The Call of the Mild

by William Rabkin

  Captain Hook was born Reginald Balowsky and he specialized in labor law, although from what Gus could glean from the résumé, he was never actually on the side of labor. He’d won awards from manufacturers groups and various chambers of commerce, all of which hailed him as a “champion of business.” He didn’t seem to have any outside affiliations or interests—or at least none that would fit comfortably on a lawyer’s CV.

  Turning the page, Gus was surprised to discover that Tinkerbell, born Jade Greenway, was also a litigator. He had seen the killer instinct in Gwendolyn; he could have seen it from the helicopter if she’d stayed on the ground. But Jade seemed so much softer and less secure than her colleague. Her outside interests confirmed this suspicion. She did a lot of work with pet rescue organizations, she volunteered at a local food bank, and she’d founded something called the Society for the Preservation of English Folk Songs. If Gus had had to guess, he would have said she was a researcher, and that if she ever did set foot in a courtroom it was to handle pro bono cases arbitrating conflicts between puppies and unicorns. From her CV, though, it looked like she had taken on several multinational corporations, and won. At least that explained why Gwendolyn seemed to despise her so intensely; these two would be competing for dominance in the same field, and Gus was pretty certain that Rushton did nothing to discourage that sort of rivalry.

  Finally Gus turned to the page that interested him the most: Morton Mathis, the man Shawn had identified as the killer of both Ellen Svaco and Archie Kane. His CV confirmed what Gus already knew about the man: He was a recent transfer from Detroit, where he’d been a rising star in the District Attorney’s Office. There was no indication of what had made him decide to leave the public sector or to move out to California, and his outside interests didn’t provide a clue—he had been involved in a capital campaign for the Detroit Opera and had chaired a fund-raiser to produce a performance of Wagner’s Ringcycle. But that wasn’t nearly as interesting as his legal specialty at the firm. He focused almost entirely on issues of technology—not surprising, considering his undergraduate degree in computer engineering.

  Shawn was right. He had to be. Morton Mathis was the only lawyer in the firm who had substantial involvement in the high-tech field. He’d have an understanding of the kind of work they were doing at JPL, and he’d know who was in the market to buy it once it was stolen. There was only one problem with the theory that Gus could see: Mathis had joined the firm six months ago. Before that he’d never worked or lived in the state. How had he made the contacts at JPL and set up his smuggling scheme so quickly?

  Those were questions that could best be answered over poolside mai tais, Gus reasoned. Now that they were certain who their target was, they could take their time reeling him in, delivering him to Rushton just when the helicopter came to take them home.

  Gus stashed the files away in the pocket on the side of his seat and looked out the window as the helicopter soared above Santa Barbara and then over the mountains to the east of the city. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen his hometown from the air—he’d flown out of the local airport more than once—but this view was nothing like the brief glimpses you could get out of the window of a jet. They were flying level and low, and he could see everything spread out below him as if they were floating in a hot-air balloon.

  Gus wanted to pull Shawn aside and whisper what he’d discovered about Mathis. But the cabin was small, and there really was no “aside” in it. And Shawn was busy doing his own research, anyway. What Gus had learned from files, Shawn seemed determined to learn firsthand: in this case, that Gwendolyn was not someone they wanted to tangle with.

  “Have you been on one of these retreats before?” Shawn asked her.

  Her icy blue eyes barely flicked up at him from her iPhone. “Yes.”

  Shawn waited for her to fill in the details, but the only filling she did was in an e-mail. “What was it like?”

  This time she didn’t look up at all. “I survived.”

  “I can see how that might be a challenge,” Shawn said. “I once ate so many shrimp I had to be rushed to the emergency room.”

  If she appreciated his humor, she didn’t show it. But she did teach Gus a little more about the luxurious appointments in the cabin. Until she swiveled her chair so that its back faced Shawn, Gus had no idea the chairs weren’t fixed facing forward. He found the unlocking button below the armrest and turned his seat to get a better look out the window.

  Hundreds of feet below, the ground rushed by in a blur of brown. They seemed to be flying over the Central Valley. Gus tried to calculate where they might be going. If they’d been flying with the ocean on their right, he knew they’d be heading south to L.A. or San Diego or even Baja. With the ocean on their left, he’d have guessed San Francisco or the Napa Valley. Maybe even the northern coast. Plenty of resorts in either direction. But they were clearly heading east, and the only luxury destination Gus could think of in that direction was Las Vegas. That route would take them over desert, though, and while the ground below them was dry, it was clearly farmland.

  Gus was trying to re-create the map of California in his mind when he heard a voice behind him.

  “I know why you’re here,” the voice said.

  Gus swiveled his chair to see the man he had named Doc Savage leaning down into Shawn’s face.

  “I’m glad someone does,” Shawn said. “Because I thought I was supposed to be collecting all the World Rings, but now I discover that whoever gathers them all has to be sacrificed to harvest their power, and even as a hedgehog, I can tell that’s a bad deal.”

  Gus glanced up at the flat panel in the front of the cabin and confirmed that Shawn had turned on a Wii console and fired up a video game.

  “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 piña 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.

  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 g
unshot. 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.”