William Rabkin - A Fatal Frame of Mind

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Kitteredge said. “You’ve got to let me go.”

“Don’t do it!” Lassiter shouted.

“You won’t get far,” O’Hara said. “Every police officer in this city will be looking for you.”

“At least this way I have a chance to find out the truth before they get me,” Kitteredge said.

Lassiter stared at O’Hara, mentally sending the order for her to shoot. Astonishingly, she managed to ignore it. Instead, she did the one thing Lassiter dreaded more than anything else in the world. She nodded.

Then she held up a hand to the officers. “Weapons down,” she commanded. Some of the officers complied immediately. Others just stared at her, keeping their guns leveled at Kitteredge. “I said weapons down!” she said. “Now!”

This time there was no questioning her intent. The other officers stood down.

“Let him go and run,” O’Hara said.

“Other way around,” Kitteredge said. “I take him with me, and I leave him in a safe place once I know I’m not being followed.”

“Don’t do this, Detective,” Lassiter said.

She thought it over for a moment, then nodded again. “If anything happens to him-”

“Then you’d better find the moles in your own department,” Kitteredge said. “Because I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

He took a step toward the front door, then stopped, waiting to see if anyone was going to come for him. But the police officers were frozen in place. He took another step, dragging Lassiter with him, then moved swiftly toward the front door. He kicked it open and disappeared through it.

“Okay,”Shawn said as Gus piloted the Echo back to the Psych office. “From now on, we’re going to have a few rules. To start with, I choose the evening’s entertainment.”

“We didn’t go to the museum for fun,” Gus said automatically. He had no interest in the conversation, but he knew if Shawn didn’t receive a response he’d keep repeating his original statement until he did, or until they were both dead. “We went on a case.”

“That’s rule number two,” Shawn said. “I choose our clients, too.”

A dozen different arguments flashed through Gus’ brain. He could, for instance, have pointed out the times Shawn had agreed to take on a client who turned out to be guilty. Or the instances when Gus had brought in a case that turned into a great success for the agency.

But Gus didn’t have any strength left for arguing. He barely had any strength left at all. If it hadn’t been for the Echo’s power-assisted steering he might have simply kept going straight down Santa Barbara Street until he’d driven into the ocean.

It wasn’t just the fact that they’d been up for more than twenty-four hours that had sucked all the energy out of him. Although it wasn’t as easy as it had been when they were teens, Gus and Shawn still routinely pulled all-nighters when they were working on a case. And it wasn’t the grueling interrogation they’d received from Detective O’Hara after she’d allowed Kitteredge to escape with her partner as a hostage, or even the huge sense of relief when Lassiter had been found half an hour later locked in the trunk of a stolen patrol car, furious but unharmed and definitely alive.

What had worn Gus out so completely was his sense of utter failure. Professor Kitteredge had reached out to him, reached out to the one person he had thought could help him, even though they barely knew each other. And not only had Gus been unable to help; he had stood by as things had gotten immeasurably worse for his old professor. Gus didn’t know exactly what Kitteredge had wanted help with, but whatever it was it couldn’t have been as bad as his current problem. He was a wanted fugitive, hunted not only for a cold-blooded murder but for taking hostage a Santa Barbara police detective. His career was ruined, his life changed forever-that is, if he managed to survive this day. Santa Barbara’s police were professional above all else, but when they were chasing a criminal who’d dared hold a knife to one of their own, Gus knew that following the letter of the law would not seem as important as bringing down the felon.

“Rule number three is a no-brainer,” Shawn said after checking to make sure that Gus was actually awake to hear him. “No cases that require formal wear.”

Gus briefly considered responding to that, but he decided to allocate all his available strength to turning the steering wheel sufficiently to execute the right turn that would head them in the general direction of their office.

“Now, rule number four might seem a little controversial at first,” Shawn said. “But when you think it over, I’m sure you realize it makes sense. If you ever get French fries when we break for food on a case, you have to give me two for every one you eat, even if I’ve got my own order. And if there are any soggy fries in my bag, you have to let me trade them for your crispy ones at a rate of three of your crispies for every one of my limps.”

Of all the rules Shawn had laid down, that struck Gus as the one that he’d most likely insist on, ludicrous as it sounded. If he didn’t object now, he knew, Shawn would not only bring it up on every case they worked in the future, but find ways to build on it so that he’d be entitled to every bit of food Gus ever ordered. Still, he couldn’t get up the energy to argue. “Whatever,” he said.

Shawn eyed him suspiciously. “You’re making this too easy,” he said.

“You could stop,” Gus said.

“When I’m getting everything I want?” Shawn said. “Like that’s going to happen. I haven’t even gotten to the most important rule yet.”

Gus didn’t know what that rule was going to be, but he knew his partner well enough to imagine. No doubt Shawn was going to insist that Gus donate all his income from his pharmaceuticals sales route to Psych, or demand that Gus call him “sir” whenever they were in public, or let Shawn use his legs as a pillow if he got sleepy on a stakeout.

If he’d had any more energy, Gus might have once again muttered “Whatever.” Instead, he shrugged. Let Shawn make any rule that amused him. They’d be in force only as long as Gus stayed with Psych, and after tonight’s fiasco he wasn’t sure how much longer he wanted that to be. He’d been playing at private detective for a few years now, and he’d been having fun. He’d even done a pretty good job from time to time.

But now he saw that whatever successes they’d had were nothing more than luck. He clearly had no idea what he was actually doing, and when his luck ran out he had no way to compensate for it. People got hurt. Maybe people even got killed, all because they trusted in him.

“Okay, here it comes,” Shawn said. “The most important rule of all. The one that’s going to change Psych forever, whether we like it or not.”

“Why?” Gus was surprised that his tongue had bothered to form the syllable, but apparently some of his reflexes were even more powerful than his exhaustion.

“Why what?”

“Why will it change Psych forever, whether we like it or not?” Gus said. “There’s no one at Psych besides us, so if we don’t like one of your rules, we can simply ignore it.”

“You can’t just ignore rules,” Shawn said.

“You do it all the time,” Gus said. “And when I hesitate before breaking a rule, you get mad at me.”

“That’s completely different,” Shawn said. “Those are other people’s rules. Man-made rules. I’m talking about the laws that are set out by the universe, like gravity or entropy or the way it’s impossible to get the last bits out of a shampoo bottle no matter how hard you shake it.”

“Okay, fine,” Gus said. “Let’s have it.”