The Never Game Read online

  He was breathing hard . . . and only partly from the effort of climbing on the ledges and rocks.

  They received a two-minute warning from the heavens. The deadline seemed to energize Maddie. She charged forward repeatedly. He took a cut on his leg, and she one on the upper arm. Blood appeared in the wound, an eerie sight. A meter on his goggles reported that he had ninety percent life left.

  He feinted and Maddie fell for it. She dodged too late to miss a slash on her upper thigh, a shallow wound, and he could hear her low, murky voice: “Son of a bitch.”

  Shaw pressed forward and Maddie backed up. She tried to make a leap onto a low ledge—a platform about eighteen inches off the ground—misjudged and fell hard. Though the floor was padded with foam, her side had collided with the edge of the platform. She dropped to her knees and gripped her ribs. He heard her grunt in pain.

  Standing straight, he lowered the sword and walked forward to help her up. “You all right?”

  He was about three feet away when she sprang to her feet and plunged her blade into his gut.

  YOU’VE JUST DIED!

  It had all been a trick. She’d fallen on purpose, landing in a particular way—with her feet under her so she could leverage herself up and lunge.

  The overlord in the ceiling announced that their time was up. The fantasy world became a backstage once more. He and Maddie pulled their goggles off. He started to give her a nod and say, “That was a low blow”—not a bad joke—but he didn’t. She wiped sweat from her forehead and temple with the back of her sleeve and looked about with an expression that wasn’t a lot different from that of the creatures that had killed him. Not triumph, not joy in victory. Nothing. Just ice.

  He recalled what she’d said before they stepped inside the booth.

  We’ll just try it out here for the fun of it . . .

  As they walked to the exit, it was as if she grew aware suddenly that she wasn’t alone. “Hey, you’re not mad, are you?” she said.

  “All’s fair.”

  The awkward atmosphere leveled but didn’t exactly vanish as they walked outside. What did disappear was his intention to ask her to dinner. He would—might—later. Not tonight.

  They handed their goggles to the HSE employee, who put them in a bin for sanitizing. At the desk, Maddie was given a canvas bag, which he assumed contained a new game for her to take home and review.

  His phone hummed.

  A local area code.

  Berkeley police, to arrest him for the transgressing larceny? Dan Wiley and Supervisor Cummings deciding to arrest him anew after changing their minds about the Great Evidence Robbery?

  It was from JMCTF, though just the desk officer, telling him his car was available to be picked up at the pound.

  Exhausted and having died three times in ten minutes—or was it four?—Shaw thought: Give it a shot. “Can somebody deliver it to me?”

  The silence—which he imagined was accompanied by a look of bewilderment on the officer’s face—lasted a good three seconds. “I’m afraid we can’t do that, sir. You’ll have to go to the pound to pick it up.”

  She gave him the address, which he memorized.

  He eased a glance Maddie’s way. “My car’s ready.”

  “I can drive you.”

  It was obvious that her preference was to stay. Which was fine with him.

  “No, I’ll get an Uber.”

  He hugged her and she kissed his cheek.

  “It was fun—” he started.

  “’Night!” Maddie called. Then she was off, tugging at her hair and striding toward another booth—with the marauding aliens, the swords and Shaw himself completely erased, like data dumped from a hard drive’s random access memory.

  24.

  No logical reason in the world to pay one hundred and fifty dollars to retrieve a car that should never have been held hostage in the first place.

  But there you have it.

  Adding insult, the charge was five percent more if you used a credit card. Colter checked his cash: one hundred and eighty-seven dollars. He handed over the Amex, paid and walked to the front gate to wait.

  The pound was a sprawling yard in a seedy part of the Valley, on the east side of the 101. Some of the cars had been there for months, to judge from the grime. He counted airliners on final approach to San Francisco Airport, thinking of how the sound of the planes had unsettlingly masked the noise of any attackers when he was searching for Sophie at that old factory. Now he gave up at sixteen jets. The vehicle arrived five minutes later. Shaw examined it. No scratches or dents. His computer bag was still in the trunk and had probably been searched, yet nothing had been damaged or taken.

  The crisp voice of the GPS guided him back into a tamer part of Silicon Valley, quieted in the late evening. He was headed toward his RV park in Los Altos Hills. Colter Shaw had, however, chosen a circuitous route, ignoring the electronic lady’s directives—and her patient recalculating corrections.

  Because someone was following him.

  When he’d left the pound, he’d been aware of car lights flicking on and the vehicle to which they were attached making a U-turn and proceeding in his direction. Maybe a coincidence? When Shaw stopped abruptly at a yellow light that he could easily have rolled through without a ticket, the car or truck behind him swerved quickly to the curb. He couldn’t tell the make, model or color.

  A random carjacker or mugger? Two percent. A Chevy Malibu wasn’t worth the jail time.

  Detective Dan Wiley, planning to beat the crap out of him? Four percent. Satisfying but a career ender. The man was a narcissist, not a fool.

  Detective Dan Wiley, hoping to catch him score some street pot or coke? Fifteen percent. He seemed like a vindictive prick.

  A felon Shaw had helped put inside or a hitman or leg breaker hired by said felon? Ten percent. No shortage of those. It would have been hard for someone to have traced him to the police pound yet not impossible. Shaw gave it double digits because he tended to skew the number higher when the consequences of what might occur were particularly painful. Or fatal.

  The more likely possibility, Person X—whose plans for Sophie Mulliner had been spoiled and who’d come for revenge: sixty percent.

  He muted the GPS lass, turned off the automatic braking system and steered down a quiet street. He hit the gas hard, as if trying to run, spinning tires. The pursuer sped up too. At fifty mph he crunched the brake pedal and turned into a left-hand skid. Almost lost it—the asphalt was dew-damp—then steered in the direction of the car’s veering rear end. He controlled the flamboyant maneuver just in time and the Malibu zipped neatly into the entrance of a darkened parking garage. Twenty feet inside he made a U-turn, the sound a teeth-setting squeal due to the concrete acoustics. He goosed the accelerator and sped back to the entrance.

  Shaw’s phone was up, camera videoing, car lights on high beam. Ready to capture an image of the tail.

  His prey never appeared. A minute later he gunned the engine and exited, turning right, expecting his pursuer to be waiting.

  The street was empty.

  He continued to the RV park, this time obeying Ms. GPS to the letter. He paused at the entrance to the trailer park and looked around. Traffic, but the vehicles streamed by, their drivers uninterested in him. He continued into the park, turned on Google Way and parked.

  He climbed out, locked the car and walked quickly to the Winnebago door. Inside, leaving the lights off, he retrieved his Glock from the spice cabinet. For five minutes he peered through the blinds. No cars.

  Shaw went into the small bathroom, where he took a hot, then ice-cold, shower. He dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, and made dinner of scrambled eggs with some of the gun-cabinet herbs (tarragon, sage), buttered toast and a piece of salty country ham, along with an Anchor Steam. Eleven p.m. was often his dinnertime.

  He sat at the ba
nquette to dine and perform his nightly check of the local news feeds. Another woman had been attacked—in Daly City—the perp arrested before Shaw had rescued Sophie. Some irrelevant stories: a popular labor organizer denying corruption claims, a terrorist plot thwarted on the Oakland docks, a surge in voter registration as Californians prepared to go to the polls on some special referenda.

  As for the Sophie Mulliner kidnapping, the anchors and commentators didn’t provide any news that Shaw wasn’t aware of, while still doing what they did best: ramping up the paranoia. “That’s right, Candy, my experience has been that kidnappers like this—‘thrill kidnappers,’ we call them—often go after multiple victims.”

  Shaw had made the news as well.

  Detective Dan Wiley said that a concerned citizen, Colter Shaw, pursuing the reward offered by Mr. Mulliner—making him sound particularly mercenary—had provided information that proved helpful in the rescue.

  He logged off and shut down computer and router.

  Proved helpful . . .

  Nearly midnight.

  Shaw was ready for sleep but sleep was not on the immediate horizon. He returned to the kitchen cabinet and once more removed the envelope he’d stolen from the Cal archives, the one with the elegant penmanship emblazoned on the front: Graded Exams 5/25. Inside were the documents he’d skimmed earlier. He opened a blank notebook and uncapped his fountain pen.

  A sip of beer and he began to read in earnest, wondering if in fact he’d find an answer to the question: What had actually happened in the early-morning hours of October 5, fifteen years ago, on bleak Echo Ridge?

  LEVEL 3:

  THE SINKING SHIP

  Sunday, June 9

  The rock had had no effect on the windshield of the foundering Seas the Day.

  Shaw tossed it back into the grim, turbulent Pacific and pulled the locking-blade knife from his pocket. He’d use it to try to remove the screws securing the window frame to the front of the cabin.

  He heard, over the gutsy roar of waves colliding with rock and sand, Elizabeth Chabelle shouting something.

  Probably: “Get me the fuck out of here!”

  Or a variation.

  Gripping a scabby railing with his left hand, he began on the screws. There were four—standard heads, not Phillips. He fitted the blade in sideways and rotated counterclockwise. Nothing for a moment. Then, with all his strength, he twisted and the hardware moved. A few minutes later the screw was out. Then the second. The third.

  He was halfway through the fourth screw when a large swell smacked the side of the boat and sent Shaw over the railing backward, between the ship and a pylon.

  Instinctively grabbing for a handhold, he let go of the knife and saw it vanish in a graceful spiral on its way to the ocean floor. He kicked to the surface and muscled his way once more onto the forward deck.

  Back to the window, loosened but not free.

  Okay. Enough. Angrily Shaw gripped it with both hands, planted his feet on the exterior side wall of the cabin and pulled—arm muscles, leg muscles, back muscles.

  The frame broke away.

  Shaw and the window went over the side.

  Oh, hell, he thought, grabbing a breath just before he hit.

  Kicking to the surface again. The shivering was less intense now and he felt a wave of euphoria, hypothermia’s way of telling you that death can be fun.

  Scrabbling back onto the foredeck, he dropped into the front portion of the cabin and slid to the bulkhead separating this part from the aft. The vessel was now down by the stern at a forty-five-degree angle. Below him, exhausted Elizabeth Chabelle had left her bunk bed perch in the half-flooded aft section of the cabin. She gripped the frame of the small window in the door. He saw wounds on her hands; she would have shattered the glass and reached through to find the knob.

  Which had been removed.

  She sobbed, “Why? Who did this?”

  “You’ll be fine, Elizabeth.”

  Running his hands around the perimeter of the interior door, Shaw felt the sharp points. It had been sealed from the other side with Sheetrock screws, just like at the factory where Sophie had been stashed.

  “Do you have any tools?”

  “No! I l-looked for f-fucking tools.” Stuttering in the cold.

  Where was the hypothermia clock now? Probably ten minutes and counting down.

  Another wave crashed into the boat. Chabelle muttered something Shaw couldn’t understand, her shivering was so bad. She repeated it: “Wh-who . . . ?”

  “He left things for you. Five things.”

  “It’s so f-fucking c-cold.”

  “What did he leave you?”

  “A kite . . . th-there was a kite. A power bar. I ate it. A f-flashlight. Matches. They’re all wet. A p-p-pot. F-flowerpot. A f-fucking f-flowerpot.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “Give—?”

  “The pot.”

  She bent down, feeling under the surface, and a moment later handed him the brown-clay pot. He shattered it against the wall and, picking the sharpest shard, began digging at the wood around the hinges.

  “Get back on the bunk,” Shaw told her. “Out of the water.”

  “There’s n-no . . .”

  “As best you can.”

  She turned and climbed to the top of the bed. She managed to keep most of her body, from ample belly up, above the surface.

  Shaw said, “Tell me about George.”

  “Y-you know m-my boyfriend?”

  “I saw a picture of you two. You ballroom dance.”

  A faint laugh. “He’s t-terrible. But he t-tries. Okay with f-fox-trot. Do you . . .”

  Shaw gave a laugh too. “I don’t dance, no.”

  The wood was teak. Hard as stone. Still he kept at it. He said, “You get to Miami much, see your folks?”

  “I—I . . .”

  “I’ve got a place in Florida. Farther north. You ever get to the ’Glades?”

  “One of those b-boats, with the airplane p-propellers. I’m going to d-die, aren’t I?”

  “No you’re not.”

  While the glass knife might have cut through plaster to free Sophie, the pottery shard was next to useless. “You like stone crabs?”

  “Broke my t-tooth on a . . . on a shell one time.” She began sobbing. “I d-don’t know who you are. Thank you. Get out. Get out now. S-save yourself . . . It’s t-too late.”

  Shaw looked into the dim portion of the cabin where she clung to the post of the bunk.

  “P-please,” she said. “Save yourself.”

  The ship settled further.

  LEVEL 2:

  THE DARK FOREST

  Saturday, June 8, One Day Earlier

  25.

  At 9 a.m. Colter Shaw was in one of the twenty-five million strip malls that dotted Silicon Valley, this one boasting a nail salon, a Hair Cuttery, a FedEx operation and a Salvadoran restaurant—the establishment he was now sitting in. It was a cheerful place, decorated with festive red-and-white paper flowers and rosettes and photos of mountains, presumably of the country back home. The restaurant also offered among the best Latin American coffee he’d ever had: Santa Maria from the “microregion” of Potrero Grande. He wanted to buy a pound or two. It wasn’t for sale by the bag.

  He sipped the aromatic beverage and glanced across the street. On his drive to the mall he’d passed imposing mansions just minutes away, but here were tiny bungalows. One was in foreclosure—he thought of Frank Mulliner’s neighbor—and another for sale by owner. Two signs sat in the parking strips of houses. VOTE YES PROPOSITION 457. NO PROPERTY TAX HIKES!!! And a similar message with the addition of a skull and crossbones and the words SILICON VALLEY REAL ESTATE—YOU’RE KILLING US!!

  Shaw turned back to the stack of documents he’d removed from the university the other day. Stolen, true, tho
ugh on reflection he supposed an argument might be made that the burglary was justified.

  After all, they had been written or assembled by his father, Ashton Shaw.

  Two of whose rules he thought of now:

  Never adopt a strategy or approach a task without assigning percentages.

  Never assign a percentage until you have as many facts as possible . . .

  That, of course, was the key.

  Colter Shaw couldn’t make any assessment of what had happened on October 5, fifteen years ago, until he gathered those facts . . . What in these pages addressed that? There were three hundred and seventy-four of them. Shaw wondered if the number itself were a message; after all, his father had been given to codes and cryptic references.

  Ashton had been an expert in political science, law, government, American history, as well as—an odd hobby—physics. The pages contained snippets of all those topics. Essays started but never completed and essays completed but making no sense whatsoever to Shaw. Odd theories, quotations from people he’d never heard of. Maps of neighborhoods in the Midwest, in Washington, D.C., in Chicago, of small towns in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Population charts from the 1800s. Newspaper clippings. Photographs of old buildings.

  Some medical records too, which turned out to be from his mother’s research into psychosis for East Coast drug companies.

  Too much information is as useless as too little.

  Four pages were turned down at the corner, suggesting that his father, or someone, wished to return to those pages and review them carefully. Shaw made a note of these and examined each briefly. Page 37 was a map of a town in Alabama; page 63, an article about a particle accelerator; page 118 was a photocopy of an article in The New York Times about a new computer system for the New York Stock Exchange; page 255 was a rambling essay by Ashton on the woeful state of the country’s infrastructure.