The Never Game

by Jeffery Deaver

  “Where’re my weapons?” Shaw asked.

  “Snug in my pocket. That little tiny thing. And the Python too. Under the bed. That’s smart. And a fine piece of gun making, that model is, as I’m sure you appreciate.”

  Confused, yes. But one thing Shaw understood: the man wasn’t here because he was pissed off Shaw had ruined his bonfire in Oakland. That attempted arson had been about creating a diversion so that Rodent could break into Shaw’s Winnebago.

  He probably had uttered the words, during the confrontation, “Why’d you do that, Shaw?”

  The further question—what did he want in the camper?—was not yet answerable.

  In the light within the camper Shaw could see the man’s pocked face more clearly than the other day. He noted too a scar on the side of his neck, in roughly the same position as the one on Shaw. Rodent’s wound had been more serious and the scar looked like the twin disfigurement caused by a grazing bullet: troughing skin and burning with the slug’s heat at the same time.

  The man was too much of a professional to hold his own pistol out toward Shaw. A fast person might slap aside the gun with one hand and strike flesh with the other. Shaw had done so more than once. No, Rodent kept the glossy black weapon close to his side, the muzzle trained forward.

  Shaw said, “You broke in last night, dent puller and crowbar. Sloppy. To make it look like it was some methhead. Tonight you were subtler.”

  Rodent had picked the repaired locks with a deft touch. Shaw, who had occasion to break into secure locations, was impressed.

  The first time, Rodent had looked for whatever it was he’d wanted—and hadn’t found it. He had done reconnaissance, finding the lockbox—which would take heavy equipment to remove or open—and the location of the weapons. Then waited until tonight to return for a visit in person—hiding until Maddie Poole had left.

  With his left hand, Rodent fished in a pocket and extracted jingling handcuffs. These he tossed to Shaw, who dropped them on the floor.

  A pause.

  “Lookie, got to establish a rule or two.”

  Shaw said, “No cuffs. I don’t know karate. You have my only firearms. I do know how to throw knives but I only have Sabatiers for cooking in the camper and they’re badly balanced.”

  “Rules, don’tcha know. For your safety and my peace of mind. Now, yessir, yessir, I’ve killed a soul’r two, though mostly in self-defense. Death isn’t helpful . . . What’s that word? Death’s counterproductive. It draws attention, makes my life complicated. And that, I don’t need. So I’m going to kill you? Nope. Unless, naturally, something you do requires me to kill you.

  “I do hurt people. I like hurting people. And I hurt in ways that change them. Forever. A man who loves art, blind him. A woman who loves music, her ears. You can see where this is going. We know about you, Shaw. You wouldn’t do very well hanging out in a wheelchair the rest of your life, don’tcha know.”

  Shaw gazed at the wiry man and kept his face a mask, while his heart was slamming in his chest, his mouth dry as cotton.

  Never reveal fear to a predator . . .

  “This is a forty-caliber gun. That’s a big old bullet. Which I’m guessing you’re familiar with.”

  Shaw was.

  “Elbows, ankles, then knees. There’d be virtually nothing left to repair. And I’ve got this thing that’ll make the sound like a cough. Another one over your mouth for the screams. So. Put the cuffs on. I do not need to worry about you, Shaw. Cuffs or elbow?” He took wads of black plasticized cloth from his pocket. Some kind of silencer?

  Shaw retrieved the bracelets and put them on.

  “Now, we’ll do our business and I’ll be on my way. Is the envelope in the lockbox in your bedroom?”

  “The . . . ?”

  Patiently: “I know you’re not being—what’s that word?—coy. You’re in the dark here. I want the envelope your father’s friend Eugene Young hid in the School of Sociology archives at Berkeley. That you stole a couple days ago.”

  Shaw tried but couldn’t process the change in direction.

  “No, no, don’t wan’ta hear ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’ We know you called Young at home, not knowing he was dead. Now, there’s a look for you, Shaw. You usually give the great stone face. The answer to your question: we had a tap on his line.”

  They’d been monitoring his father’s colleague, and now his widow, for fifteen years? And this was accompanied by a queasy sense of invasion. They’d been monitoring him as well.

  Why on earth?

  Rodent said, “You found out about the envelope. Looking through Daddy’s old stuff, maybe. And it sent you to the Sociology archives, where you ‘borrowed it.’” His face tightened into a rat smile. “Sociology. My goodness. One of the few places—really few—we didn’t look. Because why would we? A subject your daddy had no interest in.”

  “I—”

  “Remember, don’tcha know. None of that ‘confused’ stuff.”

  How had Rodent found out about the theft at Berkeley? Shaw thought back. He’d told Young’s widow that he was staying at an RV camp in Oakland. Would have been easy to trace him to Carole’s. Rodent had followed Shaw to Berkeley. Shaw hadn’t seen him tailing. Because it’s a good rule when riding a motorcycle to look ahead and to the side, not behind, flashing lights being the exception.

  However, such logistics faded from Shaw’s thoughts. More important: the word we, mysterious documents and a fifteen-year-old wiretap. Shaw realized that his father had maybe not been as crazy or as paranoid as he seemed.

  Never dismiss conspiracies too quickly . . .

  Shaw thought back to the letter Eugene Young had written to his father. He asked Rodent, “So where’s Braxton now?”

  Touché. A wrinkle in the pasty flesh between Rodent’s eyes. “What do you know about her?”

  Well, one thing more than he’d known a few seconds ago.

  Her . . .

  The man’s mouth tightened slightly. He’d been gamed. He said nothing else about Ms. Braxton, whoever she might be.

  “Lockbox. Let’s look inside.”

  “Just a trap. Empty.” Being cuffed defeated Shaw’s tactic of disarming the intruder when he reached in and broke a finger. He thought of the irony, given his nickname for the intruder. The trap was a big one, meant for rats.

  “I guessed. Could be a reverse trap. Not sure that makes sense but you get the idea.”

  Shaw opened it.

  Rodent’d already pulled out a small halogen flashlight, which he now used to peer into the safe. He seemed impressed with the booby trap.

  Back into the kitchenette. “Where’s the envelope? Or we start with the pain. This is entirely up to you.”

  “My wallet.”

  “Wallet? . . . On the floor. Facedown.”

  Shaw did as told and felt the man lay something soft against the back of his knee, then apply pressure.

  “It’s the weapon.”

  Shaw had guessed. It must be some kind of truly magic cloth if it could dull the sound of a .40 caliber pistol.

  The man extracted the wallet and rolled Shaw over and upright.

  “Behind the driver’s license.”

  Rodent fished. “A claim check for a FedEx store on Alameda?”

  “That’s it. They have the original of my father’s documents and two copies.”

  It was in the strip mall that also contained the Salvadoran restaurant of the other day, with the coffee from Potrero Grande. After he’d left, on his way to Frank Mulliner’s, he’d taken the manuscript in to have the copies made. He’d decided to leave the job there for a few days just in case the police, at the behest of the Sociology Department, came a’calling. Plausible deniability.

  “Any other copies?”

  “None that I made.”

  Eyes leaving Shaw for on
ly a second at a time, Rodent extracted his phone and placed a call, explaining to whoever was on the other end about the FedEx store. He recited the claim number. He disconnected.

  “It’s closed now,” Shaw said.

  Rodent smiled. Silence, as he sent a text, presumably to someone else. His eyes scanned Shaw as if, were he to look away for a whole second, his captive would strike like a snake.

  Finally, Shaw could wait no longer. He said, “October fifth. Fifteen years ago.”

  Rodent paused, looking up from his phone, not a twitch of surprise in his eyes. His voice was no longer high as a taut violin string as he said, “We didn’t kill your father, Shaw.”

  Shaw’s heart was thudding for reasons that had nothing to do with the fact that he was looking down the barrel of a large pistol.

  “This is all a big soup of a mystery to you, that’s pretty clear. And it should stay that way. I’ll tell you this: Ashton’s death was a . . . problem . . . for us. Pissed us off as much as you . . . Well, okay. That’s not fair . . . But you get my drift.”

  Rodent texted some more.

  Shaw was dismayed. His heart sank. Because this meant his nightmare had come true: his brother, Russell, was their father’s killer. He closed his eyes briefly. He could hear his brother’s voice as if the lanky man were in the room with them.

  He’s taught us how to survive. Now we have to survive him . . .

  Russell had committed the murder to save his siblings—and his mother too. She and Ashton had been virtually inseparable ever since they met forty years ago in the Ansel Adams Wilderness on the Pacific Crest, a National Scenic Trail extending from the Mexican border to Canada. Yet as his mind dissolved, the year or so before his death, Ashton grew suspicious of his wife too, occasionally thinking she was part of the conspiracy, whatever that was.

  And what if saving his siblings and mother wasn’t the only motive? Shaw had long wondered too if there was a darker one. Had Russell’s resentment finally boiled over? Dorie and Colter were very young when the family moved. Neither remembered much, if anything, about life in civilization. Russell was ten; he’d had time to experience the frenetic, marvelous San Francisco Bay Area. He’d made friends. Then, suddenly, he was banished to the wilderness.

  Angry all those years, never saying anything, the resentment building.

  Russell was the reclusive one . . .

  Rodent lowered his phone. “For what it’s worth, it was an accident.”

  Shaw focused.

  “Your father. We wanted him alive, Braxton wanted him dead—but not yet, not till she had what she wanted. She sent somebody to, well, talk to him about the documents.”

  Talk. Meaning: torture.

  “Near as we can piece it together, your father knew Braxton’s man was on his way to your Compound. Ashton tipped to him and led him off, was going to kill him somewhere in the woods. The ambush didn’t work. They fought. Your father fell.

  “That was the second time Braxton’s man screwed up, so he’s no longer among the living—if it’s any consolation.” Then Rodent tilted his head and gave a faint smile. “The first time was he got kicked off the property by some kid. A teenager. A kid who drew down on him, some old revolver . . . My goodness, would that’ve been you, Shaw?”

  You’re kind of like a Deliverance family, aren’t you?

  The hunter . . . That’s what he had been doing there, gunning for his father. Ashton Shaw, who—everybody believed—possessed a mind so troubled it invented spies and forces set against him.

  Ashton Shaw, who had been right all along.

  Oh, Russell . . .

  Colter Shaw had never felt his brother’s absence more than at this moment. Where are you?

  And why have you vanished?

  He said, “You know a lot. What about my brother, Russell? Where is he?”

  “Lost his trail years ago. Europe.”

  Overseas . . . This surprised Shaw. Then he wondered why that should, since he’d had virtually no contact since the funeral. Paris was no more far-fetched than the Tenderloin in San Francisco or a tract house in Kansas City.

  “What’s this all about?”

  Rodent answered, “I told you. Not your concern, don’tcha know.”

  “What is my concern is Braxton. Accident or not. She’s responsible.”

  “No, that’s none of your concern either. And, believe me, you don’t want it to be your concern.”

  Shaw wondered where the facial pocks had come from. Youthful acne? An illness later in life? Rodent had the wiry build and staccato glances of a military man or soldier of fortune. Maybe a gas attack?

  Rodent’s phone hummed. Lifted it to his ear. “Yes . . . Okay. Back at the place.”

  The FedEx caper had apparently been successful.

  He disconnected. “Alrighty, then.” He put away the black silencing handkerchief and, moving back to the far side of the camper, slipped his Beretta away. “I’ll leave the cuff keys under your car, the Glock and the Colt in the trash can by the front entrance. Don’t try to find us. For your own sake, don’tcha know.”

  76.

  Fifteen minutes of contortions on unforgiving blacktop to fish the keys out from under the Malibu with his feet. The duration of the discomfort expanded because he needed to field questions from a ten-year-old boy.

  “What’chu doing, mister? That’s funny.”

  “Got an itch on my back.”

  “You do not.”

  After freeing his wrists, it took another five minutes to find the Glock and Colt. He was particularly irritated that Rodent had dropped them in a trash can containing the remnants of a Slurpee. Shaw would have to strip both weapons and apply heavy dosages of Hoppe’s cleaner to remove the cherry-flavored syrup.

  Back in the camper, he prescribed a Sapporo beer to dull the pain from the pulled thigh and neck muscles. Then he transferred his contacts, photos and videos from his iPhone to his computer, checked them for viruses and placed the mobile in a plastic bag and took a hammer to it. He texted the new number to his mother at the Compound, his sister and Teddy and Velma.

  He then dialed Mack’s number in D.C.

  “Hello?” the woman’s sultry voice said.

  “I’ll be on burners till I get a new iPhone.”

  “’K.”

  Charlotte McKenzie was six feet tall, with a pale complexion and long brown hair, her brows elegantly sculpted. During the day she wore a stylish but dull-colored suit, cut to conceal her weapon if she was wearing her weapon, and flats, though not because of her height; her job occasionally required her to run and when it did she had to run fast. Shaw had no clue what she’d be wearing now, presumably in bed. Maybe boxers and a T. Maybe a designer silk negligee.

  Shaw loved the way she made lobbyists cry, the way she sheltered whistle-blowers, the way she found facts and figures that, to anyone else, were as invisible as cool spring air.

  Those who knew both of them wondered, Shaw had heard, why they’d never gotten together. Shaw occasionally did too, though he knew that, like his heart, Mack’s was accessed only by negotiating an exceedingly complex and difficult ascent, rather like Dawn Wall on El Capitan in Yosemite.

  “Need some things,” he said.

  “Ready.”

  “There’s a picture on its way. I need facial recognition. Probably a California connection but not certain.” From his computer he sent her an email containing an attachment of a screenshot of Rodent from the video he’d taken during the Molotov cocktail incident.

  A moment later: “Got it. On its way.” Mack would be sending it to a quarter million dollars’ worth of facial recognition software running on a supercomputer.

  “Be a minute or two.”

  A pause, during which clicks intervened. Mack made and received her phone calls with headset and stalk mic so she could knit. She quilted too. In any
one else these would jar with her other hobbies—of wreck scuba diving and extreme downhill skiing. With Mack, they were elegantly compatible.

  “Something else. I’ll need everything you have on a Braxton. Probably last name. Female, forties to sixties. She might’ve been behind my father’s death.”

  The only response was “B-R-A-X-T-O-N?”

  In the years he’d worked with her Mack had registered not a single breath of surprise at anything he asked her to do.

  “That’s it.” He thought back to the note that Eugene Young had written to his father:

  Braxton is alive!

  “May have been an attempted hit on her fifteen years ago.”

  This introduced the unsettling thought that his father was a member of a murderous conspiracy too.

  “Anything else?”

  He thought about asking for the address of one Maddie Poole, a grinder girl who lived somewhere in or around Los Angeles.

  “No. That’ll do it.”

  Click, click, click. Then silence and a different tap—that of a computer keyboard.

  “Got him on facial recognition.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Ebbitt Droon.” She spelled it for him.

  Shaw said, “That’s a name, for you.”

  “I’m sending you a picture.”

  Shaw reviewed the image on his screen. A twenty-something version of Rodent.

  “That’s him.”

  Droon?

  “His story?”

  Mack said, “Virtually no internet presence but enough fragments that tell me he—or, more likely, some IT security pro—scrubs his identity off the ’net regularly. He missed a pic I found in an old magazine article about vets. It was a JPEG of the page, not digitized, so a bot would miss it. Boyhood in upper Midwest, military—Army Rangers—then discharged. Honorable. Vanished from public records. I sent the one-twenty to someone. They’ll keep looking.”

  An enhanced facial recognition search—based on one hundred and twenty facial points, double the usual. That “someone” would probably mean a security agency of some sort.