The Never Game

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. (#ulink_0e584e3f-f416-5443-893f-57685490dcaa)

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.