “There’s no way we’re going to give it to you.”

  “Except that there are only two of you,” Savage said. “And there are three of us.”

  Savage took one menacing step forward. But as his foot hit the ground, something snaked through the litter of dried pine needles and seized him around the ankle. Before anyone could move, the snare tightened on his foot and flung the lawyer upside down high among the top branches of the trees. Gus heard a meaty thump as Savage’s head collided with the trunk. Gus peered up. Way above them, he could see the tiny, broken figure of the lawyer dangling limply from the rope.

  “I guess that makes us even again,” Shawn said. “Shall we start walking?”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  After leaving the investigation, Henry had thought he’d go back to rock and roll camp. He’d driven most of the way to Ojai beating out his drum solo on the steering wheel. But he couldn’t focus on jamming right now; his mind was completely preoccupied with a double homicide, and he knew that even though he wasn’t officially involved, he couldn’t just let it alone. So he made a U-turn as soon as he passed the end of the divided section of Highway 33 and headed home.

  He’d spent the next day working the phone and the computer trying to find any information on the case. He’d even popped into police headquarters, but Lassiter and O’Hara were out in the field, and no one knew when they’d be back. Of course he could have called their cells and offered his services, but he knew what they’d have said: He was retired.

  The long and fruitless day landed him exactly one piece of information—the janitorial contracting service Arnold Svaco had worked for had a contract to clean, among many much less interesting places, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Arnold had been working there almost exclusively for years. Maybe that meant something, although Henry had no idea what. He left the information on Lassiter’s voice mail, just in case.

  The next day was the last session of camp, and when he w
oke up Henry decided he’d go back for the big jam session finale. The case was still pushing the beat out of his mind, but after wasting all of yesterday, he decided he could leave the police work to the working police.

  He was getting into the car for the drive to Ojai when his cell rang. He answered. And heard the last two words he ever expected to hear since his retirement:

  Hostage situation.

  Henry blew through a half dozen red lights on his way to Edgecliff Road, but by the time he got to Rushton, Morelock’s mansion offices, the parking lot was already filled with police cruisers. He jumped out of his car as Lassiter rushed up to him.

  “How bad is it?” Henry said.

  “How bad can it get?” Lassiter said. He started towards the mansion, assuming that Henry would keep up with him. They blew past the front door and continued along the exterior of the building.

  “What does he think he’s doing?” Henry said.

  “ ‘Bringing justice to an unjust world,’ ” Lassiter said. “Or something even dumber. You can ask him yourself. He’s been demanding to speak to you.”

  There was a window open at the far end of the building. Lassiter stopped short, but gestured for Henry to walk up to it.

  Henry peered into the open window. The room was enormous, the size of Henry’s whole house, and furnished in nautical antiques. Across a huge desk Henry could see an elderly man in a wheelchair. He’d never met Oliver Rushton, but he’d seen enough pictures in the paper to recognize him. Standing over the lawyer was Officer Chris Rasmussen. He was pointing a gun at Rushton’s head.

  Henry had to think fast. He should have formulated a plan of action on the drive down, but the situation was so insane he couldn’t bring himself to believe it until he saw it for himself. Now he had to improvise.

  “Officer Rasmussen,” he said with as much authority as he could muster. “Report.”