William Rabkin - The Call of the Mild

“You’re getting awfully literal all of a sudden,” Shawn said.

“I’m getting scared,” Gus said. “No, I take that back. I am scared.”

“Okay, there’s a killer out there picking us off one by one,” Shawn said. “But look at the bright side. One more murder and we’ll know for sure who it is. And that’s halfway to safety right there.”

“Unless one of us is the victim,” Gus said.

Shawn stopped to think this over, as if the thought had never occurred to him. “That would be a problem,” he said. “Because if the killer took out you or me, that wouldn’t bring us any closer to knowing who it is.”

“And because I’d be dead,” Gus said, panic rising in his chest. “Or you would. Or we both would.”

“That wouldn’t make any sense,” Shawn said. “If we were both out of the running, then there wouldn’t be any question who the killer was. No, the next murder has to be a single, unless said killer is willing to take all three out at once.”

“What if she is?” Gus said.

“She?”

“Oh, come on,” Gus said. “Only Gwendolyn could have set that trap. She’s the one with all the jungle lore at her fingertips. She’s the one who is obviously willing to kill without even blinking. And she’s coming after us next.”

“It’s a good argument, but if we guess wrong-”

“I’m not guessing,” Gus said. “I know. I know from my dreams. Because the thing that’s chasing me is always female. I just never realized until right now that it was a female human.”

“This is based on your dream?” Shawn said. “Haven’t you learned anything from working for a fake psychic-detective agency?”

“I know something has been trying to warn me of this day for almost as long as I’ve been alive,” Gus said. “I know that I’ve lived what happens next again and again-and I’ve never survived it.”

“If you give in to panic and superstition, we are never going to make it home,” Shawn said. “We need to be intelligent. Rational.”

“Says the psychic,” Gus said.

“Exactly,” Shawn said. “We can get away with almost anything by claiming I’m psychic-because people aren’t intelligent and rational. They believe that stuff. We don’t.”

“Then maybe you should start using that brain of yours,” Gus snapped.

“I am,” Shawn said.

“You’re using your feet,” Gus said. “You’re using your mouth. But you’re not using your brain. You’re walking along this trail, waiting for the killer to reveal herself, gambling that her preferred method of doing so won’t involve our decapitation. But what you’re not doing is the one thing you do well-putting together a series of microscopic clues and solving the case.”

Shawn stopped, scowling angrily. “Have you considered maybe I’m doing this for you?”

Gus stopped, too. “You’re keeping me stranded in the wilderness with an insane killer for my own good?”

“Immersion therapy,” Shawn said. “You’ve got to get over this bizarre, superstitious fear of a silly dream.”

“Even if it kills me.”

“At least you’ll be cured,” Shawn said and started down the trail.

Gus grabbed the top of Shawn’s pack and pulled him back. “Don’t you dare blame this on me,” he said through clenched teeth. “People are dead. We could be dead. You can’t be doing this to help me with my recurring dream. Even if you do have one of-”

Gus broke off, realization dawning on him. Shawn saw it coming and tried to get away.

“If that’s the way you feel, I apologize,” Shawn said as he took a step down the trail again.

But Gus wouldn’t let go of his pack, and Shawn was jerked back like a marionette whose puppeteer suffered from Parkinson’s. “You never told me what your recurring dream was,” Gus said.

“It’s really not important now,” Shawn said. “If you want me to solve this crime now and leave you emotionally crippled, then that’s what I’ll do.”

“ This is your recurring dream,” Gus said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Shawn said. “This is your recurring dream. See? Wilderness? Lost? Big scary monster in the trees?”

Again Shawn tried to get away, and again Gus held him back. “In your recurring dream, people are dying, there’s a killer right in front of you, and you can’t figure out who it is,” Gus said. “That’s your deepest fear, isn’t it?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Shawn said with a complete lack of conviction.

He did. Gus could see it in his eyes. Shawn was afraid, and it wasn’t of the killer. He was afraid of a vision he’d seen in a dream over and over again. Gus let go of his pack and took him by the shoulders.

“You can do this, Shawn,” Gus said. “You know you can. I know you can. It’s just another case, just another set of clues.”

“It’s not!” Shawn said loudly enough for Gwendolyn and Balowsky to hear-and to stop walking. He moved in closer to Gus and whispered, “I don’t have clues here. I don’t know who the killer is, and I won’t until one of them is kind enough to eliminate the other one from suspicion.”

“You only think there aren’t any clues,” Gus said. “But there are. There have to be. You’ve seen them, you’ve heard them. You just didn’t notice at the time. But they’re all in your head. All you have to do is put them together. And you’ve got to do it now.”

Shawn still looked shaken. “Why now?”

“I’ve seen you solve enough crimes to know that there are two elements you need before you can swing into action,” Gus said. “You need the clues-and you need an audience. If you wait much longer, there won’t be anyone left to be stunned by your revelations. And then you might never be able to pull it together.”

Shawn looked up the trail at Gwendolyn and Balowsky, who were staring back at them. “They’re not much of an audience.”

“Next time we’ll book the State Theater,” Gus said. “Right now this is what we’ve got. So go dazzle ’em.”

Shawn took a deep breath. Then another one. Then he plastered a broad smile across his face.

“Wait up, guys,” he called to the lawyers. “Let’s take a break and unmask a killer.”

The reveal wasn’t going well, Gus could tell. It had started ou t strongly. Shawn was full of his usual bravado as he launched into an explication of the case’s known facts. But even as he was finishing up the saga of their ordeal at Descanso Gardens, Gus could feel he was losing momentum-and with that, his audience. Even the revelation that the gun-toting mime was actually their late colleague Archie Kane didn’t elicit more than the slightest gesture of impatience from Gwendolyn and Balowsky.

“So everything Rushton told us about you was a lie,” Gwendolyn said. “That’s a shock. Can we start walking again?”

“We’re just getting to the good part,” Shawn said, a hint of desperation in his voice.

The trouble was, Gus knew, he wasn’t getting to the good part. Gus had listened to enough of these summations to understand their structure. Shawn would lay out what seemed like a string of facts known to everyone, apparently at random. What his audience wouldn’t understand until it was too late was that there was nothing random about the selection. Shawn would pick out the precise pieces of information that built up, step by step, to his conclusion. As a technique, it was flawless. Even when Shawn was wrong-something that happened along the way before he hit the ultimate solution in the occasional case-the summation itself never was. The chosen clues would always lead inexorably to the determined conclusion. If that conclusion was wrong, it was simply that Shawn had selected the wrong pieces or put them together in the wrong way.