The Never Game

“Oh, excuse me. You really think I’m the sort of loser plays Call to Arms? Fuck off, okay?”

Once more a scan of the room. The young man surrendered and walked to the order station.

The perils of the internet. Had the poor kid been set up by bullies? Shaw recalled what Maddie Poole had told him about SWAT’ing. And what Marty Avon had told him about the ease of hacking gaming servers.

Or was the kid right, that the description he’d sent the woman online didn’t match the in-person geek version, so she’d bailed on him?

The kid placed an order, paid and took the number on the wire metal stand to a table in the back, dropped into a chair and opened his computer. He plugged in a bulky headset and began pounding away on the keys. His face was still red and he was muttering to himself.

Shaw pulled out a notebook and opened his fountain pen. From memory he sketched a map of where Hank Thompson had been killed. His sure hand completed the drawing in five minutes. He signed it with his initials in the lower-right-hand corner, as he always did. He was waiting for the ink to dry when he looked up. Maddie Poole was walking in. Their eyes met. She smiled; he nodded.

“Lookit you,” she said, possibly meaning his posture. He was leaning back in his chair, his feet stretched out in front of him, the Ecco tips pointed ceilingward.

Then the smile faded. She’d scanned his face. The eyes, in particular.

She sat down, took the bottle of beer from him and lifted it to her own lips. Drank a large mouthful.

“I’ll buy you another one.”

“Not a worry,” he said.

“What is it? And you’d better not say ‘Nothing.’”

He hadn’t texted or spoken about Thompson’s murder.

“We lost the second victim.”

“Colt. Jesus. Wait. Was it that murder in the state park? The guy who was shot?”

A nod.

“The Whispering Man thing again?”

“The police still aren’t talking about that in the news — they don’t want the Gamer to know how much they know.”

“Gamer?”

“That’s what they’re calling him.” He sipped the beer. “He took Thompson into the mountains and left him with the five objects. Thompson came to and started a signal fire. That’s how we got onto him. But the Gamer came back to hunt him. That’s part of the game too.”

She looked over the map, then up at his eyes, a frown of curiosity on her face. He explained about his custom of drawing the maps.

“You’re good.”

Shaw happened to be looking at the spot on the map that represented the foot of the cliff where Henry Thompson had died. He closed the notebook and put it away.

Maddie touched his forearm firmly. “I’m sorry. What about Tony Knight? You didn’t tell me what happened. I was worried until I got your text.”

“Things got busy. And Knight? I was wrong. It wasn’t him. He’s been helpful.”

“Do the police have any ideas who it is?”

“No. If I had to guess, a sociopath. Nothing I’ve ever seen before — this elaborate modeling on the game. My mother might have known people like that.”

“You said she was a psychiatrist.”

He nodded.

Mary Dove Shaw had done a lot of research into medications for treating the criminally insane and as a principal investigator had funneled a lot of grant money to Cal and other schools.

That was earlier in her career — before the migration east, of course. In the later years her practice was limited to family medicine and midwifing in and around White Sulphur Springs and the management of paranoid personality and schizophrenia, though the latter practice involved only one patient: Ashton Shaw.

Shaw had yet to share with Maddie much about his father.

She asked, “Are the police offering a reward?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. I’m not interested in that. I just want to get him. I—”

The rest of the sentence was never uttered. Maddie had lunged forward and kissed him, her strong hands gripping his jacket, her tongue probing.

He tasted her, a hint of lipstick, though he hadn’t seen any color. Mint. He kissed back, hard.

Shaw’s hand slipped to the back of her head, fingers splayed, entwined in her sumptuous hair. Pulling her closer, closer. Maddie leaned in and he felt her breasts against his chest.

They began to speak simultaneously.

She touched his lips with a finger. “Let me go first. I live three blocks from here. Now what were you going to say?”

“I forgot.”

47

Shaw led a nomadic life and didn’t have a large inventory of possessions. But the Winnebago was downright cluttered compared with Maddie Poole’s rental.

True, it was temporary; she was only in town for C3, had driven up from her home outside L.A. Still...

One aspect exaggerated the emptiness: the ancient place was huge, five bedrooms, possibly more. A cavernous dining room. A living room that could be a wedding venue.