The Never Game

“That’s right. Sometimes it’s finding a missing child or a grandfather with Alzheimer’s. Mostly, I track down fugitives and escapees. There’s a fair number of people I’ve put into prison. People who’re not very happy with me. Now, I checked your incarceration schedule. You’ll be in San Quentin until your trial. I’ve put four prisoners in the Q. If you don’t help me, I’m going to talk to a screw or two I know. Those’re guards, by the way. You’ll learn that soon enough. They’ll spread the word that you’re a friend of mine and—”

“What?” Foyle stiffened.

Shaw held his hand out, palm first. “Calm, there... And I guarantee that word’ll spread fast.”

“You son of a bitch.” He sighed, then leaned forward. “If I say anything, they’ll hear.” A nod at the ceiling, where presumably hidden microphones were hard at work.

“That’s why I’m going to write down the questions and you’re going to write down the answers.”

He removed from his bag one of his case notebooks and opened it, then he uncapped a pen. It was a cheap, flexible plastic one provided by the guards, who had explained that the Delta Titanio Galassia, with its sharp point, was not a wise implement to take into an interview with a suspected murderer.

72

“It’s easy to not die,” Ashton Shaw is saying to Colter, then fourteen. “Surviving is hard.”

His son doesn’t bother to ask what he means. The professor always gets to his point.

“Lying on a couch in front of a TV. Sitting in your office typing reports. Walking on the beach. You’re avoiding dying... Say, hand me another piton.”

Even at that age Colter notes the irony in his father’s comment about the ease of not dying since they are presently one hundred and twenty feet in the air, on Devil’s Notch, a sheer rock face just across the boundary of the Compound.

Colter hands him the piton, and, using the tethered hammer, Ashton whacks the metal spike into a crack, tests it and hooks in the carabiner with a sharp click. Parallel on their course, father and son chalk their hands and move several feet higher. The summit is only ten feet away.

“Not dying isn’t the same as being alive. You’re only alive when you’re surviving. And you only survive when there’s a risk there’s something you can lose. The more you risk losing, the more you’re alive.”

Colter waits for this to be translated into a Never rule.

His father says nothing more.

And so this becomes Colter Shaw’s favorite advice from his father. Better than all the Never rules put together.

Ashton’s words were in Shaw’s mind now as he downshifted the Yamaha YZ450FX bike and pounded along a dirt road on the way to Scarpet Peak, between Silicon Valley and Half Moon Bay. As at Basin Redwoods Park, where Henry Thompson had been murdered, this might have been an old logging trail but was now apparently the means of transit for hikers. He hit fifty-five, caught air, then landed like waterfowl in autumn skimming down to the surface of a lake.

Minutes counted. He twisted the throttle higher.

Soon he came to the clearing. Ten acres of low grass, ringed by pine and leafy trees.

He steered the bike out of the woods and killed the engine. This model of dirt bike — the 499cc version — came with a kickstand, a necessity for a street-legal conversion since you could hardly rest it on its side when you went shopping. He propped the bike up and removed his helmet and gloves.

How crazy was this?

Shaw decided: Doesn’t matter. It was inevitable.

Not dying isn’t the same as being alive...

The clearing reminded him of the meadow behind the cabin on the Compound — the place where Mary Dove had presided over her husband’s funeral. Ashton had anticipated — one might say overanticipated — his death and had made funeral arrangements long before the fact. His mind was sharp and clever then and rich with a wicked sense of humor. In his instructions he’d written: It’s my wish that Ash’s ashes be scattered over Crescent Lake.

Shaw gazed across the clearing. On the far end of the moonlit expanse were two cat’s eyes of windows, glowing yellow. Just dots from here. The illumination was radiating from a vacation cabin, whose location was the information that Shaw had wrung out of Jimmy Foyle.

The jog to the cabin took him no more than five minutes. Thirty yards away he paused, looking for security. There might be cameras, there might be motion sensors. Shaw was relying on speed to his target and the element of surprise.

Tony Knight wouldn’t be expecting anyone to come a’calling. After all, he had immunity.

Shaw wondered who the client was, the politician who’d hired Knight’s broadcast anchors to spread phony rumors about his opponent and destroy his chances in a forthcoming election. Some senator? A representative?