The Dead Reckoner Volume One: Absolution and Desolation

someone rummaging through drawers and hoped it was Norman Shaw. Instead she found a man about her age, dressed in cargo pants and a white tee. He was indeed opening drawers and looking through them. When he sensed her entrance, he stopped what he was doing and looked up at her. Ruth saw that he was handsome, but wore a bad close-cropped haircut. It looked like he'd given it to himself.

  “Hi.” he said.

  “Yes.” said Ruth. “Hello.”

  “I'm looking for the key.” The man turned to a translucent plastic lock box hanging on the wall between two green metal filing cabinets. “For this.”

  Ruth noticed that a row of dials were inside the box and said, “You want to turn down the heat?”

  “Yeah.” he said, and came around the desk to stand about two feet from her. “Do you know where the key is?”

  “I was looking for Norman Shaw, the chapter chairperson? He probably turned it up in the first place. I'm pretty sure he's got the key.”

  “With him? Really? Well, where can we find him?” The man gestured toward the hall with an open hand. “These kids can't compete like this.”

  “I agree.” Ruth pulled out her phone and opened the Sorter app. There was the other point marked on the map again, not too far from where they stood.

  “What's that?”

  Well it's the damn Sorter, that's what, thought Ruth. It was something trying to convince her that a man who spent all his spare hours helping mentally disabled children achieve their athletic goals was some kind of psychotic. And just what kind? Homicidal? Or just a little bit tense?

  “I...” she started. Ruth didn't know what to say. There was at least one excuse she could always fall back on. “I'm a cop. I'm Detective Ruth Holland. But that's not why I'm here. My son's in the gym with the others.”

  “Okay.” The man stuck out a hand. “John Smith. My sister, Alice, also competes. So that thing tracks Norman's phone or something?”

  Ruth shook John's extended hand. He had a nice firm grip.

  “Yes, let's go see if we can scare him up.”

  The two left the office and stopped short in the hall. They looked at each other and each knew what the other was thinking. That oily smell Ruth had noticed before was much stronger now. She lead John to the door between the trophy cases and they opened it. A set of bare wooden steps lead from the door into the depths of a monstrous room with a few windows at the top. Gigantic boilers turned on their sides lined the room's back wall. It looked to Ruth like the pictures she'd seen of the Titanic's engine room.

  John said, “Man this place is old. Look at this. But we gotta go.”

  “You think it's dangerous?”

  John pointed at the floor, where there was a growing slick of oil. He pulled her back through the doorway.

  He said, “It looks like there's a leak. A lot of it's spilled already. This place is a fire trap. I'm not kidding, Detective Holland. I really think we ought to play it safe and get everyone out of here.”

  “Can we pull the emergency shut off?”

  “Alright, let's pull the fire alarm and look for the shut off.”

  “I've got to get back to my son.” said Ruth. “And if I'm in there I can help them evacuate. I'll call it in while I'm on my way.”

  “Ok, I'll stay here and find the shut off. Even if that puddle catches fire, it's not like it's going to explode. I'll wait five minutes and pull the alarm, so you can find your kid before all hell is loose.”

  Ruth nodded. “Sounds like a plan. And your sister? Alice? I can make sure she gets out safely.”

  “Yeah, Alice Smith. She competes in badminton. Thanks, Detective.”

  Ruth hurried back down the hall and into the gymnasium. She ran toward the judo group, but even while a few dozen feet away she noticed he was gone. Jason was gone. Ruth grabbed the coach by the shoulder and demanded to know where her son was.

  “He wanted to go to his locker to get his belt.”

  She had told him that she would get it, but the boy had run off anyway. It was unlike him to wander away, but she had to admit that to him these were special circumstances. This was a safe place in his mind. It was his school and he was competing here with his friends. Besides, as his one and only parent, Ruth did have a habit of forgetting things. Jason understood that there was just so much to get done in the day and that sometimes he had to fend for himself. Ruth had to admit that this would not have have been the first time she'd promised to retrieve something important to him which she then forgot about. Nonetheless, she was angry about the lapse in supervision.

  “And you let him go?” she said.

  The coach shrugged. “This is his school. I figured...”

  She didn't stay to hear the rest of it. Ruth returned to the halls, trying to remember Jason's locker number. He'd told her because he was thrilled when they assigned it to him. It was a special number. 314. That's right, it was 314, the first few digits of pi. Ruth stopped. The locker was on the third floor. Ruth barreled through the doors to the stairway and started up. It was a good thing she was in excellent shape. She made short work of the stairs, but when she reached the top landing she heard the alarm go off.

  Ruth told herself that didn't matter. There was still no smell of fire. John had probably found the emergency shut off. The coaches and other organizers could help the kids get outside. All Ruth had to do was find Jason. It was easy to do so in the empty hall. He was the only person up there, way at the end. He was dressed in his white judo uniform. He'd found his orange belt and tied it around his waist. Now Jason was standing in the middle of hallway, hands over his ears and screaming like – well, like Edvard Munch's The Scream.

  Once more, Detective Holland was running. She should've expected to find him like this. Jason was a high functioning autistic boy. He went to school with his chronological peers and performed well, sometimes above average. His disorder, if one wished to call it that, manifested in his obsessions, solitude, and clumsy personal engagement. It also came out when there were loud noises. Jason wasn't afraid of them, but he was especially sensitive to them. They felt to him like a knife through the head.

  Ruth met up with Jason and spared him the lecture about setting off on his own. She grabbed his arm, still bent to keep his hand over his ear, and dragged him back toward the stairwell. Then it happened again. The Sorter. What could it want from her now? With one hand she towed Jason and with the other she unlocked her phone. The warning was blinking bright red at her now.

  NORMAN SHAW. POTENTIAL PSYCHOTIC RISK. DANGER FACTOR: HIGH

  The map showed that she was very close to Shaw, maybe a few feet away. She realized that one thing this map could not represent was height. Norman could be on any floor. Ruth stopped and twisted her neck from one side to the other. There was a figure inside one of the classrooms. It was standing with its back turned to her. Ruth considered this for a moment. That had to be Norman. Was he up to something? How was she supposed to approach him? And with her son beside her?

  Something else was wrong too. Jason noticed it first. Without saying anything, he pulled one hand away from his head long enough to tug at his mother. He pointed at the door. Ruth smelled it before she saw it. Smoke. Lazy billows flowed through the crack underneath the door. Ruth wasn't going to open those doors. She knew what she was going to find. It was better to seek another way out now.

  She took her chances with the figure in the classroom. There was no time to think about this. Ruth barged in and the man turned his head. It was indeed Norman Shaw. Then he turned his body. In his hands he carried a pistol. Ruth backed away.

  “I'm sorry.” said Norman.

  He stood near a desk at the head of the classroom. Sitting on the desk was a disk about three inches in diameter. It was composed of four rings concentric around a circle. Eyes printed along the edges of each ring stared at them. Under each eye stood a number or letter.

  ??
?Norman?” said Ruth. “Norman, I don't care what you're doing here, but we have to go. This building is on fire.”

  “I know.” he said. He was calm. Norman lifted the disk and that put the rings in motion. The eyes on the inner rings orbited the center, one row clockwise and another counterclockwise and the last clockwise again. As the spun they click clicked like a roulette wheel. The letters lit up and blinked from red to black as they spun. “I pried open the service valve and busted the emergency shut off.”

  The wheels and their eyes stopped spinning. The letters were a jumble, but Ruth's gaze fell on a group of them no frozen in red. They spelled the word “Unconditional”.

  Norman said, “It keeps coming up that way.”

  He put the device back on the desk and stepped closer with his weapon. It was clear that this is what the Sorter had been trying to warn her about. Ruth didn't have time to consider what was going on inside Norman's head, why he would endanger the lives of so many kids he seemed to care so much about. None of that mattered. She turned the door knob. Jason, with all of his significant weight, pulled her backward through the doorway.

  “I'm going now.” she said. “Norman, you should come with us.”

  “It's like it programmed me.” he said. “They made me take the test. They let the Sorter peer inside of me. And it told me things, Ruth. It told me things that I just couldn't hear.”

  Norman raised