Mind-Altering Murder Read online

  Then he saw something. A glint of light. It came from one of the upper shelves. Gus peered up and saw that there was one bottle that wasn't dirty at all. It looked like it had just been placed there. "I'll have that bottle of Glen Graggenlogan," he said, hoping he was reading the label correctly from this distance.

  The old man stared at him for a moment, then gave Gus an almost imperceptible wink. "Think you can handle it, junior?" he said.

  Was this some kind of test, or was the old man really trying to warn him away for his own good? Gus couldn't tell. "Is there something I should know?"

  The shopkeeper didn't answer, just kept staring. There wasn't going to be any help coming from him. "Just give me the bottle," Gus said.

  The old man pulled his hand out from under the counter and turned slowly to a rickety library ladder attached at the top to a railing that ran parallel to the ceiling. Sliding it slowly into position, he managed to lift one leg up to the bottom rung, where he rested as if waiting for the strength to continue.

  Gus checked his watch, then checked it again. Time was flying past. Morton wasn't going to wait forever.

  "Can I help you with that?" Gus said, if only to keep himself from screaming at the old man to hurry the hell up.

  "Don't need no help," the shopkeeper said. "Not from a punk like you."

  Was that a deliberate provocation? Once again Gus wished he knew more about the old man's role in his task. If he was in on it, if he was reporting back to Morton, it wouldn't sound good that Gus was willing to take this kind of insult from him. Cayenne wouldn't have. He'd have shaken the rickety ladder until the rungs broke free and the geezer fell to his death. But if he wasn't, if he was just naturally unpleasant, then all that mattered to Gus was getting the bottle and getting out.

  "Sure this is the one you want?"

  Gus looked up to see that somehow the old man had reached the top of the ladder and grabbed one of the dusty bottles with the hand that wasn't clutching the guide rail.

  Gus's first instinct was to thank him, then point out that he was close to the proper bottle. But now he was seized by the suspicion that this was some kind of test, and that he wouldn't pass it with a demonstration of graciousness. "You blind, deaf, or just stupid?" he snarled. "I said the Glen Graggenlogan, not whatever swill you're trying to pawn off on me."

  If the shopkeeper was unused to this level of rudeness, he didn't show it. He thrust the dusty bottle back into its place on the shelf, nearly sending the entire row crashing down onto the floor, then extended his arm as far as it would go, his fingers barely brushing the bottle Gus had demanded.

  Gus couldn't look. He knew what was going to happen. The old man was going to nudge the bottle again and he was going to knock it off the shelf. The only thing he'd be able to bring Morton would be the broken neck, which was undoubtedly what Morton would give him in return.

  A buzz sounded behind him. The door alarm. Gus started to turn. Before he could see who had come in, two shots blasted through the air.

  The old man flew off the ladder, smashing into the wall of bottles, then crashed to the floor in a rain of broken glass and cheap scotch.

  Gus stared over the counter at the shopkeeper's bloody corpse. "Why did you do that?"

  Shawn stepped up to him, thrusting the .44 Magnum into the pocket of his leather duster.

  "The question," Shawn said, "is, why didn't you?"

  Chapter Two

  "Why didn't I what?" Gus said. "Murder an old man who was trying to help me?"

  "Is that what you call it?" Shawn said.

  "Murder is what the law calls it," Gus said. "It's what the Bible calls it. It's what everyone in the world calls it."

  "I could be wrong about this, but I seem to recall hearing that in different countries they have different words for things," Shawn said as he stepped over to the shelves of snack foods and gave an exploratory squeeze to a package of Twinkies with a pull date from before the turn of the millennium.

  Gus couldn't pull his eyes away from the dead man lying on the floor in a pool of blood and whiskey. "Why did you kill him?"

  Shawn put down the Twinkies and turned his attention to the freezer chest loaded with ice-cream bars. Or, as he discovered when he tried to take one out, loaded with a single ice-cream bar, as all the smaller units had melted and refrozen into a cube six feet on each side.

  "Because it was him or you." Shawn took two running steps, then leaped over the counter, landing in a crouch next to the body, his duster sending waves through the puddle spreading across the floor.

  "What was he going to do?" Gus said. "Throw the bottle at me?"

  "Worse. He was going to give it to you." Shawn pulled the bottle of Glen Graggenlogan from the shopkeeper's cold, dead hands and looked it over carefully. Then he pulled out the cork and turned it upside down. There was a rattle of metal on glass, and a small olive-colored device fell into Shawn's hand.

  "What is that?" Gus said.

  "Doesn't matter what it is now. What matters is what it would be if you walked out the door with it," Shawn said.

  "And what is that?"

  "The ultimate theft-protection device," Shawn said. He jumped back over the counter, opened the door, and tossed the device out onto the street. The thing bounced twice on the asphalt and then exploded into a fireball that took out two cars and the area's last remaining pay phone.

  It took a few seconds for Gus' ears to stop ringing. He spent the time staring at the crater in the center of the road and trying to figure out how far his body parts might be separated by now if Shawn hadn't stopped him from taking the bottle.

  "I thought that was the thing I was supposed to bring Morton," Gus said finally.

  "Apparently you were supposed to think that."

  Gus looked around the liquor store in despair. "So what is the object?" he said. "What is it we're supposed to collect here? Because I haven't seen it."

  "That's where you're wrong," Shawn said. "You were staring at it all along."

  "I wasn't staring at anything all along," Gus said, then realized he wasn't completely right. "Except ..."

  Shawn nodded. "Except." He jumped back over the counter and fished around under it in the area the old man had kept his hand, then came up with a machete.

  "Morton's people would never allow us into his lobby carrying a weapon like that, let alone into his penthouse," Gus said.

  "The machete isn't going anywhere," Shawn said. "Except through a couple of vertebrae."

  It took Gus a moment to realize what he was hearing. By that time Shawn had already raised the machete high over his head and was beginning to bring it down toward the old man's body.

  "Stop!" Gus shouted.

  Shawn froze, the machete poised in midair. "You want to do this?"

  "Of course not," Gus said.

  "Then what's the problem?" Shawn said. "You can kill a couple of cops when we leave here. Then we'll be even."

  "I don't want to kill anybody," Gus said.

  "You're no fun," Shawn said.

  "I am fun," Gus said. "I am huge amounts of fun. Entire barrels of monkeys spend their lives yearning to be as fun as I am. What isn't fun is shooting unarmed people and cutting off their heads."

  Gus reached up and grabbed his own ears. He gave them a hard tug, as if he was trying to pull his head off his shoulders.

  "He had a grenade in one hand and a machete under the counter, which strongly suggests he wasn't entirely unarmed," Shawn said.

  Despite his best efforts Gus' ears remained stubbornly in place. "What about the little old lady you gunned down in the park?"

  "She had that dog," Shawn said.

  "A bichon frise," Gus said. "A Muppet would have been more of a threat. That didn't stop you from putting three bullets in her."

  "I admit I got a little overeager there," Shawn said. "But I paid the price for that. The cops came down pretty hard on me."

  "Until you ran them all ov
er with your Hummer," Gus said.

  "Which dented the fender and put the car out of commission," Shawn said. "Why do you think you were able to get here first?"

  Gus gave his ears another yank, then grabbed his nose with one fist and twisted fiercely. "I wish I hadn't. I wish we had never started this in the first place."

  "But we did," Shawn said. "And now we have to finish."

  "I am finished," Gus said. He squeezed his temples between his hands, then twisted his head furiously. The last thing he heard was the crack of his neck snapping.

  Chapter Three

  Gus blinked against the sudden harsh light, then turned to see the cyclops next to him. It wore Shawn's traditional khakis, along with a plaid shirt open over a white tee, but its head was a solid sphere of white plastic. It stumbled through the empty room, waving its arms in front of it like a small child playing zombie.

  Gus grabbed the cyclops by the shoulders, then pulled the globe off its neck. Freed from the helmet, Shawn glared at him.

  "You're never supposed to pull someone out of an immersive reality like that," Shawn said. "You could have destroyed my brain."

  "The only thing destroying your brain is that stupid game," Gus said.

  Shawn stared at him. "Sorry, Dad. I didn't recognize you with all that hair and the new tan," he said finally.

  "I am not some grumpy old man trying to unplug the computer because you've been playing Monkey Island for sixteen hours straight," Gus said. "Although I'm beginning to see his point."

  "What, that people shouldn't be allowed to have fun?" Shawn said.

  Gus put the two helmets into their slots on a low shelf that ran along one side of the handball court-sized room. As soon as they were back in place, there was an electronic click and the door set into one wall sprang open.

  "Now look what you've done," Shawn said. "I hope this game saves itself automatically, or we're going to have to start all over again. And I don't know about you, but I don't feel like hijacking another bus full of schoolkids."

  "You didn't have to hijack the first one," Gus said. "You didn't get anything out of it."

  "I got major street cred," Shawn said. "Especially after I threw the driver off the bridge, then landed the bus on top of him."

  "Listen to yourself," Gus said. "You sound like a maniac."

  "Desperate times call for desperate measures," Shawn said.

  "Your measures aren't desperate. They're stupid," Gus said.

  "The whole point of the game is to take over Morton's crime syndicate, and you can't do that unless you can win his trust and get close to him," Shawn said. "So first thing, you've got to establish yourself as the new face of crime in Darksyde City so he'll invite you to join his organization. And you call that stupid?"

  "It is when we have a job in the real world," Gus said. "Gaining street cred with a fictional mobster in a computer game isn't bringing us any closer to finding Macklin Tanner."

  That was one thing the events of the game had in common with those of the real world. Nothing they had done before entering the virtual world had offered a clue to the whereabouts of the man they'd been hired to find.

  Macklin Tanner, founder and CEO of VirtuActive Software--one of the biggest computer-game companies in the country--had disappeared mysteriously a week before. The police had done some investigating and found no traces of foul play; in fact, they'd found a note on his computer saying he was going on vacation for a few weeks. That closed their investigation.

  But when the company's president, Brenda Varda, came to the Psych offices, it was clear she didn't believe a word of it. Although her manner was cool and professional, they could tell she was seriously troubled. She had the seemingly effortless beauty that often came with a multimillion-dollar salary, but there was a haunted look in her eyes as she explained the problem.

  "We've been working on this new game for years," she said as she stared across the desk, pleading for help from Shawn and Gus. "It's Mack's dream, a completely interactive three-D action game with an entirely new interface. It's going to change the world of gaming. It may even change the rest of the world. And there's no way he'd leave just before the launch."

  "Unless the stress got to him," Gus suggested. "People do strange things when they're under that much pressure."

  Brenda sighed and picked her purse up off the floor. Before she could get up, Shawn jumped to his feet.

  "Excellent work, Gus," Shawn said. "You knew exactly what the police told her and you were able to repeat it word for word."

  Brenda turned her cool green eyes on Gus. "Is that what you were doing?"

  "Sure," Gus said. "It couldn't possibly be true."

  Shawn took one of Brenda's hands in his own and looked at her. And he saw. Saw the sheen under her eyes where she'd put on cream to reduce tear-induced swelling. Saw the faint pale shadow on her ring finger.

  Shawn closed his eyes and put his fingers to his temples. "I see him," Shawn said.

  "You do?" she said. "Is he all right?"

  "He's on an altar," Shawn said. "It's some kind of bizarre ritual."

  "Oh, my God," Brenda said. "Are they going to sacrifice him?"

  "No, wait," Shawn said. "He's not on an altar. He's in front of it. And you're there next to him."

  Brenda let out a gasp. "No one knows about that," she said. "We were only married for days back in college. Then we realized we were made to be best friends, not lovers, and we had it annulled."

  "I'm sensing a greater love than that," Shawn said. "At least from you."

  She blushed. "He's still the only man I've loved completely," she said. "And I guess he likes me, too. We still go on vacations together twice a year as man and wife. Which is the other reason I know he didn't just wander off on his own without telling me."

  That might actually be another reason why he did, Gus realized. Maybe he'd met someone and didn't want to hurt her feelings.

  But if that thought occurred to Shawn, he didn't share it with Brenda Varda. Instead he promised they would find Tanner.

  The only trouble was that there were no clues. Or, worse, there were clues, but they all pointed to the same conclusion the police had already reached. A couple of Tanner's suitcases were missing, his favorite of his eight cars--a restored candy apple red 1964 Impala--was gone from his garage, and his closets had gaps where a couple weeks' worth of resort wear might have hung.

  With no physical evidence to follow and no real reason to believe anything had happened to Tanner, Gus suggested they check air-and cruise-line manifests to see which exotic vacation he'd chosen. Shawn had a different idea: They should hunt for Tanner in the game itself.

  "Maybe we should start our search in 1995," Gus had said. "That's the last time anyone thought the idea of a guy being sucked into a computer game was halfway interesting. And that was only because no one knew enough about Russell Crowe to be annoyed by him yet."

  "No one got sucked into a game in Virtuosity," Shawn said. "In fact, it was just the opposite. The killer escaped from the game to stalk the mean streets of reality. Which would be an interesting twist if we could prove it happened here."

  "Yes, searching for a character from a computer game set loose in real-life Santa Barbara sounds like a much better use of our time than trying to figure out where Tanner actually went," Gus said.

  "I'm not the one who brought up the idea," Shawn said. "I said I thought we should look for clues inside the game."

  "Why would there be clues inside the game?" Gus said.

  "It's called Criminal Genius," Shawn said.

  "So?"

  "Whoever planned Tanner's disappearance is clearly intelligent," Shawn said. "Can we agree on that much?"

  "Since I'm working on the assumption that Tanner did it himself, yes, we can," Gus said.

  "The crime was perfect. There wasn't a single clue left behind," Shawn said. "No one could pull off that kind of job and not want to boast about it somewhere. A
nd having that game sitting out there, the irony would be too great to resist."

  "What if the guy who did it doesn't think he's a criminal genius?" Gus said. "What if someone killed Tanner in a moment of panic or passion, and then threw some clothes in a suitcase to cover it up?"

  "It doesn't matter what the intent was," Shawn said. "The loser who sticks up a 7-Eleven considers himself an evil mastermind if he gets away with it. All crooks do."

  "And you know this how?" Gus said.

  "The same way I know there isn't a man on Earth who thinks he's a bad father, or a woman who believes she's a lousy driver," Shawn said. "Every crook needs to boast about how smart he is, and the smarter the crook, the bigger the boast. He left a clue in that game."

  "What if he didn't work on the game?" Gus said.

  For the next twenty-five minutes, Shawn refused to acknowledge Gus' existence. That was fine with Gus. He used the time to discover that Tanner's name wasn't listed on any flights, trains, or ships within three days of his disappearance. Of course, since his car was also missing, that wasn't tremendously helpful, except as a way of ruling out various avenues to investigate. Finally Gus agreed to take an exploratory trip through the game, if only because he couldn't think of any other place to start and a dumb idea seemed better than no idea.

  At least that's what he'd told Shawn. As he said the words he could hear their falseness so clearly he began to suspect his voice and lip movements might have fallen out of synch. He couldn't believe that Shawn would fall for his obvious untruth.

  But Shawn did. And that disturbed Gus more than anything else. He tried to look at the situation generously: They'd been best friends for so long Shawn had no reason to doubt anything Gus told him.

  That wouldn't stop the nagging feeling in the back of Gus' mind that Shawn accepted what Gus had to say only because it matched up with what he wanted to hear. That he was incapable of listening to anything that contradicted his prejudices.

  That was why Gus wouldn't tell Shawn what he was really thinking. Not only about this case, but about the agency and about their profession. About his future.