The Never Game

Ashton knew he was being followed. He probably hid in the canoe until the man started up the trail and then followed.

The pursuer became prey.

The trail isn’t so very fresh — the men were here some hours ago — yet an urgency ignites within Colter and he muscles up the trail, quickly, after the two men, a thirty-degree incline through rocks and over small, sandy ledges. He has never been to Echo Ridge, a craggy rise in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. The terrain is unforgiving. Echo Ridge was one place on the Compound that the children were not allowed to go.

Yet it was to Echo Ridge that Ashton Shaw followed someone who had been pursuing him. And Echo Ridge is the place to which his son is climbing now.

Ten minutes later a breathless Colter crests the summit and stands against a rock face, sucking in air. In his hand is the Colt Python.

He’s looking over the tree- and brush-covered plateau of the ridge. To his left — west — is a pelt of forest and a layered maze of rock formations and caves, where your assumption is: bears in the big ones, snakes in the small.

To Colter’s right — east — is a cliff face, ninety degrees, a hundred feet or more straight down to a dry creek bed on the valley floor.

The same creek bed where last year Colter had the confrontation with the hunter, who’d blindly shot into a bush and wounded the buck.

He now looks east again, at the brightening morning sky, and sees the sharp black silhouette of the Sierra Nevada peaks, a massive jaw of broken teeth.

As for his father’s footsteps? The other man’s? He can’t see either. The plateau is rock and gravel. No cutting for sign here.

Now the sun rises over the mountains and pastes orangey light on the rock and the forest of Echo Ridge.

The light also pings off a shiny object fifty yards away.

Glass or metal? It’s not too early for ice, but the glint is coming from the floor of pine needles, where there would be no standing water to freeze.

Colter cocks the pistol and lifts it as he walks forward. The gun is a heavy one, weighing two and a half pounds, but he hardly notices the weight. He proceeds toward the flash, eyeing the forest to his left; no threat could come from the cliff edge on his right, except from that hundred-foot drop to the creek bed below.

When he’s still about twenty feet from the light source, he sees what it is. He stops, gazing around him. He doesn’t move for a moment, then slowly he walks in a circle, which ends at the cliff’s edge.

Colter swaps the gun for the cell phone. He flips it open and takes a moment to remember how it works. Then he dials a number he memorized years ago.

Now, fifteen years later, Colter Shaw was looking at a configuration of rock so very similar to Echo Ridge.

He gazed at the crime scene tape around the place where Henry Thompson lay.

Shaw thought about the button on the Hong-Sung goggles — the one you pushed to be resurrected.

RESET...

Over the crest of the rise, four newcomers walked slowly, carrying and wheeling large cases — like professional carpenters’ toolboxes. The Joint Major Crimes Task Force crime scene team wore blue jumpsuits, the hoods pulled low around their necks. The day was not particularly hot but the sun was relentless and wearing the contamination-proof coveralls would be unbearable after any length of time.

Standish approached and offered Shaw a bottle of water. He took it and drank down half, surprised at how thirsty he was. “We’ll leave it to Crime Scene and the ME. No hurry to get back. I’m going to hitch a ride in the vans. Not in an airborne mood at the moment.”

Shaw agreed.

The detective was staring over the cliff. After a moment she asked, “You see that big cat again?”

“No.”

Absently she said, “You know, there were a couple of them in Palo Alto the other day. I read the story in the Examiner. Safeway parking lot. Roughhousing like kittens. Then they ran off into the woods and disappeared. They interviewed somebody. He said, ‘The mountain lion you can’t see is worse than the one you can.’ Is that the truth about life or what, Shaw?”

His phone vibrated. He read the text.

A moment of debate as he stared down the rock face. He typed and sent a reply.

He slipped the phone away and said to Standish that he’d changed his mind and would take the chopper back after all.

46

Six p.m., and Colter Shaw was back in the Quick Byte Café.

He tilted the beer bottle back, drank long. It was a custom of his to drink locally brewed beer whenever he traveled. In Chicago, Goose Island. In South Africa, Umqombothi, which smelled and looked daunting but tricked you with a three percent alcohol content. In Boston, Harpoon — not that other stuff.

And in the San Francisco Bay Area: Anchor Steam, of course. Tiffany, back on duty, had given it to him on the house, delivered with a wink.

He set down the bottle and closed his eyes briefly, seeing Henry Thompson’s body, the gradient colors of his blood on the rock, as white and flat as that creek bed below Echo Ridge.