The Desperate Game: (InterMix) (15 page)

“‘Confront giant spider again,’” she read.

“Instead of setting a trap for him? That doesn’t sound right. Who would just confront a spider?” But Zac selected the option that specified confrontation.

The spider simply got out of the way as if it hadn’t seen the intrusion.

“The spider is supposed to be the gate guard. Why didn’t he react to our trying to get back inside the mountain?” Guinevere tapped the tip of her pencil on the pad. “Most of the characters are straight out of StarrTech personnel files, Zac. That’s probably supposed to be a company guard.”

“Who acts like he doesn’t see a thing. Bribed?” Zac nodded. “Okay, what next?”

“There is only one more note, Zac.” Guinevere chewed on her lower lip as she read the final direction. “After the giant spider let you through, you’re supposed to choose answer number three.”

“And go right back into the treasure hall? Okay.”

Zac pushed the proper key and sat back as the graphics on the screen did a series of crazy gyrations.

“What the hell? The treasure hall doesn’t look the same as it did the first time we entered.” Zac examined the graphic display curiously. A light was flashing in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. “What’s that?”

“The light? I don’t know. There’s no reference to it in Larry’s notes. He must not have gotten any farther before—” She broke off, not wanting to finish the sentence. “What are the options listed for the next playing step?”

Zac read them slowly, “‘Pick up treasure chest’ is option number one.”

“That doesn’t make sense. We’re already holding the treasure we wanted.”

“‘Go back to giant spider and negotiate.’”

Guinevere wrinkled her nose. “Who negotiates with a spider?”

“‘Find another exit from the hall.’”

“Hmm. That’s a possibility. There wasn’t any other exit mentioned the last time we were in here. What’s the last option?”

“It just says, ‘Choose
D
.’” Zac’s finger hovered over the letter
D
on the keyboard. “I think I’ll try that one first. If it doesn’t work, we can play the damn thing again and choose the new exit from the hall.” He punched
D
.

The flashing light on the screen winked out. Instantly the graphics disappeared. In their place was an address.

“Good grief,” Guinevere whispered, “why on earth would Cal have left an Alaskan address?”

Zac didn’t move for a long moment, his gaze fixed on the screen. “Write it down, Gwen. Before it disappears or something.”

Hastily she scribbled the unfamiliar Alaskan address. “Have you ever heard of Calliope Junction?”

“Nope. But that doesn’t mean anything. I’ve never been to Alaska.”

The address on the screen suddenly winked out. The first steps of the game reappeared.

“What now, Zac? Do we play it again? It’s getting late. Almost dark.” Guinevere slowly closed the notebook in her lap.

Zac carefully slipped the disk out of the computer drive and shut off the machine. “No, we don’t play it again. It’s taken us too long to get this far.”

“But what about that other option? The one that offered a new exit from the hall.”

He stood up and resheathed the disk in its envelope. “I’m a pragmatic man, Gwen. I’d much rather check out an address than continue playing games. Let’s go.”

“Go where? Zac, what are you going to do next?”

He was pulling out a handkerchief and wiping any surfaces he might have touched, including the computer. “What did that last picture of the mountain treasure hall look like, Gwen?”

“I don’t know.” She thought about it. “It seemed different. There wasn’t any huge pile of glittering treasure. Just some stacks of boxes.”

“Yeah. And where does StarrTech stack boxes in great quantity?” He glanced around, assuring himself the living room was in order.

“A warehouse.” Guinevere followed him out the door. “What are you going to do, Zac?”

“Pay a visit to the StarrTech warehouse when there won’t be anyone around but the night guard. Say, around ten o’clock tonight.”

“What do you think you’ll find? A box with that address on it? Zac, that’s pretty farfetched.” She hastened down the steps in his wake.

“I don’t know what I’ll find. I just want to go looking.”

“But what about those bloodstains? What about Larry?”

He turned around at the Laser, opening her car door for her. “Gwen, I’m playing some hunches,” he said impatiently. “If I get lucky and play them fast enough, we may have a chance of finding Larry. If we do this formally and call in the cops, everything will go into a long delay. By the time it all gets sorted out the answers may have disappeared.”

“On their way to Alaska?”

He smiled. “You know, sometimes you’re not half slow.”

She refused to respond to that. “I don’t think you should go, Zac.”

“But then you really don’t have anything to say about it, do you? If I don’t call you by midnight, go ahead and notify the police about Hixon.”

He pushed her not ungently into the car and slammed the door. A moment later he was in the Buick, pulling out onto the street. He didn’t glance back as he drove off toward town.

Guinevere sat for a few seconds behind the wheel of her car and thought that there was one more question she had wanted to discuss with him. Not only had the roles of the players been altered in Bender’s version of the game, but one character was still missing from the game.

There had been no appearance of the elf at any point. Yet Cal hadn’t changed the name of the game. The title on the screen had still been “Elf Hunt.”

Guinevere wondered what would have happened if instead of pushing the
D
key, Zac had chosen the option that offered an alternative route out of the treasure hall. Slowly she put the Laser in gear and started home.

The questions in her head wouldn’t go away. By nine thirty that night she was still fretting about the blood on Hixon’s desk and the untried option in the last playing sequence of the game. When Guinevere wasn’t busy worrying about that, she gave herself up to terrifying fantasies of Zac wandering alone around a deserted warehouse.

Except that he wouldn’t be alone, she reminded herself. The night guard would be on duty. A night guard who, like a giant spider, wasn’t doing his duty? Zac was the expert, Guinevere reminded herself. This was his line of work. She took some comfort from that and then asked herself why she was worrying in the first place about a man who obviously didn’t have a lot of faith in her integrity.

She had been a fool to let him stay the night. Guinevere groaned silently as she paced her living room for the hundredth time. She glanced at the clock. In another half hour or so Zac would be inside the warehouse. Why had he wanted to go so late at night? Saturday was a quiet warehouse day anyway. Perhaps if some overtime had been authorized, there might be a few people around, but that was about all. He wouldn’t have been bothered by a normal workday crowd if he’d just gone in early this evening.

Unless he not only wanted to avoid any stray overtime workers but had plans somehow to avoid the night guard too. Maybe after seeing the reaction of the spider in the game script, he was suspicious of the guards.

In which case he was
sneaking
into that warehouse, not simply going in on official business during the quiet hours.

Alarm flared along Guinevere’s nerve endings. Cal Bender was dead. Larry Hixon was missing, and the elf had disappeared from the story script.

Bender and Hixon knew the StarrTech computer programs inside out. And so did the Elf. With a flash of intuition Guinevere wondered if it was the missing elf who would have been discovered if they had chosen the option that would have provided an alternative route out of the treasure hall.

Nervously Guinevere glanced again at the clock. From the beginning Zac had coordinated his investigation with Russ Elfstrom. It was entirely logical that Zac had informed Elfstrom of his plans to go into the warehouse tonight.

Everybody in the new game script had been assigned a role except the elf.

Guinevere felt herself grow very cold. She was overreacting. She didn’t know anything about conducting an investigation. If she had any sense, she would stay out of it and let Zac play it his own way. He was the expert.

And then, one more time, she visualized his going through that warehouse on his own tonight, perhaps dealing with a hostile guard who took his orders from someone behind the scenes, say, a manipulative, intrigue-loving king or an unseen elf.

Guinevere gave up trying to rationalize herself out of panic. It was easier to succumb to it. She grabbed her leather bag, located the car keys, and let herself out of the apartment. After loping downstairs into the garage, she climbed quickly into the Laser. It was a long drive out to StarrTech’s warehouse. It would take her almost half an hour to get there. And by now Zac would already be inside.

Getting past the guard had been unexpectedly easy. He had been nowhere around. Zac stored that interesting tidbit of information and then began his tour through the warehouse. He had a flashlight in one hand, and he was wearing a pair of what used to be called sneakers before they became fashionable. The dark cotton knit sweater and jeans gave him what Guinevere would probably think was a suitably commando-style air.

He thought of her as he drifted like a ghost through the stacks of packing crates and cartons. The knot of tension he’d felt this morning as he’d listened to Russ Elfstrom’s logic had been inexplicable. He should have been able to deal easily with the possibility that Gwen was somehow involved in this mess. But it hadn’t been easy at all to confront her. And he still wasn’t sure he should trust his judgment. Christ! He’d been to bed with the woman only once. You didn’t make fundamental decisions about whom to trust on that basis.

Trust was a factor that came into an association over a long period of time. It was something that came into existence when you’d worked with someone for a while, developed a rapport, done favors for the other person, and had him or her return those favors. Trust was something you had after someone had saved your neck and you, in turn, had saved his or hers.

Trust was a hard-won commodity and existed between very few people. Trust, Zac knew, was one of the anchors in his friendship with Russ Elfstrom.

Sure as hell, Zac told himself, he was not obliged to trust Guinevere Jones after such a short period of time and one night in her bed. But maybe his judgment had been impaired. He’d let her off far too easily this afternoon. He should have pushed and pushed hard; he should have worn her down, prodded and pulled and pounded until she was in tears. She wasn’t that tough. He could have broken her beneath a little well-applied interrogation.

But the hurt and defiance in her eyes had bothered him, made him feel ridiculously guilty. He hadn’t wanted to be responsible for the pain. He’d wanted to comfort her, apologize for the questioning. He had just wanted to believe her and had let it go at that. So he’d trusted his instincts and backed off instead of pushing her until she cracked. The hell of it was, she probably didn’t even realize how lucky she’d been.

Zac moved down a long aisle of crates. A part of him listened intently to the tiny noises in the darkness. He knew he was waiting for something, but while he waited he intended to have a look at the shipment holding area. A few minutes later he was in it, swinging the flashlight beam across the address labels on the crates and boxes waiting for shipment the following Monday. It was a long shot, of course. But offhand he couldn’t think of anything more intelligent.

Cal Bender’s body had been discovered. By rights it should have stayed hidden through the long, cold winter in the mountains. With any luck at all, it might not even have emerged in the spring. That ravine had been deep. Still, casual hikers had found the body. Bodies had a way of turning up, Zac reflected. They were hard to hide, harder than a murderer might think. Bodies decomposed and drew attention with the odor. Bodies floated to the surface of lakes, washed ashore on beaches, got dug up by gardeners, found by hunters. It was tough to hide a body.

One method was to ship it right out of the state.

Larry Hixon had disappeared this morning. The news about Bender’s body being found had been on television late last night, and it had also appeared in the morning paper. Someone might have decided that things were getting much too dangerous and that it would be safer to take Hixon out of the game. The same someone might have decided to try an alternative method of hiding the body, perhaps a method that had worked successfully for hiding other things, such as equipment shipments.

StarrTech was saving money on its electric bill, Zac noted. Most of the warehouse was in deep darkness. A few fluorescent lights burned near the exits and threw long shadows down the aisles of boxes and crates, but here in the holding area it would have been impossible to read the labels on the boxes without the flashlight. As it was, Zac had to move slowly and carefully. On the positive side, he reminded himself, he was good at moving slowly and carefully. It was something he did well. A man had to take pride in whatever small talents he possessed.

In spite of his careful search, the crate with the label addressed to Calliope, Alaska, almost slipped past without Zac’s seeing it. He had been leaning across it to read the large carton behind it. But when he stepped back, the odd name jumped into the flashlight’s beam.

Zac felt the familiar, sudden surge of adrenaline that always seemed to hit him when he was close to an answer. Over the years he had learned to heed the warning. He examined the fastening of the crate. It would take a crowbar to get inside. That was okay. He’d already noted where the day crew kept its tools.

Zac moved quickly back through the aisles of cartons and crates, found a crowbar, and returned to the Calliope box. After balancing the flashlight on a nearby carton, he began to pry the top off the crate that had been bound for Alaska.

It was no surprise when he found Larry Hixon inside. The amazing part was that Hixon was still alive. Unconscious, bound and gagged, but alive. There was a swelling on the side of his head, and there had been some bleeding, although not enough to seep out of the carton.