Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon ml-4

by Donna Andrews

  If this were one of those teen horror flicks, I told myself as I approached the front door, we would now have reached the part where the character on screen makes the mistake of thinking that she's safe just because her destination is within reach. And she'd let down her guard, and bingo! Casualty number one.

  So I pretended to have trouble finding my keys, while concealing them in my hand, and had a good look around the parking lot while pretending to rummage through the purse. No one.

  Then, to put my pursuer off guard, I put my hands on my hips, said “Damn,“ and took a step or two away from the door, as if I were leaving.

  When I thought whoever had been following me would surely have retreated to avoid being seen, I whirled, ran back to the door, keys at the ready, unlocked it, and ran inside.

  I'd also seen plenty of horror movies where the heroine assumed she was safe just because she was inside a building. No such mistake for me. I pulled out my flashlight and made sure there was no one in the downstairs entrance. Or in the stairwell. While I was checking the stairwell, I heard a faint noise. Someone trying the knob of the outside door.

  I clicked the beam off and hid in the stairwell, just beside the door. If anyone came into the stairwell, I could jump him. And of course, if whoever was following me came in and took the elevator, I'd have plenty of time to call the police before it arrived at the second floor.

  Nothing, for thirty seconds. Then I heard another faint noise. The rattle of a key in the lock. Aha! So whoever had been following me had a key to the building. That narrowed my possible pursuers down to maybe a hundred people. Unless, of course, I'd caught the eye of a mugger who traveled with a collection of skeleton keys. But my money was on someone who worked in the building.

  My eyes were adjusted to the dark now, not that it was completely dark – a streetlight outside lit the hall faintly, and some of the light reached the wall opposite the door into the stairwell. A trapezoid of shadow appeared on the wall as a faint squeak told me the door was opening. Then the door closed and I could see the shadow of a man on the wall. I tensed. The shadow grew, and then he stepped through the doorway into the stairwell.

  “Aaiiee!“ With a bloodcurdling yell, I sprang toward the intruder, giving him a glancing blow to the shoulder with the flashlight and then knocking his feet out from under him with a swift kick. He fell with a thud and a yelp, and I was about to stomp on his knee and crush it when I realized there was something familiar about that yelp.

  I turned on the flashlight instead, and saw that I had felled Rob.

  “Hi, Meg,“ he said, and rubbed the back of his head, where I'd hit him.

  “Rob, what are you doing here?“

  “I was following you,“ he said, feeling his ribs. “I saw you walking this way, and I thought I'd see what you were up to.“

  “It never occurred to you to just walk up and say, 'Hi, Meg. What are you up to?'“

  “I thought it would be more fun to surprise you,“ he said, rubbing his knee. “Gee, I blew it didn't I? I should have done the Crash of the Eagle when you attacked me. Or maybe Striking Mace.“

  “If you say so.“

  “Could we take that over again?“ he asked. “I'll go out in the hall and come back in again and – “

  “Rob?“

  “Yes?“

  “Go home,“ I said.

  He stood up, tested his knee, winced, and nodded. “Okay,“ he said.

  I watched as he limped slowly off. I hoped he was exaggerating the limp. I felt bad about hurting my own brother, but not too bad. If he was going to sunk around stalking people, he'd have to learn to take care of himself.

  I climbed the stairs. Quietly, though I figured anyone who had anything to hide probably heard the commotion Rob and I had made and fled long ago. I unlocked the office door and then drew back into the shadows and waited until I was sure anyone lurking inside would have gotten impatient and peeked out. And then I waited another five minutes, because I knew perfectly well patience wasn't my long suit.

  I flung the door open suddenly and flipped the light switch, figuring that the sudden illumination would temporarily blind anyone lurking inside. Of course, it wouldn't help my vision, but I figured I'd have an edge if I was expecting it.

  No armed thugs or nimble ninjas lurked inside the door. I could see George, stirring slightly, but I turned the light off before he woke up completely. Apart from him, the reception area was unoccupied.

  So was the rest of the office. I could probably have figured that out in five minutes if I'd just walked around yelling “Hey, anyone here?“ Or better yet, “Pizza's here!“ It took me four times that long, listening outside doors and then leaping through, doing my best imitation of what the cops do in TV shows. It occurred to me, halfway through, that this tactic probably worked better for cops with firearms than for someone armed only with a large flashlight. And that if anyone was recording my antics with a hidden camera, I'd never live it down.

  But by the time I'd finished creeping and leaping my way through the floor, I was reasonably sure no one was there. Yippee. Time to begin the real business of the evening.

  I balanced the black light on my bandaged left hand, wiped my embarrassingly sweaty right palm, took a better grip on it, and fumbled for the ON switch. The light was about the size of a flashlight – in fact, it did have a small flashlight built into one end. But running all along the length of it was a glass cylinder, rather like a very short fluorescent lightbulb. I'd tested it, at home, of course – at least as far as I could test it without anything ultraviolet to detect. I'd put in fresh batteries and switched it on to admire the weird purple glow. I was ready to stalk the mail cart.

  But using the black light to do so proved harder than I'd thought. I'd imagined the mail cart's path would look rather like the markings on an asphalt highway, a wide, solid line, several inches wide. Or perhaps more like the baselines on a ball field. I dredged up a childhood memory of seeing someone mark the baselines with a little cart that rolled along the infield, depositing a thick trail of white powder behind it. I presumed the mail cart company used something like that, only with powder that was colorless in daylight. And when I flicked on the black light, the trail would suddenly appear, glowing luminously. And all I'd have to do to find some key evidence was follow the trail, like Dorothy skipping down the yellow brick road.

  I flicked on the black light and saw… nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary, anyway.

  I waved the light around.

  Still nothing.

  It wasn't as if I had expected to find that the killer had left secret clues in ultraviolet ink or anything, but there had to be something, or the mail carts couldn't run.

  I went back into the reception area where, thanks to my several days as substitute switchboard operator, I had a very good idea where to look for the mail cart path. I got down on my hands and knees and held the black light within a few inches of the carpet.

  I saw something all right, but it was hardly the broad, unmistakable path I'd imagined. More like a faint spackling of yellow dots. After I'd studied them, I began to see something like a pattern.

  I also saw green flecks, but they seemed too small and random to have anything to do with the mail cart, especially since they appeared in some areas of the floor where the mail cart couldn't possibly go. Like under the reception desk. And faint pink spots that appeared in a regular pattern, like a grid, all over the room. I finally concluded that the pink spots were actually one of the fibers in the carpet.

  I studied the floor of the reception room until I thought I understood the mail cart markings, and then crawled along the trail, out the opening into the main part of the office, checking my theories. Yes, that pattern of dots signaled that the cart was supposed to turn. This other pattern, which I'd first seen beside the reception desk, cued the cart to stop at a desk and beep for a human to take his or her bundle of mail.

  Here and there I found larger, fainter spots, ranging from silver dollar size to d
inner plate size, though less regular. They seemed to cluster. Puzzled, I studied them until I finally remembered Dad talking over dinner one evening about how forensic technicians used black lights to detect bodily fluids. Deducing that the larger spots might have resulted from the Bring Your Dog to Work program, I went to the kitchen, washed my hands, and resolved to give the larger spots a wide berth for the rest of my investigation.

  I'd hunted out a blank floor plan of the office – left over from the Space Race, as I called the premove turfing over who got to sit where – and marked the cart's path on that. I started from the reception area, went down the hall past the computer lab – which was dark and Rogerless tonight, to my relief – and then through the cube-filled main space, ending up back in the reception area. It took two hours, but I felt a moment of satisfaction when I sat down on one of the guest sofas and looked down on my floor, plan – now clearly marked with the mail cart's entire route.

  Somewhere along that path, Ted was killed.

  I studied the floor plan, noting the places where the mail cart was out in the open – unlikely spots for anyone to strangle Ted – and the places where a sufficiently daring murderer might possibly risk an attack.

  Frankly, there was no place I'd have risked an attack. Perhaps I wasn't cut out to be a daring murderer. Or perhaps I was missing some critical clue, some plausible theory.

  Perhaps they'd all joined forces to off Ted; the programmers on one end of the mouse cord and the graphic artists on the other, like some lethal game of tug-of-war.

  I decided to inspect a couple of the most promising sites again. I picked up the floor plan and headed down the hall toward the lunchroom.

  The no-longer-darkened lunchroom. Someone was in there again.

  As I crept down the hall toward the room, I heard a familiar rattling sound. The sound of dice shaken in a plastic cup, followed by the slightly different rattle of half a dozen dice landing on a hard surface.

  The sound, combined with the late hour, took me back in time. To when Rob was still perfecting Lawyers from Hell, which also happened to be just after Michael and I started dating. I was staying with my parents until I could evict the sculptor who'd sublet my apartment. Michael would come down for weekends, and we'd play Lawyers from Hell with Rob and the rest of the family for hours. Not that we were that interested in the game, but with no place we could really be alone together…

  I shook my head to bring myself back to the present and peered into the room. Frankie, Keisha, and several others from the staff were sitting around a table. The familiar paraphernalia of role-playing games lay scattered across the table. A box full of dice in all sizes and colors. Not just the standard six-sided dice, but also eight-sided, ten-sided, twenty-sided, and my favorites, the four-sided dice, which looked like three-dimensional triangles or tiny three-sided pyramids. All the players had pencils and sheets of paper, and they were all staring intently at Frankie. Apparently Frankie was acting as game master, the referee who runs the session. He was frowning over a rule book, evidently trying to make a decision based on the dice roll he'd just thrown.

  The faces were different, but the scene was the same, and I felt oddly transported back to those earlier evenings, with their odd mix of excitement and frustrated sexual tension. What am I doing here instead of in California with Michael? I wondered. I could – Something jarred me out of that fantasy. The scene before me was a little too much the same as those early days of Lawyers from Hell. Frankie was sitting behind a game master's screen, a piece of cardboard folded into three parts so it would stand upright and keep the players from seeing all the notes and statistic sheets he was using to run the game.

  In the original live role-playing version of Lawyers from Hell, Rob had always used a special game master's screen – we'd called it the judge's bench. Our niece who went to art school had painted it. Around the bottom was a frieze with caricatures of several dozen family members who'd helped play-test the game, all depicted wearing prison stripes and leg irons as part of a chain gang.

  I recognized the screen in front of Frankie as that original Lawyers from Hell judge's bench. A little battered, but unmistakable. I recognized the trio of rule books at Frankie's elbow, too. Pre-trial, jury selection, and trial phases – Rob's original final version, run off on his inkjet printer arid stapled in purple paper covers, the same copies we'd given to the graphic designer cousin to typeset. No doubt with Rob's handwritten notes in the margins. At least two out of the three volumes were the originals. The third was a printed copy, and I was willing to bet the missing volume was the one I'd found in Ted's cache. Not that the printed copy wasn't rare enough, given the short period of time Rob had tried to sell the paper-based game before moving to the computer version. But not nearly so rare as the original.

  “What's going on here?“ I asked.

  The half-dozen players all started and whirled to see what was up; then their faces all took on a sheepish, guilty look.

  “We're playing Lawyers from Hell,“ Keisha said.

  “Don't tell Rob,“ Frankie begged.

  “That you're playing his game?“

  “That we're playing the unautomated version,“ Keisha said.

  “With Rob's paraphernalia,“ I added.

  They all looked guilty. I folded my arms and looked stern. It's what I always did when I wanted to make Rob confess something. I'd learned my first day at Mutant Wizards that it seemed to have the same effect on the whole staff.

  “It's okay,“ Frankie said. “I mean, we all love the computer version. It's wonderful!“

  The others nodded and murmured agreement.

  “But if you first got into gaming playing role-playing games – face-to-face ones – it's… well, it's kind of…“

  “It's not as much fun,“ Keisha said bluntly.

  “I keep telling them they should let the users hear the dice rolls,“ one player put in. “We could generate the sound of rattling dice.“

  “I thought one of the advantages of the computer version was that you didn't have to spend so much time rolling dice and calculating things,“ I said.

  “Yeah,“ Frankie said. “But you lose something, too. That adrenaline surge you get when the Judge rolls the dice and you know something's about to happen.“

  “And the human interaction,“ Keisha added. “One of the weaknesses of the computer game is that it's at most a two-player game – you don't have all the fun of a group of people playing all the different witnesses and stuff. I know the online version is supposed to fix that, but it's still not like sitting in a room with people and playing. There's no ambience.“

  I looked around the room. On the face of it, the lunchroom was pretty short on ambience. Deltas of paper spread across the floor, interspersed with pencils, stray dice, and bags of snack food. Half a dozen pizza boxes were scattered over the counters. Beer and soda cans, solo or in clumps, festooned the entire room.

  But on another level…

  “So sometimes we borrow Rob's stuff and play a game, the old-fashioned way,“ Frankie said. “Just… because.“

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,“ I said. “We had a lot of fun, playing the game, back when Rob was still polishing it.“

  “You were a beta tester?“ Keisha exclaimed. “Cool!“

  “Do you still play?“ Frankie asked.

  “I haven't for months,“ I said. I'd almost said years; it felt like that long. “It got to be pretty time consuming, especially after Rob decided that he needed someone else to judge so he could concentrate on experiencing the game as a player, and I got drafted. Being judge is a whole lot more work.“

  “You've played the judge?“ Frankie asked.

  “Oh, my God,“ Keisha exclaimed. “Do you realize who she is?“

  The others looked at her, puzzled. For that matter, so did I.

  “She's Judge Hammer!“ Keisha said.

  The others looked at me openmouthed.

  “You were, weren't you?“ Keisha demanded.

&nb
sp; “Yeah,“ I said. “Rob was already Judge Langslow, so I picked hammer. For my blacksmithing.“

  “Wow,“ Frankie said.

  They were still looking at me, with the sort of awestruck expressions they usually wore when listening to Rob's pronouncements. As if I were some kind of heroic figure out of legend.

  Which to them, I suppose I was. Although he had little or nothing intelligible to say about topics such as game mechanics, marketing techniques, or the future of the electronic entertainment industry, Rob kept getting invited to speak at conferences. And to many people's astonishment, he'd become a highly entertaining speaker. He confined himself largely to telling anecdotes about things that had happened during the development of Lawyers from Hell. Lightweight stuff, but Rob managed to make the development of the game seem like a scientific quest at least as important as the Alamo Project. Occasionally, someone who heard one of his tales would find it a powerful metaphor for some business truth, and if they told Rob about their insights, he was always happy to add them to his repertoire. And otherwise sane people, after hearing his nostalgia-laden tales of playing the early version of the game, seemed to regard those late nights in my parents' family room with the same kind of envy other generations would feel for people who'd actually experienced Paris in the twenties or Haight Ashbury during the Summer of Love.

  “Would you consider judging a game for us?“ Frankie asked, and several others began clamoring, as well.

  None of us ought to be here at all, I thought, on a work night; I should confiscate Rob's paraphernalia and send them home, so I could get on with studying the floor tiles.

  “Just a short game,“ I said.

  In my fit of nostalgia about the good old days of playing the original Lawyers from Hell, I'd forgotten a few small details, like how absolutely horrible you feel the next day if you're trying to survive on two and a half hours of sleep.