Psyc 03_The Call of the Mild (29 page)

“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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
here 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?

Gus fought to keep these thoughts out of his mind, but it was getting harder and harder. The pain in his feet and legs was keeping him anchored to reality, but he could feel the ropes starting to fray.

He followed the trail around an enormous tree, only to find Shawn sitting against the other side of it nibbling at a granola bar.

“Can you believe people actually fight to protect this kind of wilderness?” Shawn said, getting to his feet. “Go ahead, try to tell me it wouldn’t be better without a Burger King every couple of miles.”

Gus stopped. “How far ahead are the others?”

“They’re spread out over a mile or two,” Shawn said. “If it makes you feel any better, even Gwendolyn was looking like she really needed a sylvan pool to splash in.”

“It doesn’t,” Gus said. He took a step forward and felt the pain run up his leg.

“It should,” Shawn said. “We need these people to be at least as exhausted as we are.”

“Small chance of that,” Gus said. “Why?”

“Because it’s our only chance of survival,” Shawn said. “We need the killer to be tired so that he or she starts to make mistakes.”

For the first time in hours Gus didn’t feel the ache in his legs. He didn’t think about the horrors of being lost in the wilderness.

“Mathis was the threat to the killer, and Mathis is dead,” Gus said. “Why kill again?”

“Because as long as any of us is alive, Mathis is still a threat,” Shawn said. “If the world knows he was murdered, they’ll also know it had to be one of us. And once they start investigating, they’ll figure it out. It may take a while. If it’s Lassiter on the case, it may take decades. But they will figure it out.”

“But if we all disappear in the wilderness, no one will ever know what happened.” It was so obvious that Gus couldn’t believe he hadn’t realized it before. “The killer is presumed dead along with the rest of us. The only difference is we’re all rotting out in the woods, while he or she is smuggling that chip out of the country.”

“I’m going to follow Gwendolyn’s lead here,” Shawn said. “Let’s just call the killer ‘he’ from now on, and remember we don’t know the real gender. Because if we have only hours left to live, I don’t want to spend precious seconds of my life saying ‘he or she.’ ”

“Fine,” Gus said. “He’s going to kill us all. He’ll have to kill all the actors, too.”

“He’s got time,” Shawn said. “Even if Rushton isn’t playing games, no one’s going to know anything’s wrong for at least four more days. It will take another forty-eight hours before they send out the search parties. And they’re not going to find anything, if the killer is smart.”

“So what do we do?” Gus said.

“As I see it, we’ve got a couple of options,” Shawn said. “First, we could kill all the lawyers before they can get to us.”

“I’m going to pass on that one.”

“Just as well,” Shawn said. “I don’t really have enough energy for a mass killing. It looks so easy when you see it in the movies, but when you start figuring all the logistics, all the luring the victim into a secluded location, then hiding the body, and then getting ready to start all over again with the next one, it gets to be a lot of work.”

“Why wouldn’t you just drop behind them on the trail and shoot them all at once?” Gus said.

“You mean like you?”

“Yes, Shawn,” Gus said wearily. “That’s the real reason I’ve been taking up the rear. Because I am actually the killer, and I plan to eliminate all the lawyers. On the off chance I ever catch up with them, of course.”

“You have to admit, it would be a great twist,” Shawn said. “No one would ever see that coming.”

“No one ever saw that Tommy Lee Jones was killing Laura Mars’ models, either,” Gus said. “And for the same reason: It’s really stupid and makes everything that comes before it ridiculous.”

Gus pushed himself off the tree and started walking down the trail, trying to ignore the pain in his feet and legs. Shawn caught up with him within three steps. Or almost caught up with him; the trees grew so close here there was only room to walk single file.

“Okay, okay, forget the twist,” Shawn said. “We’ll focus on finding the real killer, even if it turns out to be the most obvious suspect.”

“You mean Gwendolyn?”

“Of course not,” Shawn said. “She’s a trained killer, a natural hunter, and a born predator. She’d murder us all as soon as look at us. Sooner, probably, if she knew how bad you looked right now.”

“Which makes her the most obvious suspect,” Gus said.

“Maybe in that bizarro universe you live in,” Shawn said. “She’s so obvious she couldn’t be the killer. Not if we’re going to maintain any self-respect as detectives.”

Gus tried to ignore the throbbing in his head, which was beginning to pulse in rhythm with the pain in his legs. “So when you say ‘the most obvious suspect,’ you really mean the least obvious suspect, who is most obvious by virtue of not being obvious at all.”

“Now that is some respectable detectiving,” Shawn said.

“Who are we talking about?” Gus said.

“I’d think it would be obvious.”

Gus tried to glare back at Shawn, but all he could see behind him was the edge of his own pack. “I don’t want to have this conversation anymore,” he said.

“Okay, I’ll tell you, but only because you’re tired and cranky,” Shawn said. “Jade Greenway.”

Gus stopped so suddenly that Shawn walked into his pack, nearly knocking them both over. He steadied himself against a tree as Shawn came around to face him. “What makes you say she’s the killer?” Gus said.

“Jade is perfect,” Shawn said. “She’s quiet and kind of shy and seems pretty easy to intimidate, at least compared to the rest of this bunch. She’s the only one who ever expressed remorse over Mathis’ death, even if it was expressed more as a confirmation of her own moral superiority than as any actual sense of grief. And she always wears bright green, which makes her unbelievably easy to see, especially if she tries to hide in this dusty brown forest.”

“Everything you’re saying is an argument for why Jade Greenway isn’t the killer,” Gus said.

“Exactly,” Shawn said. “You don’t get a lot less obvious than that. Which all adds up to make her the obvious suspect.”

“If you’re living in a nuthouse,” Gus said. “Or a Joe Eszterhas movie.”

“I’m going with the nuthouse,” Shawn said. “Unless Jade and Gwendolyn throw off their tops and start dancing around the trees.”

Gus could feel his legs beginning to tremble beneath him. Since his only choice was to fall over and die right here or start walking again, he set out along the trail. He could hear Shawn crunching through the pine needles behind him.

“Okay, fine, don’t believe me,” Shawn said. “But when she sneaks up on you in the night, and you have only one second to cry out before your life is over, I hope you’ll have the common decency to use that time to say I was right.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Gus said. “In the meantime, whether it’s Jade or Gwendolyn or Savage or Balowsky or even Joe Eszterhas, how do we keep the rest of us alive for the next few days?”

“I’ve been working on a plan,” Shawn said. “To start with, it’s absolutely crucial that the six of us stay together at all times. As long as we’re all in each other’s sight, there’s no way the killer can start to pick us off one by one.”

“That is a good plan,” Gus said. “I do see one little hole in it, though.”

“It’s true that the killer could tell everyone their shoes are untied, and then when we all bend down to look, in that instant he strikes,” Shawn said. “I recommend we keep our laces tightly tied at all times.”

“The killer could still drop to the back of the line, pull out a gun, and take us all out,” Gus said. “With these packs on, it’s almost impossible to see anything that’s behind you.”

“I’ve got a two-pronged solution to that,” Shawn said. “The first prong is you, although I’ve always considered you more of a tine. You’ll stay at the end of the line at all times.”

“How do I keep someone from dropping behind me?” Gus said.

“Whatever you’ve been doing so far has worked just fine,” Shawn said. “You’ve been dead last since we started out.”

Gus stopped short, braced himself against a tree, then waited for the satisfying thwock of Shawn’s nose hitting his pack. Then he moved on again. “Until now,” he said. “You’re behind me as we speak because you chose to wait for me. Couldn’t the killer do exactly the same thing?”

Shawn rubbed his bruised nose, then started off after Gus. “That’s what the second prong is for,” he said. “And in this case the prong is a rope, which wouldn’t be very useful if we needed a pitchfork, but is pretty good as a way to keep us from getting killed.”