Wish You Were Here by Tom Holt Page B

again—
    â€˜Yo, Talks.’
    â€˜Much obliged.’
    â€˜You’re welcome, Talks.’
    â€˜Where’d this lot come from, then? I thought you said . . .’
    â€˜It’s this clown I’m taking round. Not the English kid or the journalist or the droopy girl, the lawyer. Didn’t do what he was told.’
    â€˜Ah.’
    â€˜I said to him, Don’t try and warn them. So of course he did. Guessed he would. That sort always have to know best.’
    Dieb cringed. All his fault! He recognised the feeling that flooded his body as if it was a leaky submarine; it was that oh-shit sensation he used to get as a young lawyer when he realised he’d failed to meet a time limit, missed out some procedural step, lost the deeds, whatever. Partly it was straightforward pain, as if his mind had been burnt and was still raw and seeping; mostly, though, it was a great gush of rage building up pressure inside him, searching for an outlet. When he’d been a young lawyer he’d hated everybody he could think of; his boss, for giving him work he wasn’t fit to do; his secretary, for not reminding him; his colleagues, for not warning him; the client, for getting him into this mess in the first place. And God, of course. When he’d been a young lawyer, Calvin Dieb had sworn a lot at God. Now that he was a middle-aged lawyer, used to having the buck screeching to a halt at his feet every day of the week, he didn’t hate anybody in particular (even now, he didn’t hate the Vikings, or the Indians, or even the squirrel). He just hated. And, of course, he got even. Usually he got even first; if he had a philosophy of life, it was huddled round the concept of pre-emptive revenge.
    It was very quiet now; either they’d gone away, or they were all standing round him in a circle, waiting for him to open his eyes. He opened them. As far as he could judge, he was on his own.
    â€˜Hello?’ he heard himself call out - Jesus, how stupid! No harm seemed to come of it, however. No more arrows, no more howling warriors, not even a chatty squirrel. It occurred to him that maybe he should go and see if any of the Vikings was still alive. If so, he could use the phone in his car to call for help, if only he could get into his car, which he couldn’t, not without the keys. Unforceable locks, unsmashable glass, an alarm that boiled your eyes in your head at forty paces; it was one of the reasons he’d gone for that particular model, the security. If only, if only he could get back inside it and raise the windows and deadlock the doors and call the National Guard and the Air Force on the phone, then everything would be all right.
    If only he could find . . .
    Survivors. There had to be survivors. With every muscle, tendon and nerve in his body clenched - except for victim photographs usable in evidence, he couldn’t stand the sight of blood - he tiptoed down towards the lakeside—
    (Oh God, what if they’ve scalped them? He didn’t actually know what scalping really involved, but he was prepared to wager relevant money that it was truly horrible.)
    And found it empty. Not a corpse. Not an arrow, or a tomahawk, or a splatter of blood. The whole scene was cleaner and tidier than a Swiss operating theatre.
    A wave of relief and a surge of panic raced simultaneously through his mind, turning it into a jacuzzi of conflicting emotions. Maybe it hadn’t happened, and nobody had been killed; in which case, he’d hallucinated it all, and he was going mad, and they’d lock him up in the funny farm and debar him from practising as a lawyer, and then the bank would foreclose on the house and his wife would be put out on the street—
    Hang on, he remembered, I haven’t got a wife. And the house is paid for, at least the town house is, and the apartment in Des Moines. The farm and the ski lodge weren’t, but as far as he was concerned they could have those and