"Don"t be ridiculous," Shawn said. "This is your recurring dream. See? Wilderness? Lost? Big scary monster in the trees?"
Again Shawn tried to get away, and again Gus held him back. "In your recurring dream, people are dying, there"s a killer right in front of you, and you can"t figure out who it is," Gus said. "That"s your deepest fear, isn"t it?"
"I have no idea what you"re talking about," Shawn said with a complete lack of conviction.
He did. Gus could see it in his eyes. Shawn was afraid, and it wasn"t of the killer. He was afraid of a vision he"d seen in a dream over and over again. Gus let go of his pack and took him by the shoulders.
"You can do this, Shawn," Gus said. "You know you can. I know you can. It"s just another case, just another set of clues."
"It"s not!" Shawn said loudly enough for Gwendolyn and Balowsky to hear-and to stop walking. He moved in closer to Gus and whispered, "I don"t have clues here. I don"t know who the killer is, and I won"t until one of them is kind enough to eliminate the other one from suspicion."
"You only think there aren"t any clues," Gus said. "But there are. There have to be. You"ve seen them, you"ve heard them. You just didn"t notice at the time. But they"re all in your head. All you have to do is put them together. And you"ve got to do it now."
Shawn still looked shaken. "Why now?"
"I"ve seen you solve enough crimes to know that there are two elements you need before you can swing into action," Gus said. "You need the clues-and you need an audience. If you wait much longer, there won"t be anyone left to be stunned by your revelations. And then you might never be able to pull it together."
Shawn looked up the trail at Gwendolyn and Balowsky, who were staring back at them. "They"re not much of an audience."
"Next time we"ll book the State Theater," Gus said. "Right now this is what we"ve got. So go dazzle "em."
Shawn took a deep breath. Then another one. Then he plastered a broad smile across his face.
"Wait up, guys," he called to the lawyers. "Let"s take a break and unmask a killer."
Chapter Fifty-Four.
The reveal wasn"t going well, Gus could tell. It had started ou t strongly. Shawn was full of his usual bravado as he launched into an explication of the case"s known facts. But even as he was finishing up the saga of their ordeal at Descanso Gardens, Gus could feel he was losing momentum-and with that, his audience. Even the revelation that the gun-toting mime was actually their late colleague Archie Kane didn"t elicit more than the slightest gesture of impatience from Gwendolyn and Balowsky.
"So everything Rushton told us about you was a lie," Gwendolyn said. "That"s a shock. Can we start walking again?"
"We"re just getting to the good part," Shawn said, a hint of desperation in his voice.
The trouble was, Gus knew, he wasn"t getting to the good part. Gus had listened to enough of these summations to understand their structure. Shawn would lay out what seemed like a string of facts known to everyone, apparently at random. What his audience wouldn"t understand until it was too late was that there was nothing random about the selection. Shawn would pick out the precise pieces of information that built up, step by step, to his conclusion. As a technique, it was flawless. Even when Shawn was wrong-something that happened along the way before he hit the ultimate solution in the occasional case-the summation itself never was. The chosen clues would always lead inexorably to the determined conclusion. If that conclusion was wrong, it was simply that Shawn had selected the wrong pieces or put them together in the wrong way.
But this time was different. Shawn didn"t have a destination in mind, so he had no guide in choosing his clues. He was spewing out everything he"d seen, heard, and done over the last week, in the desperate hope that he could pick a pattern out of it. Gus suspected the lawyers had no idea how much Shawn was struggling, because they"d never witnessed the master at work. He could still put on an entertaining show. But Gus knew it was just a show, and he found it painful to watch.
"Yes," Shawn said. "Rushton lied to you all. For good reason. He suspected that one of you had killed Archie Kane. Or-"
He broke off, trying to figure out where to go next. Gus gave him a nod of encouragement.
"Or did he know?" Shawn said. "Know because he was working with the killer all along?"
"Why do you need a driver"s license to buy liquor when you can"t drink and drive?" Balowsky said. "Why are their interstate highways in Hawaii? If you want to play rhetorical questions, we can be here until the mountain crumbles into sand, and then we don"t have to worry about walking down. Unless we"re murdered first."
"As if that"s something you"re worried about," Gwendolyn said.
"Standing next to you, I am," Balowsky said. "Why don"t you just get it over with? I"ll even let you have your favorite target."
He turned his back on her-and then whirled around quickly to see if she was aiming a knife at it.
Gus looked at Shawn. Wasn"t he going to stop this? But Shawn wasn"t paying attention to the bickering lawyers. He didn"t seem to be paying attention to anything outside himself. He stared off into the far distance, the beginnings of a smile on his face.
"Shawn?" Gus said.
"Rushton brought us into the conference room apparently so we could learn what you all were like," Shawn said. "And you didn"t disappoint. Gwendolyn Shrike attacked immediately, only to retreat when there was clearly no hope for victory. Kirk Savage hid behind legal technicalities. Morton Mathis was scared we"d reveal his real ident.i.ty. Reggie Balowsky sat back and waited to see who was going to win before he chose a side. And Jade Greenway, poor, sweet Jade Greenway, bravely stood up for us."
"Bravely!" Gwendolyn almost spat the word. "Is it brave to suck up to your boss?"
Gus stared at Shawn. What was he doing now? What he was saying still seemed like a stall, but there was confidence in his voice and a glint in his eye that hadn"t been there when he started the reveal.
"Not to speak ill of the dead or anything," Balowsky said.
"The only reason you don"t speak ill of the dead is because you can"t do them any more damage that way," Gwendolyn said.
"Personally, I"m all in favor of sucking up to the boss," Shawn said. "Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that I run my own business and I end up sucking up to myself. Which isn"t really as easy as it sounds. Anyway, there"s sucking up and there"s sucking up. It"s one thing to lavish praise on your boss"s new pet detectives. It"s another thing to do it before you even know they exist. This is the point where you ask what I"m talking about."
If it was, neither Gwendolyn nor Balowsky was taking advantage of the opportunity. They were glaring at each other, unmoving.
"I"ve had enough of you to last a lifetime," Gwendolyn said. "So if you"re going to try to kill me, go ahead."
"No point pretending with me," Balowsky snarled. "We both know I didn"t do it, and that only leaves you. And I"d like to see you try it now."
Balowsky opened his hand, revealing the Swiss Army knife he had palmed. It was opened to its largest blade, and the three inches of forged steel trembled in Gwendolyn"s direction. Gus didn"t see her move, but somehow she had a large rock in her hand, which she was holding up as a club.
"They seem pretty busy," Shawn said to Gus. "Maybe you should ask what I"m talking about."
"Do you know?" Gus said without taking his eyes off the lawyers.
"You should try me and find out," Shawn said.
The bright tone in Shawn"s voice gave Gus a small hope. Maybe they could get of this with a minimum of bloodshed.
"Okay, Shawn," Gus said. "What are you talking about?"
"You sure you don"t want to lecture me here about how I always drag these things out and make you ask questions instead of just giving you the answer?" Shawn said. "Because I figure we still have a couple of minutes left."
"Before what?" Gus said, a shiver of dread going up his spine.
"One question at a time," Shawn said. "So let"s get back to the first one, and the answer involves Hank Stenberg. Which is really remarkable, because this is not the first time that kid has helped solve one of our most baffling cases, and he really is kind of a tard. But if he hadn"t written that Wikipedia entry on us, we never could have figured out the truth."
"Why, did he put the solution to our final case in there?" Gus said, beginning to wonder if Shawn had simply lost his mind.
"How could he?" Shawn said. "We couldn"t tell him what was going on in the mountains because we have no way to contact him, so he"d have to be up here with us to know about it. And even if he was, he couldn"t access Wikipedia, because there"s no cell service and no Wi-Fi up here. So how could anyone access Wikipedia in a place where there"s no cell service and no Wi-Fi?"
Gus tried to slog through the layers of verbiage Shawn was spewing out to find the point. He even managed to keep himself from chiding Shawn for the inappropriate use of the slur "tard" as he searched for the point. What difference could it possibly make to point out that there was no Wi-Fi up here, especially since no one had a cell phone? And yet Shawn seemed to think there was something significant about the availability of Wikipedia in the mountains.
Something began to click in Gus" brain. It wasn"t here Shawn was talking about. It was about receiving information where there shouldn"t be any signal. He knew this meant something, but he couldn"t quite place it.
He turned to Shawn, expecting to see the triumphant grin that would accompany Gus" admission that he needed Shawn to carry the explanation out another step. But Shawn wasn"t smiling at him. In fact, he wasn"t looking anywhere near Gus. He wasn"t looking at the lawyers, either, even though they seemed to be frozen in place.
Shawn was staring off into the woods, his attention riveted to a s.p.a.ce between two large trees.
"What are you looking at?" Gus asked.
Shawn didn"t take his eyes off the s.p.a.ce. "I think I was wrong."
"It doesn"t really matter," Gus said. "You haven"t explained what you were talking about, so I"ll never know if you change your mind now."
"Not about the killer"s ident.i.ty," Shawn said. "I"m right about that. But when I said we had a couple of minutes, that was all wrong."
Gus felt a flash of fear run up his spine. "Couple of minutes until what?"
"And I was wrong about something else," Shawn said. "And this is the big one. I told you to fight your fear. I told you not to give in to panic. That was absolutely backwards. You need to panic. You need to panic right now."
"I don"t understand," Gus said.
"Look around you, Gus," Shawn said sternly. "There"s nothing here but trees and sun and mountains and cliffs. You"re alone in the wilderness and there"s no one who can help."
"Stop it," Gus said. The panic was rising now. Even though Gus was clearly not alone, his brain was having an increasingly difficult time convincing his muscles of that fact.
"It"s your dream finally coming true," Shawn said. "You"re going to die and there"s nothing you or I or those two freaky lawyers can do to stop it."
Gus squirmed as a spasm of terror flowed through him. His feet pawed at the ground as if trying to shake off the shackles of his will and start running blindly. "What are you doing?"
"There"s nothing any of us can do to stop it," Shawn said.
Gus" head was spinning, or maybe it was the ground. He tried desperately to hold on to reason. "Stop what?"
"That." Shawn pointed at the gap in the trees. For a moment, Gus saw nothing. And then it was there. Just a flash, barely enough to settle on his retinas, but Gus saw it and he understood what Shawn had been trying to tell him.
Just a flash, but that one flash told him everything he needed to know. That one flash of bright, brilliant green.
Chapter Fifty-Five.
Gus ran.
The branches tore at his arms, the jagged rocks dug into his feet, his lungs screamed in pain as he gasped for breath. At least it wasn"t night, as it had been in the dreams, but the trees were so dense they nearly blocked out the sun completely.
How long had be been running? It could have been hours; it could have been months. He had no idea where he was; the trail was a distant memory. At first he"d tried to remember landmarks so he could find his way back if he survived, but rational thought was the first cargo he"d jettisoned as he realized he needed to go faster.
And where was Shawn? They"d started running at the same time, along with Gwendolyn and Balowsky, and for a little while they were all together. But somehow they had split up, apparently on the philosophy that Jade couldn"t track four targets at once. At the time, that sounded like a good idea. No matter how many times he reordered the priority of their deaths, Gus always found himself near the bottom of the list. Shawn would be an intellectual threat to Jade, Gwendolyn a physical one. So Jade could pick them off, then take her time going after Balowsky and him.
It was only after he heard her footsteps behind him that he remembered Jade"s philosophy-take the weakest one down first, and then use that failure against the stronger. No matter how fast he moved, how cunningly he changed direction, she was always there.
How was this possible? He"d had this dream so many nights in his life, and every time the thing chasing him was a hideous, demonic monster. That"s one reason he"d been so fast to a.s.sume Gwendolyn was the killer, because she could fit that description.
But Jade Greenway rescued puppies and kittens. She preserved English folk songs. Unless she was preserving them to hum while she ate those rescued pets, this was not the portrait of a cold-blooded killer. What right did she have to be complex?
Gus could see the plunge just ahead of him, the cliff falling off hundreds of feet to a roaring river far below. There was plenty of time to stop or turn away, but no matter how hard he willed his feet to change direction they kept pounding inexorably towards the edge. He pummeled his thighs, tried to throw himself to the ground, grab hold of a tree, anything to slow himself down. Nothing worked. His feet kept propelling him forward.
It was the moment he always knew would come. It was the end. He felt his foot take one last step and hit nothing beneath it but empty air.
He was going to die. But at least there was this. At least now he understood why his body insisted on taking him off the cliff. It was because he couldn"t run anymore, and because he wouldn"t let the killer who was chasing him have the satisfaction of finishing him off.
A hollow victory, but as much of a victory as he could hope for, Gus thought. But as his left foot began to come down on open air, something happened that never happened in the dream.
In the nightmare, he didn"t know what was chasing him or why. But in reality he knew it was Jade Greenway, and he knew why-she was a crook who was going to use their deaths to help her escape. In the dream Gus felt only terror and hopelessness. But now there was something else.
There was anger.
If he went over this cliff, then Jade would win. If he didn"t go over the cliff, she"d probably kill him easily, and she"d still win. But Gus would not let that happen without a fight.
As his right foot, still propelled by his momentum, began to lift off the ground to join its mate in s.p.a.ce, Gus stretched out his arm, reaching for a branch that hung out over the chasm. His fingers closed around the limb.
And then they opened again. The rough bark tore at the skin of his palm as the branch slid through his hand.
Gus was falling. Part of his mind tried to calculate exactly how long it would take for him to hit the rocks so many hundreds of feet below.
But the other part still refused to give up. He reached out blindly and his hands. .h.i.t a root that had grown out of the cliff face. He grabbed it tight and felt the pain blast through his palms to his shoulders as he stopped his fall.
Gus let himself hang for a moment, allowing the pain to fade a little. Then he looked up. His head was about a foot below the cliff"s edge. He scrambled with his toes for a foothold, but the cliff fell away inwards and he couldn"t touch it. He tried to pull himself up, but his arms were so shocked with pain it was all he could do to dangle helplessly.
He heard something moving at the top of the cliff. Before he could do anything, there was a flash of green and Jade stepped to the edge.
"Let me help you." She crouched down to her knees and extended a hand. "Take my hand."
"So you can drop me?" Gus snarled. "I don"t think so."
"If you"re holding on to my hand, I don"t see how I can drop you," Jade said, looking puzzled. "Also, why would I want to?"
"For the same reason you killed Archie Kane and Morton Mathis and Kirk Savage," Gus said. "To cover up your conspiracy to sell stolen technology from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory."
She gave him a little frown. "If that were true, it wouldn"t be very smart to bring it up right now," Jade said. "It would be much wiser to tell me how delighted you are to discover I"m alive, and to pretend you have no idea I"m the killer. That way I might actually help you up, thinking that you weren"t a threat."
"You need us all dead," Gus said. "It"s the only way to convince the world that you died out here, too, so that no one will bother to look for you."