The Never Game

“Wednesday. Start at five p.m. and go from there.”

Tiffany’s fingers, tipped in lengthy black-polished nails, typed expertly. Within seconds a video appeared. It was clearer than most security cams, largely because it wasn’t the more common wide-angle lens, which encompass a broader field of view yet distort the image. Shaw could see the order station, the cash register, the front portion of the Quick Byte and a bit of the street beyond.

Tiffany scrubbed the timeline from the moment Shaw had requested. On the screen patrons raced to and from the counter, like zipping flies.

Shaw said, “Stop. Back up. Three minutes.”

Tiffany did. Then hit PLAY.

Shaw said, “There.”

Outside the café Sophie’s bike approached from the left. The rider had to be the young woman: the color of the bike, helmet, clothes and backpack were as Mulliner had described. Sophie did something Shaw had never seen a cyclist do. While still in motion she swung her left leg over the frame, leaving her right foot on the pedal. She glided forward, standing on that foot, perfectly balanced. Just before stopping, she hopped off. A choreographed dismount.

Sophie went through the ritual of affixing the bike to a lamppost with an impressive lock and a thick black wire. She pulled off her red almond-shell helmet and entered the Quick Byte and looked around. Shaw had hoped she might wave to somebody whom a staff member or patron could identify. She didn’t. She stepped out of sight, to the left. She returned a moment later and ordered.

On the silent tape—older security systems generally didn’t waste storage space or transmission bandwidth with audio—the young woman took a mug of coffee and one of the chrome number-card holders. Shaw could see her long face was unsmiling, grim.

“Pause, please.”

Tiffany did.

“Did you serve her?”

“No, it would have been Aaron working then.”

“Is he here?”

“No, he’s off today.”

Shaw asked Tiffany to take a shot of Sophie on her phone, send it to Aaron and see if he recalled anything about her, what she said, who she talked to.

She sent the shot to the employee, with the whooshing sound of an outgoing text.

Shaw was about to ask her to call him, when her phone chimed. She looked at the screen.

“No, he doesn’t remember her.” On the video Sophie vanished from sight again.

Shaw then noticed somebody come into view outside. He, or she, was of medium build and wearing baggy dark sweats, running shoes, a windbreaker and a gray stocking cap, pulled low. Sunglasses. Always damn sunglasses.

This person looked up and down the street and stepped closer to Sophie’s bike and crouched quickly, maybe to tie a shoelace.

Or not.

The behavior earned Shaw’s assessment that it was possibly the kidnapper. Male, female, he couldn’t tell. So Shaw bestowed the gender-neutral nickname, Person X.

“What’s he doing?” Tiffany asked in a whisper.

Sabotage? Putting a tracking device on it?

Shaw thought: Come in, order something.

He knew that wouldn’t happen.

X straightened, turned back in the direction he had come and walked quickly away.

“Should I fast-forward?” Tiffany asked.

“No. Let it run. Regular speed.”

Patrons came and went. Servers delivered and bused dishes.

As they watched the people and drivers stream past, Tiffany asked, “You live here?”

“Florida, some of the time.”

“Disney?”

“Not all that close. And I’m not there very often.”

Florida, he meant. As for Disney, not at all.

She might have said something else but his attention was on the video. At 6:16:33, Sophie left the Quick Byte. She walked to her bike. Then remained standing, perfectly still, looking out across the street, toward a place where there was nothing to look at: a storefront with a sun-bleached FOR LEASE sign in the window. Shaw noted one hand absently tightening into a fist, then relaxing, then tightening again. Her helmet slipped from the other and bounced on the ground. She bent fast to collect and pull it over her head—angrily, it seemed.

Sophie freed her bike and, unlike the elegant dismount, now leapt into the seat and pedaled hard, to the right, out of sight.

Staring at the screen, Shaw was looking at passing cars, his eyes swiveling left to right—in the direction Sophie’d headed. It was, however, almost impossible to see inside the vehicles. If stocking-capped, sunglasses-wearing Person X was driving one, he couldn’t see.

Shaw asked Tiffany to send this portion of the tape, depicting X, to his email. She did.

Together they walked from the office into the restaurant proper and made their way back to the table. Madge, the daughter with the mother name, told him that no one she’d showed the picture to had seen the girl. She added, “And nobody looked weird when I asked.”

“Appreciate it.”

His phone sang quietly and he glanced at the screen. Mack’s research into Kyle Butler, Sophie’s ex-boyfriend, revealed two misdemeanor drug convictions. No history of violence. No warrants. He acknowledged the info, then signed off.

Shaw finished his coffee.

“Refill? Get you anything else? On the house.”

“I’m good.”

“Sorry we couldn’t help you more.”

Shaw thanked her. And didn’t add that the trip to the Quick Byte had told him exactly where he needed to go now.

9.

Colter Shaw, fifteen, is making a lean-to in the northwest quadrant of the Compound, beside a dry creek bed, at the foot of a sheer cliff face, a hundred feet high.

The lean-to is in the style of a Finnish laavu. The Scandinavians are fond of these temporary structures, which are found commonly on hunting and fishing grounds. Colter knows this only because his father told him. The boy has never been outside California or Oregon or Washington State.

He’s arranged pine boughs on the sloping roof and is now collecting moss to provide insulation. The campfire must remain outside.

A gunshot startles him. It’s from a rifle, the sound being chestier than the crack of a pistol.

The weapon was fired on Shaw property because it could not have been fired anywhere else; Ashton and Mary Dove Shaw own nearly a thousand acres, and from here it’s more than a mile’s hike to the property line.

Colter pulls an orange hunting vest from his backpack, dons the garment and walks in the direction of the shot.

About a hundred yards along, he’s startled when a buck, a small one, sprints past, blood on its rear leg. Colter’s eyes follow it as it gallops north. Then the boy continues in the direction the animal came from. He soon finds the hunter, alone, hiking deeper into the Shaw property. He doesn’t see or hear Colter approach. The boy studies him.

The broad man, of pale complexion, is wearing camouflage overalls and a brimmed cap, also camo, over what seems to be a crew-cut scalp. The outfit seems new and the boots are not scuffed. The man is not protected with an orange vest, which is a hugely bad idea in thick woods, where hunters themselves can be mistaken for game or, more likely, bush. The vests don’t alert deer to your presence; the animals are sensitive to the color blue, not orange.

The man wears a small backpack and, on his canvas belt, a water bottle and extra magazines for his rifle. The gun is a curious choice for hunting: one of those black, stubby weapons considered assault rifles. They’re illegal in California, with a few exceptions. His is a Bushmaster, chambered for a .223 bullet—a smaller round than is usually chosen for deer hunting and never used for bigger game. The shorter barrel also means it is less accurate at a distance. These guns are semiautomatics, firing each time the trigger is pulled; that aspect is perfectly legal for hunting, but Colter’s mother, the marksman in the family, has taught the children to hunt only with bolt-action rifles. Mary Dove’s thinking is that if you can’t drop your target fast with a single shot you (a) haven’t worked hard enough to get closer or (b) have no business hunting in the first place.

And, also odd, the Bushmaster isn’t equipped with a scope. Using iron sights to hunt? Either he’s an amateur’s amateur or one hell of a shot. Then Colter reflects: he only wounded the deer. There’s the answer.

“Sir, excuse me.” Colter’s voice—even then, a smooth baritone—startles the man.

He turns, his clean-shaven face contracting with suspicion. He scans the teenager. Colter is the same height then as now, though slimmer; he won’t put on bulking muscle until college and the wrestling team. The jeans, sweatshirt, serious boots and gloves—the September day is cool—suggest the boy is just a hiker. Despite the vest, he can’t be a hunter, as he has no weapon.

Colter is teased frequently by his sister for never smiling, yet his expression is usually affable, as it is now.

Still, the man keeps his hand on the pistol grip of the .223. His finger is extended, parallel to the barrel and not on the trigger. This tells Colter there is a bullet in the chamber and that the hunter is familiar with weapons, if not the fine art of hunting. Maybe he was a soldier at one time.

“How you doing?” Colter asks, looking the man straight in the eye.

“Okay.” A high voice. Crackly.

“This is our property, sir. There’s no hunting. It’s posted.” Always polite. Ashton has taught the children all aspects of survival, from how to tell poisoned berries from safe, to how to stymie bears, to how to defuse potential conflicts.

Never antagonize beast or man …

“Didn’t see any signs.” Cold, cold dark eyes.

Colter says, “Understood. It’s a lot of land. But it is ours and there’s no hunting.”

“Your dad around?”

“Not nearby.”

“What’s your name?”

Ashton taught the children that adults have to earn your respect. Colter says nothing.

The man tilts his head. He’s pissed off. He asks, “Well, where can I hunt?”

“You’re a mile onto our land. You would’ve parked off Wickham Road. Take it east five miles. That’s all public forest.”

“You own all this?”

“We do.”

“You’re kind of like a Deliverance family, aren’t you? You play banjo?”

Colter doesn’t understand; he would later.

“I’ll head off then.”

“Wait.”

The man stops, turning back.

Colter’s confused. “You’re going after that buck, aren’t you?”

The man gives a look of surprise. “What?”

“That buck. He’s wounded.” Even if the man is inexperienced, everyone knows this.

The hunter says, “Oh, I hit something? There was just a noise in the bushes. I thought it was a wolf.”

Colter doesn’t know how to respond to this bizarre comment.

“Wolves hunt at dusk and night,” he says.

“Yeah? I didn’t know that.”

And pulling a trigger without a sure target?

“Anyway, sir. There’s a wounded buck. You’ve got to find him. Put him down.”

He laughs. “What is this? I mean, who’re you to lecture me?”

The teenager guesses that this man, with his ignorance and the little-worn outfit, had been asked to go hunting with friends and, never having been, wanted to practice so he wouldn’t be embarrassed.

“I’ll help you,” Colter offers. “But we can’t let it go.”

“Why?”

“A wounded animal, you track it down. You don’t let it suffer.”

“Suffer,” the man whispers. “It’s a deer. Who cares?”

Never kill an animal but for three reasons: for food or hide, for defense, for mercy.

Colter’s father has given the children a lengthy list of rules, most of them commencing with the negative. Colter and his older brother, Russell, who call their father the King of Never, once asked why he didn’t express his philosophy of life with “always.” Ashton answered, “Gets your attention better.”

“Come on,” Colter says. “I’ll help. I can cut sign pretty well.”

“Don’t push me, kid.”

At that point the muzzle of the Bushmaster strays very slightly toward Colter.

The young man’s belly tightens. Colter and his siblings practice self-defense frequently: grappling, wrestling, knives, firearms. But he’s never been in a real fight. Homeschooling effectively eliminates the possibility of bullies.

He thinks, Stupid gesture by a stupid man.

And stupid, Colter knows, can be a lot more dangerous than smart.

“So what kind of father you have that lets his son mouth off like you do?”

The muzzle swings a few degrees closer. The man certainly doesn’t want to kill, but his pride has been thumped like a melon and that means he may shoot off a round in Shaw’s direction to send him rabbit-scurrying. Bullets, though, have a habit of ending up in places where you don’t intend them to go.

In one second, possibly less, Colter draws the old Colt Python revolver from a holster in his back waistband and points it downward, to the side.

Never aim at your target until you’re prepared to pull the trigger or release the arrow.

The man’s eyes grow wide. He freezes.

At this moment Colter Shaw is struck with a realization that should be shocking yet is more like flicking on a lamp, casting light on a previously dark place. He is looking at a human being in the same way he looks at an elk that will be that night’s dinner or at a wolf pack leader who wishes to make Colter the main course.

He is considering the threat, assigning percentages and considering how to kill if the unfortunate ten percent option comes to pass. He is as calm and cold as the pseudo-hunter’s dark brown eyes.

The man remains absolutely still. He’ll know that the teenager is a fine shot—from the way he handles the .357 Magnum pistol—and that the boy can get a shot off first.

“Sir, could you please drop that magazine and unchamber the round inside.” His eyes never leave the intruder’s because eyes signal next moves.

“Are you threatening me? I can call the police.”

“Roy Blanche up in White Sulphur Springs’d be happy to talk to you, sir. Both of us in fact.”

The man turns slightly, profile, a shooter’s stance. The ten percent becomes twenty percent. Colter cocks the Python, muzzle still down. This changes the gun to single-action, which means that when he aims and fires, the trigger pull will be lighter and the shot more accurate. The man is thirty feet away. Colter has hit pie tins, center, at this distance.

A pause, then the man drops the magazine—with the push of a button, which means it is definitely an illegal weapon in California, where the law requires the use of a tool to change mags on semiauto rifles. He pulls the slide and a long, shiny bullet flies out. He scoops up the magazine but leaves the single.

“I’ll take care of that deer,” Colter says, heart slamming hard now. “If you could leave our property, sir.”

“Oh, you bet I’ll leave, asshole. You can figure on me being back.”

“Yessir. We will figure on that.”

The man turns and stalks off.

Colter follows him—silently, the man never knows he’s being tailed—for a mile and a half, until he gets to a parking lot beside a river popular with white-water rafters. He tosses his weapon into the back of a big black SUV and speeds away.

Then, intruder gone, Colter Shaw gets down to work.

You’re the best tracker of the family, Colter. You can find where a sparrow breathed on a blade of grass …

He starts off in search of the wounded animal.

For mercy …

There isn’t much blood trail and the ground on this part of the property is mostly pine-needle-covered, where it isn’t rock; hoof tracks are nearly impossible to see. The classic tried-and-true techniques for sign cutting won’t work. But the boy doesn’t need them. You can also track with your mind, anticipating where your prey will go.

A wounded animal will seek one of two things: a place to die or a place to heal.

The latter means water.

Colter makes his way, silently again, toward a small pond named—by Dorion, when she was five—Egg Lake, because that’s the shape. It’s the only body of water nearby. Deer’s noses—which have olfactory sensors on the outside as well as within—are ten thousand times more sensitive than humans’. The buck will know exactly where the lake is from the molecules off-gassed by minerals unique to pond water, the crap of amphibians and fish, the algae, the mud, the rotting leaves and branches, the remains of frogs left on the shore by owls and hawks.

Three hundred yards on, he locates the creature, blood on its leg, head down, sipping, sipping.

Colter draws the pistol and moves forward silently.

And Sophie Mulliner?

Like the buck, she too would want solace, comfort, after her wounding—her father’s decision to move and the hard words fired at her through the smoke of anger. He recalled on the video: the young woman standing with shoulders arched, hand clenching and unclenching. The fury at the fallen helmet.

And her Egg Lake?

Cycling.

Her father had said as much when Shaw had interviewed him. Shaw recalled too the horseman’s elegant dismount as Sophie pulled up to the Quick Byte, and the powerful, determined lunge as she sped away from the café, feet jamming down on the pedals in fury.

Taking comfort in the balance, the drive, the speed.

Shaw assessed that she’d gone for the damn hardest bike ride she could.

Sitting in the front seat of the Malibu, he opened his laptop bag and extracted a Rand McNally folding map of the San Francisco Bay Area. He carried with him in the Winnebago a hundred or so of these, covering most of the United States, Canada and Mexico. Maps, to Colter Shaw, were magic. He collected them—modern, old and ancient; the majority of the decorations in his house in Florida were framed maps. He preferred paper to digital, in the same way he’d choose a hardcover to an ebook; he was convinced the experience of paper was richer.

On a job, Shaw made maps himself—of the most important locations he’d been to during the investigation. These he studied, looking for clues that might not be obvious at first but that slowly rise to prominence. He had quite a collection of them.

He quickly oriented himself, outside the Quick Byte Café, in the middle of Mountain View.

Sophie’s launch had been to the north. With a finger he followed a hypothetical route in that direction, past the 101 freeway and toward the Bay. Of course, she might have turned toward any compass point, at any time. Shaw saw, though, that if she continued more or less north she would have come to a large rectangle of green: San Miguel Park, two miles from the café. He reasoned that Sophie would pick a place like that because she could shred furiously up and down the trail, not having to worry about traffic.

Was the park, however, a place where one could bike? Paper had served its purpose; time for the twenty-first century. Shaw called up Google Earth (appropriately, since the park was only a few miles from the company’s headquarters). He saw from the satellite images that San Miguel was interlaced with brown-dirt or sand trails and was hilly—perfect for cycling.

Shaw started the Malibu and headed for the place, wondering what he’d find.

Maybe nothing.

Maybe cyclist friends who’d say, “Oh, Sophie? Yeah, she was here Wednesday. She left. Headed west on Alvarado. Don’t know where she was going. Sorry.”

Or: “Oh, Sophie? Yeah, she was here Wednesday. Pissed at her dad about something. She was going to her friend Jane’s for a few days. Kind of sticking it to him for being a prick. She said she’d be home Sunday.”

After all, happy endings do occur.

As with the buck at Egg Lake.

It turned out that the fast but thin bullet had zipped into and out of the deer’s haunch with no bone damage and had largely cauterized the wound.

Standing ten feet from the oblivious, drinking animal, Colter had replaced the pistol in his holster and withdrawn from his backpack the pint bottle of Betadine disinfectant he and his siblings kept with them. Holding his breath, he stepped in utter silence to within a yard of the deer and stopped. The creature’s head jerked up, alerted by a few molecules of alien scent. The boy aimed the nozzle carefully and squirted a stream of the ruddy-brown antiseptic onto the buck’s wound, sending the animal two feet into the air, straight up. Then it zipped out of sight like a cartoon creature. Colter had had to laugh.

And you, Sophie? Shaw now thought as he approached the park. Was this a place for you to heal? Or a place for you to die?

10.

San Miguel Park was divided evenly, forest and field, and crisscrossed by dry culverts and streambeds, as well as the paths that Shaw had seen thanks to the mappers of Google. In person, he observed they were packed dirt, not sand. Perfect for hard biking: both Sophie’s muscular variety and his own preferred petrol.

Owing to the drought, the place was not the verdant green that Rand McNally had promised, but was largely brown and beige and dusty.

The main entrance was on the opposite side of the park but Sophie’s route would have brought her here, to the bike paths off the broad shoulder of Tamyen Road. While not familiar with the area, he knew the avenue’s name. Hundreds of years ago the Tamyen, a tribe of Ohlone native people, had lived in what was now Silicon Valley. Their lands had been lost in a familiar yet particularly shameful episode of genocide—not at the hands of the conquistadors but by local officials after California achieved statehood.

Shaw’s mother, Mary Dove Shaw, believed an ancestor to be an Ohlone elder.

He killed the engine. Here were two openings in the line of brush and shrubbery that separated the shoulder from the park proper. The gaps led down a steep hill to trails, imprinted with many footprints and tire tread marks.

Climbing from the car, Shaw surveyed the expansive park. He heard a sound he knew well. The whine of dirt bikes, a particular pitch that gets under the skin of some but to others—Shaw, for one—is a siren’s song. Motorbiking was illegal here, a sign sternly warned. If he hadn’t been on a job, though, Shaw’d have had his Yamaha off the rack in sixty seconds and on the trails in ninety.

So: One, assume kidnapping. Two, assume it was Person X, in the gray stocking cap and sunglasses. Three, assume X put a tracker on Sophie’s bike and followed her.

How would it have gone down?

X would snatch her here, before she got too far into the park. He’d worry about witnesses, of course, though the area around Tamyen Road wasn’t heavily populated. Shaw had passed a few companies, small fabricators or delivery services. But the buildings had no view of the shoulder. There was little traffic.

The scenario? X spots her. Then what? How would he have approached? Asking for directions?

No, a nineteen-year-old honors student and employee of a tech company wouldn’t fall for that, not in the age of GPS. Exchanging pleasantries to get close to her? That too didn’t seem likely. X would see she was strong and athletic and probably suspicious of a stranger’s approach. And she could zip into the park, away from him, at twenty miles an hour. Shaw decided there’d be no ruse, nothing subtle. X would simply strike fast before Sophie sensed she was a target.

He began walking along the edge of the shoulder nearest the park. He spotted a tiny bit of red. In the grass between the two trail entrances was a triangular shard of plastic—that could easily have come from the reflector on a bike. With a Kleenex he collected the triangle and put it in his pocket. On his phone he found the screenshot of Sophie’s bike outside the Quick Byte—lifted from Tiffany’s security camera video. Yes, it had a red disk reflector on the rear.

Made sense. X had followed Sophie here and—the moment the road was free of traffic—he’d slammed into the back of her bike. She’d have tumbled to the ground and he’d have been on her in an instant, taping her mouth and hands and feet. Into the trunk with her bike and backpack.