The Call of the Mild p-3 Page 13

  “Rushton’s done this kind of thing before.” If Savage noticed that Shawn was staring over his shoulder at the flat-screen, he didn’t let that slow him down.

  “Trapped Erazor in his lamp?” Shawn said. “Can you tell me how? Because I’m having trouble, even after turning into Darkspine Sonic.”

  “Setting a spy in our midst,” Savage said. “That’s the real reason he kept Archie Kane around all those years. It wasn’t because Archie was actually good at anything, or that he ever performed a single task. He was there to make sure we knew Rushton was watching us at all times. Now he’s cooked up this ridiculous story about Archie being dead, and here you are. It’s this perfect little watertight story line, and we all have to pretend we believe it.”

  “You know what isn’t watertight?” Shawn said. “The interior of a Town Car. Oh, and I guess you could add Archie Kane’s nose and mouth, too.”

  Savage looked troubled. “You mean that story about Archie is real?”

  “I don’t know why you’d believe it from me if you wouldn’t take it from your boss,” Shawn said. “But his corpse looked pretty real to me.”

  Savage glanced over at Gus as if for confirmation. “Dead,” Gus said.

  “Then Rushton really has gone insane,” Savage said after a long silence.

  Gus tried to figure out what the Man of Bronze was talking about. “Are you saying you think Mr. Rushton is responsible for Archie Kane’s murder?”

  “I’m not saying anything,” Savage said. “But know this: We are all Rushton’s pawns, even you. You may think you’re above his game, but I guarantee you’re not. So whatever happens in the next eight days, I will think of you two not as my enemies but as my brothers and do whatever I can to protect you.”

  “Will you remind me to put on sunscreen if I start to get red?” Shawn said. “Because I burn really easily.”

  “I will do whatever I can to keep you safe,” Savage said. “And I hope, no matter what your instructions, you will do the same for me. Rushton may think this is a good time for games, but I don’t.”

  He held Shawn’s gaze for a full five seconds, then turned and gave Gus the same treatment. Then he broke off his gaze and went back to his seat across the cabin, pulled out his BlackBerry, and started thumbing.

  “These guys take their retreats pretty seriously,” Shawn said. “Or did the other drug reps talk like this at the Four Seasons?”

  “I think one of them offered me a pina colada once,” Gus said. “Then he realized I wasn’t in management and couldn’t help him get a promotion, so he stuck me with the tab.”

  “That is brutal,” Shawn said. “No wonder the tan guy is so concerned about us.”

  Shawn turned back to the thorny problem of undoing the changes an evil genie had done in The Arabian Nights. Gus thought about grabbing another Wii control and joining the game, but he couldn’t manage to be quite as worry-free as Shawn. He didn’t understand much of what the lawyer had been hinting about, but it seemed increasingly apparent that the man who’d hired them was some kind of master manipulator. Shawn and Gus had thought they’d gotten exactly what they wanted from Rushton, but now Gus wasn’t sure. What were they getting themselves into?

  Gus twirled his chair towards the window as he tried to make sense of it all. But what he saw there only made him more confused. They had left the Central Valley behind them; if he craned his neck, he could see its edge far in the distance. But whatever they were flying over, it wasn’t the approach to Las Vegas. There were no lights in the distance, no freeways filled with suckers speeding towards their inevitable fleecing.

  What there was was… nothing.

  Nothing, anyway, that belonged anywhere near a five-star luxury resort. There were rolling hills densely covered with pine forest. There were frequent outcroppings of granite. There were rivers and lakes, and Gus thought he saw a waterfall.

  What there wasn’t was any sign of human habitation. No houses. No buildings. No roads.

  Gus did his best to call up that map of California in his head. If you flew out of Santa Barbara and headed east and then north, which was their trajectory as best as he could figure, you’d pass over farm towns like Lemoore and Hanford, and then you’d hit wilderness. And not wilderness like those parts of Santa Barbara where an old bungalow had been torn down but the plans for the McMansion hadn’t been approved yet. This was real wilderness. Specifically the John Muir wilderness, almost six hundred thousand acres of nothing. And beyond that, more wilderness areas and two national parks, and then a lot of nothing, and then Death Valley, which was also a lot of nothing but was also hot enough to kill you in about ten minutes this time of year.

  Gus would be the first to admit he wasn’t a connoisseur of high-end luxury resorts, but he had never heard of one anywhere within hundreds of miles of where he assumed they were now. And even if there was one somewhere below them, it probably wouldn’t have a lot of amenities, since there didn’t seem to be any roads to supply them.

  As Gus was trying to picture a place he’d actually want to stay in anywhere on a line between here and Toronto, the pilot’s voice came over a sound system. “If you look out the left side of the cabin, you’ve got a great view of Mount Whitney, the highest mountain in the contiguous United States.”

  Gus was right about their location, but, he thought hopefully, maybe he’d been wrong about the purpose. This was probably just a sightseeing detour, a chance to give the lawyers a bit of spectacular scenery before taking them to the resort that was undoubtedly waiting for them in some civilized part of the world.

  “For the person who bribed the employee at High Mountain Wilderness Retreats to get our destination and maps down the mountain, Mr. Rushton has a special message,” the pilot continued. “Mount Whitney was just a decoy destination.”

  The chopper took a hard turn to the right. Gus had to grab the armrests of his chair to keep from falling to the floor like the crew of the Enterprise during a photon torpedo attack. When he’d recovered his equilibrium, he saw with horror that the ground was rushing straight up at them.

  “This is your new destination,” the pilot said as the helicopter lowered itself onto a rocky outcropping at the peak of another mountain. “Last stop. Everybody out.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Henry and Rasmussen rode in silence all the way to Pasadena. Since the moment they’d left the dweeb’s office, Rasmussen had spoken only twice-once to confirm that Arnold Svaco was indeed Ellen’s cousin, her sole relative, and once to accuse Henry of violating every principle he’d taught Rasmussen to live by. Henry tried to retort that a policeman couldn’t hope to get by with just the information he’d learned in junior high school, but one look at the pout on the officer’s face told him not to bother.

  Instead he spent the drive thinking through the case. He had no doubt that Ellen Svaco was the emotional force behind the Fluffy Foundation. The cat box, food, and toys in her house were all for a pet who’d been dead for half a decade; they must have constituted a shrine or a monument to his memory. But it was her cousin Arnold who was footing the bills. Why? And more important, how?

  It wasn’t that Arnold was rich. He made even less than Ellen had, under thirty thousand dollars a year working as a janitor for a contractor that cleaned government offices. Yet somehow in the last five years he’d managed to donate ten times his gross salary to Fluffy’s memory.

  So who was behind these donations-and why? Since the charity was actually paying out to pet owners, it didn’t seem to be a money-laundering operation, or at least not a particularly efficient one.

  And then there was the big question-why was Ellen Svaco killed? It couldn’t have been for the money, because it appeared that she never had possession of it. Nothing about this case was making sense. Least of all Henry’s temporary partner.

  Henry pulled the car up outside a decaying bungalow in Northwest Pasadena. Its shingles were cracked, rain gutters sagging, and the lawn in front was a patch of dirt.
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br />   Rasmussen looked up from his hands for the first time since they’d left Santa Barbara. “This isn’t the Pasadena Police Station,” he said.

  “Can’t fault you on your observational skills,” Henry said. “Arnold Svaco lives here.”

  “We need to check in with the locals,” Rasmussen said. “We don’t have jurisdiction.”

  “I don’t have jurisdiction anywhere,” Henry said. “I’m not on the Santa Barbara force. I’m just a private citizen stopping by the home of another private citizen to ask a few discreet questions. There’s no law against that, is there?”

  Rasmussen stared as if Henry had suggested executing Arnold Svaco, then dragging his body through the neighborhood behind the car. “If police don’t treat each other with respect, then why should anyone else?” he said. “You taught me-”

  “I know,” Henry said. “But you were eleven years old at the time.”

  “Truth is truth, no matter what age you are,” Rasmussen said.

  “There are levels of complication that make sense only as you get older,” Henry said. “It’s like when you were little and your parents told you about where children come from. It was true, but there was a lot they didn’t explain at the time.”

  Rasmussen crossed his arms across his chest angrily. “I didn’t have parents,” he said. “I grew up in foster care. I never had any kind of role model at all-until I met Officer Friendly. I thought he was honest.”

  In another circumstance Henry might have felt bad about disillusioning this kid. But he wasn’t a little boy anymore; he carried a badge and a gun. He needed to toughen himself up, and fast.

  “I’m going to knock on that door,” Henry said. “You can come with me or you can drive away and visit the Pasadena Police Department alone. Up to you.”

  Henry left the car and went up the cracked concrete walkway. The white picket gate nearly came off in his hands when he opened it, and the porch stairs sagged alarmingly under his feet. The only architectural element on the house that seemed functional at all was the set of iron bars on all the windows. Henry rapped sharply on the warped door and called out, “Arnold! Hey, it’s me!”

  Henry ducked behind the doorframe just in case Arnold Svaco’s answer came in the form of a gunshot. But the only sound was a creak as the door swung open under his touch.

  Henry’s senses went on full alert. No one installs iron bars on his windows and then leaves the door open. He waved urgently for Rasmussen to join him, but the officer looked away and pretended not to see.

  Heart pounding and hand reaching for a gun that hadn’t been on his hip for years, Henry pushed the door open.

  Arnold Svaco’s possessions didn’t have a lot in common with his cousin’s. Where she had almost nothing, Arnold seemed to own everything he’d ever seen in any store. There were flat-screen TVs and an elaborate stereo; there were statues in marble and bronze; there were fish tanks that looked like they’d come from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. There were four leather couches and two armchairs; past the living room Henry could see a dining room table and eight matching chairs that must have cost half of Arnold’s gross yearly salary.

  But there was one way in which the two Svaco households were identical. Because everything Arnold owned was smashed and scattered around the floor.

  And Arnold lay in the middle of it all, dead.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Gus’ fingernails dug into the soft leather of his armchair. His muscles were screaming with pain, but he would not relax his hands. Not until the chopper lifted off again and took him out of this hellhole.

  “That’s a good grip you’ve got there,” Shawn said. “If you apply a little more pressure, maybe your flesh will bond with the leather of the seat and you’ll become one with the chopper. Then they’ll never get you out.”

  “If that’s what it takes,” Gus said.

  “But if you’re going to expend all this energy to stay on board, you might as well wait until you actually need to,” Shawn said. “Like when the door is open.”

  Gus lifted his eyes from their firm fix on the floor and saw that the door hadn’t slid open yet. None of the lawyers had gotten out of their seats. In fact, they were all still jabbing away at their miniature keyboards.

  Gus forced his fingers to relax and felt a wave of relief run up both arms. “They don’t seem worried that they’re about to be dumped out in the wilderness.”

  “Which is a sign that we shouldn’t be, either,” Shawn said. “They know Rushton a lot better than we do. He probably plays this kind of prank on them all the time. We’ll sit here for a few minutes, and then once everyone has had a chance to panic, we’ll lift off and head to our real destination.”

  Gus nodded. That made sense. It was the only thing that made sense. Because the other lawyers were just sitting there working away, as if they knew enough not to be alarmed. He loosened his death grip on the armrest a little more and felt the blood tingling painfully back into his fingers.

  Until there was a thump from outside and the helicopter rocked on its skids. “What was that?” he demanded.

  Shawn glanced over Gus and out the window. “Nothing.”

  “That wasn’t nothing,” Gus said. “I know what nothing feels like. It feels like nothing. That felt like something. Which means it couldn’t be nothing.”

  “It’s just the pilot,” Shawn said, checking the view out the window again.

  “He’s leaving?” Gus said. His breath was coming in short gasps now. “The pilot is abandoning his helicopter? How can we get out of here? Does anyone know how to fly a chopper?”

  “Relax,” Shawn said. “He’s not leaving. He’s just…”

  “Just what?”

  “Unpacking.”

  Gus forced himself to turn his chair so that he was facing the window. The pilot had opened a cargo door at the back of the chopper and was pulling out a series of large backpacks.

  “What are those for?” Gus said, not wanting to hear the answer from Shawn any more than he would accept it from his own brain.

  “I believe they’re called backpacks,” Shawn said. “You strap them on your back and carry things in them.”

  “Maybe you do,” Gus said, his fingers reflexively clutching the armrest again. He risked another glance out the window. The pilot was closing the cargo door. At his feet was a line of eight backpacks: seven made of beige nylon stretched over metal frames, the last in blindingly bright green.

  And still the rest of the lawyers didn’t seem to notice that anything out of the ordinary was happening. They kept texting away. Until the flat-screen went on in an explosion of static.

  Oliver Rushton smiled warmly at them from the safety of the TV. Gus felt an irrational burst of rage. He wanted to reach into the screen and pull Rushton through, wheelchair and all, and leave him on this desolate mountaintop.

  “Greetings, friends,” Rushton said. “I understand that the area you’re in is one of the loveliest parts of California. I wish I could be there with you today.”

  “I wish you were here instead of me,” Gus muttered.

  “It’s a constant challenge for me to come up with fun, creative, exciting retreats for this team, but I think you’ll agree that this is the best one ever,” Rushton said. “Because this retreat will not only test your strength, your intelligence, and your stamina, but it will also forge new bonds of friendship and trust. Here at the top of this mountain you are all individuals with your own agendas. By the time you reach the bottom, you will all be a family.”

  “I had a family once,” Gwendolyn said. “I didn’t like it much.”

  “So she auctioned off their organs and sold the rest off for medical research,” Balowsky said.

  “I made a sacrifice,” Gwendolyn said, pointedly refusing to waste a glance at her colleague. “I chose to put my career-I chose to put the needs of this firm-over my own personal life. And that remains my intent. I want to work for this firm, I want to work for you, Oliver. But I don’t need these peo
ple to be my family.”

  “I understand,” Rushton said.

  Gus had been assuming that Rushton’s appearance was a pretaped video. But of course he was speaking to them live via videoconferencing. Which was excellent news, because it would give Gus a chance to plead his way out of this.

  “But a firm can’t work as a group of individuals,” Rushton continued. “You need to be able to function as a team. That’s why I’ve designed this retreat. Because, as I said, by the time you reach the bottom of the mountain, you will be a family. Or you will all be dead.”

  Chapter Thirty

  For the first time, the other lawyers looked as if they’d realized this wasn’t just another bit of eccentricity from their boss. Maybe it was the way Rushton had emphasized that last word. Or maybe it was the sound of the helicopter door sliding open and the pilot stepping into the cabin. Possibly it was the sight of the gun holstered on the pilot’s thigh. Whatever the reason, Rushton now had everyone’s undivided attention.

  “Sorry if that sounded a little melodramatic,” Rushton chuckled. “But these mountains are harsh, and nature is unforgiving. You will all have to learn to work together if you want to find your way down.”

  “Or we could just use our GPS,” Gwendolyn said, raising her iPhone the way Tanya Roberts had wielded her sword against the temple guards to free King Zed.

  “Yes, you could,” Rushton said. “I would prefer that you didn’t. But of course I can’t stop you. When this call is over, you’ll all step out of the helicopter, and there you will find your backpacks. Inside each pack is everything you will need for the five-day journey down the mountain, and supplies for one more day just in case you decide to take a little extra time to enjoy the scenery.”

  “I don’t mind a little nature hike.” It was Savage, and indeed his muscles seemed to be on the verge of rippling right out of his body in anticipation. “But as much as I love my Bruno Maglis, they don’t provide a lot of stability, ankle protection, or waterproofing. I might as well be barefoot. And that leaves me in substantially better shape than the two women who are wearing heels.”