Player vs Player

by Amelia C. Gormley

  Meeting Rosie’s anxious eyes, he thumbed the speed dial and pressed the phone to his ear, waiting.

  “Patrick, stop.” Niles barely registered the ringing of his phone where he’d left it over on the kitchen island. It was Jordan’s ringtone, and right now his brother would just have to wait. “Listen to me. Don’t say anything more. You need to call your lawyer—a lawyer of your own, not one defending Charlie or Mike—and then you need to talk to the police. I don’t— Shit, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know what the law is with being an accessory or whatever, but if you witnessed the murders, you need to come clean about it or you’ll be, I don’t know, obstructing justice or something.”

  “No.” Patrick’s voice hardened, and he shook his head emphatically. “I’m not going to testify against them. Don’t you get it?” He swept his hands through his hair, making it stand in disorderly tufts. “They let me in.”

  “They were using you,” Niles said gently. “In fact, I’m pretty sure they’re planning to pin Daniel Fortesen’s death on you. They’re claiming they didn’t do it, but that they know who did. You need a lawyer. I’m sure Eliza Muldrake can refer someone. Let me call her for you.”

  His phone stopped ringing for a moment, then started up again as Jordan tried to call a second time. Niles continued to ignore it, all his attention on Patrick’s agitated fidgeting.

  “Fine. Let them blame it on me.” He gave Niles a stubborn look. “Might as well go to jail with them. At least then I’ll still have friends. I won’t be home alone with my stepdad while he tells me how worthless I am.”

  “Don’t let them do that. It’s not your fault. You don’t deserve—”

  “How do you know?” Patrick shouted, leaping to his feet to pace between the back of the sofa that separated the living room from the kitchen and the island. “How do you know it’s not my fault?”

  “Because I know you. You’re a good guy. You wouldn’t—”

  “You don’t know anything!” A sweep of Patrick’s arm sent a stack of mail and Niles’s phone scattering through the room just as Jordan tried ringing through for the third time. Patrick kicked at the phone, and it fell silent with a crunch. The concern that had blossomed in Niles’s chest when Patrick began making his unexpected admission ratcheted up to alarm, and Niles found himself backing away slowly.

  “You want to know what I did when they beat up those girls? Huh? I laughed. I wanted to puke, but they were all laughing, so I laughed with them. For once it was a couple bitches they were giving shit to instead of me, so I laughed!”

  “Patrick? Hey, can you calm down? I’m on your side, okay? I want to help you. Can you sit back down?”

  “I let them do it.” In an instant, the tension drained out of Patrick’s body. His shoulders slumped, and his voice took on a plaintive, almost childlike tone. The skin under his bulging, red-rimmed eyes was wet. “I didn’t want them to turn on me, so I let them do it. But then Charlie was in the parking lot, and he overheard you talking to the police about the murders, and they realized the cops had found the connection, and they told me . . . they told me you had to be taken care of. I didn’t know what to do, so when I picked up your reporter friend and he saw how upset I was, I . . . I told him everything. And he told me we should go to the cops, but they were tracking my phone and . . . I watched them run him down. And I told myself it would be okay. What did I care about a couple fake geek girls and some fag reporter? At least it wasn’t me.”

  Niles didn’t want to hear any more. He wanted to get to a phone and call someone—anyone—who would come and make Patrick stop. But he couldn’t stop the question from slipping out when he asked, “Did they attack Jordan? Did they hurt my brother?”

  The look Patrick gave him was so raw and wounded, Niles felt his own eyes burning. Patrick’s shoulders began to shake. “I did that. I didn’t— I thought it was you.”

  Niles’s mouth fell open. He shook his head, trying to deny what he was hearing. No. Not Patrick.

  “After they ran that other guy down, they said I had one final chance. You knew I was supposed to pick him up, so you had to go. But I couldn’t— I couldn’t let them do that. So I said I would do it. I told them I’d prove myself. I wasn’t trying to kill you—him—I wasn’t. I just needed to make it look good. I didn’t even know it was Jordan until after I—” A sob erupted from Patrick’s chest, and he sank to the floor, weeping. “I wouldn’t have hurt him. I wouldn’t ever want to hurt him. I swear it!”

  He wanted to hate Patrick, wanted to hate a man who had injured his brother, who had abetted so much senseless violence. But all Niles could see in front of him was a broken boy, bullied to the point where his own moral compass had been smashed beyond any hope of repair. He could only feel pity, and a terrible, terrible grief.

  “Listen to me, Patrick. Are you listening?” Patrick’s racking sobs eased up enough for him to nod as Niles scrubbed at his own face and cleared his throat. “I need to go grab the landline phone from upstairs. I’m going to call a lawyer for you, okay? I want to help you. Will you promise me you’ll stay here? I’ll only be gone a few seconds.”

  Patrick pulled his knees to his chest, curling into a ball. His eyes were vacant and lost as his gaze slowly tracked toward Niles. “I’ll stay.”

  Jordan swore when his attempt to call Niles went to voice mail for the umpteenth time. Detective Payne’s car had one of the bubbly light things, so they were making reasonably good time, considering it was nearly rush hour in downtown Portland, but his gut feeling that Niles was all right had become less certain since they’d left Rosie’s condo to check on him. Maybe he was projecting his own anxiety onto Niles, but he felt certain Niles was frightened now. He knew it the way he’d known Niles was disheartened earlier. It was easy to take that surety for granted when nothing was on the line, but when it mattered, Jordan didn’t dare trust what amounted to little more than intuition. He needed to see Niles safe with his own eyes.

  “Still no luck?” Detective Payne radiated an aura of control and competence. Relax, it said, I’ve got the situation under control. Let me do my job. Did they teach that at detective school? Because if it was supposed to be comforting, it was failing rather spectacularly. He would have liked to have seen her a little more agitated, to know getting to Niles and making sure he was okay was a little more crucial to her than just another day on the job.

  “He would never ignore one of my calls like this.” Jordan glared at his phone as if it had let him down by not yielding an answer.

  “We’re almost there,” she murmured, slowing to give traffic time to clear an intersection before she ran through it against the light. “You can stop clutching that Oh-Jesus handle so hard. I aced all my driving tests.”

  “Not unless you have a crowbar,” Jordan shot back with a tight smile he was pretty sure came off more like a grimace. “Tell me why there aren’t other units rushing to meet us at Niles’s house again?”

  “I’ve called for the nearest beat car to make a security check, but they just radioed in that there’s been a collision involving the streetcar, so all nearby units are going to be handling that.” Her fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “It’s fine.”

  “Can you at least turn on your siren?”

  “No. We have no reason to consider this an emergency. We’re just making sure everything is okay.”

  “He wouldn’t ignore my call,” Jordan repeated. “That’s more substantial than just some tenuous link to a game.”

  “Phones get lost, dropped in the toilet, run out of charge, just plain stop working. So let’s just consider ourselves cautiously optimistic until we’re sure we have a problem, okay?”

  He wanted to thank her for at least attempting to be reassuring, but he couldn’t waste the mental capacity to find the words to explain that there was no possible way he could be reassured short of reaching Niles and seeing for himself. He wasn’t sure he could make her understand that his world would quite literally end if anything irrevocable hap
pened to his brother. Instead, he thumbed the speed dial again—knowing as he did so that it would be futile—and watched cars angle off to the side of the busy city streets to permit them to pass.

  They turned onto Niles’s street and made their way up the car-lined hill to the Victorian near the top. Detective Payne parked illegally at the entrance to Niles’s driveway and turned off the car, killing the bubble light. That was when Jordan’s unease spiked into full-blown alarm, a surge of terror he knew came from Niles.

  “Oh fuck,” he muttered, groping blindly for the handle and charging for the house, ignoring Detective Payne’s calls to stop.

  The cordless phone wasn’t charged, of course. That was just his luck. He never used the damn landline and kept forgetting to put the phone back on the charger, so it figured it would be dead the one time he actually needed it. Groaning, he tossed the handset on the bed and strode into the upstairs guest room, opening the closet where he stored his miscellaneous crap. He was pretty sure he had an actual corded phone in there somewhere.

  “You called the police.” Patrick’s voice, coming suddenly from behind him, made Niles jump and nearly topple a stack of holiday ornament boxes. There was something strained and ragged in his tone that put Niles on full alert. He spun to see one of his kitchen knives clutched in Patrick’s hand, and his heart lurched with a jolt of fear. It wasn’t some huge, dramatic butcher knife, thank God, but even a seven-inch chef’s knife could do plenty of harm.

  “The phone is dead, Patrick. I didn’t call anyone.” He tried to keep his voice calm, but he couldn’t help the waver that crept in. All of Patrick’s earlier grief and remorse was gone; his face was stony, and his eyes bleak. That was far more frightening than anything Niles had seen from him yet. “I’m looking for another phone so we can call a lawyer, just like I promised.”

  “Don’t lie to me!” Fury reddened Patrick’s face, and his body quivered with it, his knuckles whitening on the hilt of the knife. “I just saw them pull up!”

  “I didn’t call them.” Niles felt the jamb of the closet door at his back and wondered if he could manage to get inside and slam the door to shield himself if Patrick snapped, which was looking increasingly likely from the trapped, panicked way his eyes were darting around. “I wouldn’t do that to you. I want to help you, I swear. Please, just let me help you.”

  “What am I going to do?” The knife lowered a few inches, and Niles felt the tension in his shoulders sink with it. Patrick’s voice cracked, and his red-rimmed eyes filled with tears again. “What am I going to do?”

  “First thing you need to do is put the knife down. If the police are here, if they see you holding it, they’re going to consider you armed. They might think you’re a threat. Put it down, Patrick. Just put it down. No one wants to hurt you. Please, just put it down.”

  “Niles!”

  His breath whooshed from his lungs in a relieved sigh when he recognized Jordan’s voice accompanying the pounding of footsteps downstairs, but Patrick went the opposite direction, going ramrod stiff.

  “Oh God! He’s going to know. He’s going to know what I did!”

  Horror froze Niles for an instant, a split second in which Patrick moved, slashing at his own wrist with the blade in a single, violent stroke. There was no hesitation, no indecision, just a sudden streak of crimson coloring the edge of that razor-sharp Japanese steel. With a shout of alarm, Niles dove for Patrick when he tried to switch hands, and felt the rip of pulling stitches in his own wound as he moved.

  The first thing Jordan saw was blood staining both Niles and Patrick as they fell to the floor together, each shouting incoherently. A knife spun away from their struggling bodies, and the sight of it felt like a wrecking ball to his solar plexus.

  “Niles!” He charged into the fray, where it seemed Niles was trying to pin a writhing Patrick down.

  “Patrick! God, Patrick, stop!” Niles clutched one of Patrick’s arms, which was streaked copiously with blood. “Jordie! Give me something to stop the bleeding! Hurry!”

  Jordan began tearing at the buttons on his shirt, but Detective Payne was already there, thrusting a towel at Niles. “Ambulance is on the way,” she announced, her alto sharp enough to cut through Patrick’s yelling and Niles’s panicked muttering.

  “Are you hurt, Niles?” Jordan demanded, running his hands over Niles’s bloodstained shirt.

  “I don’t think so. Oh God, Patrick . . .”

  “I can’t tell whose blood is whose.” He peeled back the collar of Niles’s shirt over his wound, wincing when it stuck to Niles’s skin. The bandage was saturated and blood had seeped around the edges. “I think you pulled some stitches.”

  “I’m fine.” Niles shook him off. Patrick’s thrashing slowed courtesy of their combined weight and finally halted. He lay still, panting and groaning, and Niles kept a death grip on Patrick’s forearm with the towel. He glanced around to see Detective Payne had her weight on Patrick’s lower legs, keeping them immobile.

  “Hey.” Jordan gripped the towel Niles was holding in place and pushed him away. “Let me keep pressure on that. You let Detective Payne check your shoulder.”

  Niles glanced up from Patrick then, looking absolutely shattered. The pain in his eyes made Jordan’s throat tighten. “Jordie, he— I tried to— But he— Oh God . . .”

  “Hey. Hey. It’s okay.” Swallowing against the lump in his throat, Jordan leaned forward, pressing his forehead to Niles’s. He closed his eyes and let himself feel his relief that Niles was all right, that they were together and nothing was going to happen to him. Niles shuddered and then leaned into Jordan, slowly relinquishing his grip on Patrick’s arm.

  He felt Niles move away, heard Detective Payne murmuring to him, heard the siren of the ambulance drawing closer, but he kept his eyes closed, his head bowed in a silent prayer of thanksgiving. Niles was okay. The world wasn’t going to end today.

  When he finally did open his eyes, Patrick’s were open as well, and he was staring up at Jordan with a hopeless, bewildered look.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, his voice cracking. His eyes pleaded for something Jordan had no idea how to give him. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I would never hurt you. I’m so sorry.”

  When the paramedics crowded their way into the room, Patrick was sobbing, his face pressed against Jordan’s thigh as he pleaded over and over for forgiveness.

  Six Months Later

  “Well, that’s it, then.” Tim watched as Niles picked at his fingernails. Rosie stroked his shoulder. He’d been silent since they’d gotten back home from the courthouse, and neither Tim nor Jordan knew what to say to him.

  “You did all you could for Patrick,” Jordan murmured, laying a hand over Niles’s to still his fidgeting. “He got probation and court-ordered psychiatric help instead of prison, thanks to you.”

  Tim nodded, watching them closely. “Without you, Charlie and Mike would have taken him down with them. They sure as hell tried to.” It had been an act of pure spite, it seemed, at least on Mike’s part. Charlie was merely, as always, following his cousin’s lead. But Mike had made every effort during his trial to shift blame over onto Patrick, as well as his other guild-mates.

  As it was, the jury had come back finding him and Charlie and their other guild-mates guilty on all counts—except for the murder of Daniel Fortesen, which was the only one that would have carried a hate crime penalty, and the one they had tried hardest to pin on Patrick. Testimony had devolved into Mike and Charlie’s story against Patrick’s, and once the defense lawyers pointed out that Patrick was getting immunity from aiding and obstruction charges in exchange for his testimony, he lost credibility with the jury. So no one was facing justice for Daniel’s death, a fact that Tim could see eating at Niles.

  “Doesn’t feel like it’s enough.” Niles looked up and tried to muster a game smile. “He didn’t deserve what he got.”

  “He watched those girls get murdered, and he did nothing,” Jordan said firmly. “He did
n’t try to stop it, he didn’t report it to the cops. Niles, all things considered, he got off lightly.”

  Tim pressed his lips together and refrained from agreeing with Jordan. He and Niles had been over this again and again in the months since Patrick had tried to kill himself. In a way, Niles had been right. Patrick Rutledge was a victim, not a villain. But the fact remained that he could have tried to stop what his stepbrother and cousin had been doing, yet, whether from fear for his own safety or a need for inclusion or both, he hadn’t.

  “Bullying does things to kids beyond just the obvious harassment,” Niles murmured. “It drives them to desperate extremes just to make it stop, just to win a few moments of peace and acceptance. They didn’t just hurt Patrick. They warped him.”

  Tim laced his fingers with Niles’s and squeezed, while Jordan wrapped his arm around his brother’s shoulders and let Niles lean on him. Another morose silence fell before Rosie spoke up. “And with that, I have an announcement to make. EEU has asked me to resign as Third Wave’s CEO. The negative publicity hasn’t died down, the protests and attacks in the media on gaming in general—Third Wave in particular—haven’t let up enough. And though they stuck with us until the trials were over, they’ve lost the stomach for the fight. So now I’m too controversial and polarizing a figure.”

  They gaped at her, though Niles didn’t look particularly surprised.

  “By ‘asked for your resignation,’ I assume you mean EEU has given you a choice between resigning and being fired?” Jordan asked.

  She nodded, and Niles mirrored it, grimacing. “I figured they’d do that to you sooner or later. I’ve had my own resignation letter signed and ready to submit for months now. There is no sense in me trying to work there without knowing you have my back.”