William Rabkin - Psych - A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read

“How long?”

“Remember Titanic?”

“Sure.”

“About that long.”

“That was only four hours,” Gus said. “She hit me before lunch.”

“Sorry,” Shawn said. “How long it felt.”

“Oh, my God.”

Tara kneeled down next to the couch and took Gus’ free hand. “It was a long, long night, and a longer morning,” she said. “But Shawn was with you every minute of that time.”

“And now we’re going to get the guy who did this to you,” Shawn said.

“The impound attendant?”

“Exactly. He’s hiding something, and he thought he could scare us away by waving his shotgun at us.”

“Actually, I think he thought he could scare us away by killing us,” Gus said.

“Either way, he was wrong. And we’re going to take him down.”

“Did the police find out anything?”

“The police?” Shawn said. “What do they have to do with anything?”

“Didn’t you call them to say he’d tried to kill us?”

“So they could bungle the case the way they did with Veronica Mason’s?” Shawn asked. “This guy is ours, and we’re going to make sure he pays for what he did. We’re going to spend every minute of every day uncovering his criminal conspiracy. We’re never going to stop until-Hey!” Shawn shoved the newspaper at Gus, pointing at a small boxed headline in the bottom right corner. “Look at that.”

Gus focused on a small headline that read “Local Businessman to Invest in Area, details page six.”

“Way to focus, Captain Attention Span,” Gus said.

“Just look,” Shawn said.

Gus managed to stretch his arms far enough apart to open the paper to the correct page. At least it was the page indicated by the tease. All Gus saw was a large ad promising that the junior partner in a major mattress company would commit suicide if he were forced to sell his stock at the insanely low prices his senior colleague had promised.

“‘You’re killing me, Larry?’” Gus read.

“Oh, we’re killing him all right-but Larry’s got nothing to do with it.” Shawn pointed to a small article running directly under the mattress chain’s generous delivery policy.

“‘A venture capitalist has pledged to invest several billion dollars in the Santa Barbara economy, helping local companies compete on a national playing field,’” Gus read.

“Keep reading.”

“‘Santa Barbara native Dallas Steele, who spent the last ten years as the managing partner of a New York investment bank-’” Gus stopped. “Dallas Steele? From high school?”

“Check the photo,” Shawn said.

Gus peered down at the tiny article. There was nothing but type. “There is no photo.”

“Exactly!”

Lost, Gus dropped the paper and stared at Shawn’s beaming face. Tara beamed beside him. “I don’t get it,” he said.

“No, he didn’t get it and we did,” Shawn said. “That jerk Dallas Steele comes swaggering back into town-”

“I don’t remember him being a jerk.”

“That’s the brain damage talking,” Shawn said.

“You said there was no brain da-”

“He was the biggest phony at Santa Barbara High,” Shawn said. “With his perfect hair and perfect GPA and perfect football season and perfect girlfriend.”

Tara looked confused. “He doesn’t sound phony to me. He sounds like the real thing.”

“That’s the worst kind of phony. The genuine kind.”

“You’re right,” Tara said. “No wonder you hated him.”

“He was always nice to me,” Gus said. “I mean, when you tried to rent me to the football team as a tackling dummy, he talked me out of it.”

“Depriving you of badly needed income, to say nothing of extra PE credit,” Shawn said. “And all so he could say he’d helped out some geeky loser.”

“He never called me a loser.”

“Everyone called you a loser, Gus,” Shawn said. “It was the parachute pants. Anyway, there’s only one loser now, and that’s international phony Dallas Steele.”

“It says here he’s a multibillionaire.”

“And he’s still not happy,” Shawn said. “He’s got to come back to Santa Barbara and lord it over us all. And that might have worked, if it wasn’t for us meddling kids. We knocked him right off the front page. He’s probably sitting in some palatial estate right now, leafing forlornly through today’s paper, wondering exactly how his high school nemeses Shawn Spenser and Burton Guster bested him.”

Shawn held up his hand for a high five. Gus tried to reach up for it, but his arm wouldn’t rise above his rib cage. He didn’t really understand why he was supposed to be fiving, anyway. Dallas Steele was a billionaire investor, and Gus had spent the last day in a near-vegetative state because he couldn’t scrape up the cash to ransom his company car.

“And just think how he’ll feel when he reads that we’ve crushed a criminal conspiracy that reaches into the highest levels of Santa Barbara society,” Shawn said triumphantly. “We may even take out some of his neighbors.”

Gus wasn’t sure that people in Steele’s economic bracket actually had neighbors, except in the way astronomers discuss neighboring galaxies. But that didn’t seem as important as the other question banging against his skull. “What conspiracy is that?”

“The phony impound man,” Shawn said. “We know he’s a criminal. We know he’s hiding something.”

“That doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy reaching into the highest levels of Santa Barbara society,” Gus said. “Maybe he’s a loner. Or maybe his partners are even lower down than he is.”

“You can’t have the ultimate bad guy being some poor schmuck,” Shawn said. “Your really good villains are the wealthy elite.”

“You were watching another Law and Order marathon when I was unconscious, weren’t you?”

“That has nothing to do with it,” Shawn said. “You want your hero to go up against the entrenched power structure, a lone knight in dented armor tilting at the windmills of wealth and influence in what’s supposed to be a class-free America.”

“Didn’t we just free the widow of a multimillionaire by scamming a confession out of a woman wearing Wal-Mart’s bargain line?”

“Is that a trick question?”

Gus was spared answering by the arrival of a nurse, who shooed Shawn and Tara out of the room. After a moment she was joined by a doctor, who gave Gus a quick once-over and approved his release. Gus spent the next fifteen minutes filling out insurance paperwork and the following forty-five coaxing his fingers into bending sufficiently to button his shirt. At least it was a fresh shirt. Sometime in the night Shawn must have stopped by Gus’ place and picked up a change of clothes for him.

When an orderly wheeled him to the hospital’s front door, Shawn and Tara were waiting by her red Mercedes. They kept waiting as he made his way across the sidewalk. Each step was an agonizing ordeal, as he forced stiffened and bruised muscles to contract and relax. After what felt like another hour, he made it over to them.

“Tara’s offered to take you home, bud,” Shawn said.

“It’s the least I can do. If there’s anything else, please let me know.”

“Thanks, but you don’t have to,” Gus said. “You’ve already done so much.”

“Anyone would have done the same thing.”

“For a complete stranger? I don’t think so.”

“Well, we’re not strangers anymore,” Tara said. “I’d like you to think of me as your friend.”

“Works for me,” Shawn said.

“In that case, there is one thing I’d like to do before I go home,” Gus said, gritting his teeth against the pain. “If you wouldn’t mind driving back up that hill, I want to see the man who really is responsible. And put an end to his criminal enterprise, no matter how high or low it reaches.”