“I don’t know what I find more troubling,” Gus said, “that you keep all this information in your database, or that it isn’t even correct. I haven’t gotten any parking tickets in the last month.”
“I’m looking at a digital copy of it on my screen right now,” Sandy said. “Apparently you told the ticketing officer that you were a doctor and you had stopped for an emergency. When she pointed out that you were parked in front of a BurgerZone franchise and were walking out eating a Triple Triple, you told her you were a doctor of burgerology and that the emergency was a sudden pickle intervention.”
“I never—” Gus broke off. He turned to glare at Shawn, who was gazing calmly out the window, as if he hadn’t heard a word of the conversation. “Did you borrow the Echo again without asking?”
“That’s a good question,” Shawn said. “If I don’t ask first, can it really be called borrowing? It’s actually much closer to theft. But since I always bring it back as soon as I’m done, technically it’s joyriding. And how can we object to any activity that brings a little joy into this cold, hard world?”
Gus had plenty of ways to object, and several of them involved clubbing Shawn about the head and neck with blunt instruments. But he was a professional, and he knew that the worst thing they could do was argue in front of the client. Or even the Associate Assistant to the client’s Assistant Associate. “Shawn will make sure to pay the ticket today. Thanks for the heads-up.”
“No problem,” Sandy said. “You can also let him know that his teeth are past due for a cleaning.”
“Oh, I’ll definitely make sure he knows about that,” Gus said.
Shawn ignored Gus’ smile and leaned into the speakerphone. “Did you say you can search your database for distinguishing physical characteristics?”
“Moles, freckles, dimples, wrink—”
“How about tattoos?”
“Words or pictures?”
“Pictures,” Shawn said. “Snakes.”
“Location?”
“Arms. Upper chest. Possibly lower chest, but we don’t know for sure.”
They could hear a keyboard rattling as Sandy typed in the information.
“Got a pencil?” she said.
According to the database, Phlegm’s real name was Jessica Higgenbotham, and she lived on a street Shawn and Gus had never heard of. When they consulted a Google map, they understood why. It was a brand-new street in a brand-new development of brand-new mansions. This seemed odd even at the time, since they couldn’t imagine either of Phlegm’s careers bringing in enough cash to pay for luxury housing. But maybe the city had demanded that the developer throw in a couple of “affordable” units, the going exchange rate for permission to erect a fleet of multimillion dollar eyesores on the area’s rapidly diminishing store of open space.
After a quick stop at city hall to pay the parking ticket, they drove up into the hills above Santa Barbara until they found a hilltop that had been carved off, leveled, and dotted with pink Mediterranean villas. They drove right through the development, assuming that the handful of lower-priced homes or apartments would be as far from the breathtaking ocean views as possible without actually being located underground. But the houses stayed just as grand all the way back, and the only people who looked like they might qualify for subsidized, affordable housing were the occasional gardeners and pool cleaners.
As they were cruising back toward the entrance, Shawn spotted a sign for Phlegm’s street, and they followed it until they reached the number AAttAA Sandy had given them. It was a sprawling, three-story Spanish. The sales brochure had probably called it a hacienda, but in style, size, and intent it was much closer to one of the original missions, designed to intimidate as much as impress.
“Boy, are we in the wrong business,” Shawn said. “If I’d only stopped using my eyes to see and started parking knives in them, we could be rich by now.”
“All we know is that this is the address Phlegm gave the casino,” Gus said. “For all we know, she just picked a street name out of the air.”
“I don’t know about you, but I’ve never breathed air that had anything like 49523 Mariposa Del Suerte floating around in it,” Shawn said. “If you’re going to make up an address, you choose something that sounds generic.”
“So maybe she used to babysit for the owners,” Gus said.
“Because she’d be such a good role model for the young ’uns,” Shawn said.
“Or she cleaned their house or delivered pizza to them or robbed the joint once,” Gus said. “Or she works for a real estate agency. There are a million ways she could have come up with this address.”
“A million and one,” Shawn said. “It could still be that she actually lives here.”
Before Gus could answer, Shawn was out of the car and halfway up the long flight of stairs that led to a heavy door, black iron studs planted firmly in old oak. Shawn lifted a ring dangling from a metal lion’s mouth and let it fall on an iron strike plate just as Gus stepped up next to him. Gus couldn’t imagine how the clank of metal on metal could even penetrate the wood, let alone be heard throughout the dozens of rooms this house must contain. But even as Shawn was reaching to clank the ring again, they heard the unmistakable sound of high heels on tile clacking toward them.
The door swung open silently and Shawn and Gus found themselves facing an elegant blond woman in her early thirties. She was dressed in St. John’s finest midrange casual business suit, her hair cascaded down over her shoulders, and the diamonds in her ears, on her ring finger, and around her neck could have purchased the Psych agency’s services well into the next millennium.
The woman stared at them, surprised. Gus realized she hadn’t come to answer their knock on her door; she was on her way out.
“Can I help you?” the woman said, but it was clear from her tone of voice that even if she had the power to assist them, she was quite certain that she would choose not to exercise it.
“Yes,” Shawn said, positioning himself directly in front of her to block her way. “I’m Shawn Spencer, manager of Santa Barbara’s finest steak house, the Dead Cow. And this is Rattus Norvegicus, my head dishwasher.”
“I don’t eat meat and I’ve never heard of your restaurant,” the woman said. “If this is some kind of promotion, I’m not interested. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for a very important meeting.”
She stepped out through the door, right where Shawn had been standing. But if he thought he was blocking her, he found himself backing away as she came toward him, as if she were projecting some kind of force field. She pulled the door closed behind her, jiggled the handle to make sure it was locked, then started toward the stairs.
“You could help save this poor man’s job,” Shawn said, pushing Gus toward her.
“I doubt it,” she said, but she hesitated. “What can he possibly have to do with me?”
“Well, you see, in the steak house trade, the chief dishwasher’s most important task is to keep track of the steak knives,” Shawn said.
“They’re very expensive,” Gus said. “You’d be surprised how many customers walk out the door with them.”
“And in last night’s count, we turned up one short,” Shawn said. “This is the third one Rattus has lost, and if he can’t account for it, that’s his job.”
The woman stared at them in disbelief. “You’re accusing me of stealing a utensil designed for food I never eat from a restaurant where I’ve never been?”
“Not exactly,” Shawn said. “We just think you might have accidentally misplaced it. You know, you meant to put it back on your plate, but instead you jammed it into your eyeball.”
Gus studied the woman’s face closely for any sign that she knew what Shawn was talking about. He might as well have been studying the iron lion holding the door knocker, for all the change he saw.
“There should be a security patrol coming through the neighborhood any minute,” she said. “Please feel free to continue trespassing on my prop
erty until they haul you away.”
She walked down two steps, then took a sharp left down a path leading to the garage. She reached into her purse and must have hit the button on a remote, because the garage door glided open silently, revealing a sparkling blue Porsche convertible and an empty space where another car would park.
“So much for that lead,” Gus said. “Now what do we do?”
“Follow her,” Shawn said. “And when we catch up to her, find out about her conversation with Chubby Dead Guy.”
“It’s not the right woman, Shawn. She gave Fleck a phony address.”
“And you say that why?”
“First of all, look at her.”
Jessica Higgenbotham was making that easy to do. She’d popped the trunk on the Porsche and was leaning in to get something.
“So she cleans up well,” Shawn said.
“And she didn’t react at all when you hit her with the knife-in-the-eyeball thing.”
“Oh, but she did,” Shawn said.
“She didn’t even blink.”
“Exactly,” Shawn said. “You mention something about eyeball injury, and that’s exactly what people do. They blink. It’s like a guy crossing his legs when you mention the concept of castration. Or fidelity.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Gus said.
“You’re probably right,” Shawn said with a sigh. “Say, did I ever tell you about the time I went fishing with my dad and this old guy down the pier from us got a hook stuck in his eyeball?”
“What does that have to do with—” Gus broke off, feeling his eyelid fluttering angrily. He slapped a hand over his eye until the blinking reflex passed. “Okay, fine. She’s immune to the eyeball thing. And there is a very slight physical resemblance in the features of her face. But the hair’s completely different, the voice is completely different, and—”
“And what?” Shawn said.
“And that.” The woman dropped her purse in the trunk, then peeled off her suit jacket, revealing a silk tank top underneath—a silk tank top and two long, bare, tanned arms.
“Quick, Gus,” Shawn snapped. “To the Psych-mobile!”
Shawn flew down the stairs and was buckled into the passenger seat before Gus got to the car door. Climbing in, Gus started up the car and slapped it into drive.
“Where to?”
Shawn pointed through the windshield at the Porsche zipping down the street. “Follow that overpriced car!”
“She’s not the same person.”
“Then you’ve got two choices,” Shawn said. “You can follow her and let me make a fool of myself, or you can call Benny Fleck and tell him his database is wrong.”
Gus didn’t take a second to think over the choices. He slammed his foot down on the gas and the Echo spurted away from the curb.
Chapter Seventeen
They followed the sports car down the steep road past downtown. As it reached the entrance to the 101 South, its blinkers flipped on and the car accelerated onto the freeway.
“Faster,” Shawn commanded. “You’re going to lose her.”
“Yes, there is that danger,” Gus said as he steered the Echo up the on-ramp. “Because it’s much harder to spot a bright blue Porsche on four lanes of open freeway than in a maze of twisting streets.”
As the ramp leveled off onto the 101, Gus pointed out the windshield. The Porsche was a handful of car lengths ahead of them and three lanes to the left.
“Do you want to tell me now why we’re following this woman, or do you want to wait until we’re actually in Los Angeles?” Gus said, eyeing the freeway sign that said they were eighty-eight miles away from the city.
“Better yet, why don’t you tell me?” Shawn said.
“Because this is your theory, not mine,” Gus said. “So you know the reason and I don’t.”
“Which is why it will be good for me to hear it coming from you,” Shawn said. “When I tell myself something, it always sounds like a good idea. When you talk I’m much more objective.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘objection able,’ ” Gus said. But he knew that Shawn wouldn’t tell him anything until he’d taken at least one solid guess. “Okay, Ms. Phlegm claimed she lived at a house she couldn’t possibly afford, so it’s definitely a fake address. But it’s not the kind of fake address you make up, so it’s got to be a house she knows. All right so far?”
“More or less,” Shawn conceded.
“And when we got to the fake address, we met a woman who couldn’t possibly be described as a human freak show, but who does bear some similarity to the one who sticks knives in her eyeballs.”
“So far so good.”
“So you have deduced that when she was filling out the cocktail waitress job application, Ms. Phlegm put down her sister’s address,” Gus said, feeling a small thrill of triumph as he put the pieces together. “And the woman we’re following, the one who looks slightly like her, is actually her sister.”
“Which means . . .”
“That we’re following the sister either in hopes that she’ll lead us to our real target, or we’re going to confront her again and make her tell us where Phlegm is hiding.”
“That’s very impressive,” Shawn said. “There’s only one little piece that’s wrong.”
“Which one?”
“Remember this morning when we stopped for coffee and you told me to go ahead and get the jelly doughnut because my hips weren’t getting fat?”
“Yes.”
“Everything after that.”
Gus glared at Shawn, but before he could say anything, Shawn shouted in his ear, “Get over.”
“If she’s going to Los Angeles, isn’t it better if we aren’t right on her tail?” Gus said, sticking happily in the right lane. “This way she doesn’t see us in her rearview, and if she wants to get off, she’s got to come over to our lane.”
“That’s if she’s going to Los Angeles,” Shawn said. “Or Ventura, or San Diego or Oxnard—or even anywhere else in Santa Barbara. But it’s not the case if she’s going—” Shawn broke off as he peered up at the car ahead.
“Going where?” Gus said.
“There!”
Shawn grabbed the wheel and shoved it to the left. The Echo flew across three lanes of traffic, barely missing an Escalade and squeezing past a school bus. When the sounds of horns blaring proved to Gus that he was still alive, he cracked open his eyelids to see the Porsche slowing down to take the one left-hand exit remaining on the entire 101 freeway, Hot Springs Road in Mon tecito. The Echo was close behind.
“How did you know she was going to do that?” Gus asked, working to get his breathing back under control.
“It’s amazing what you can figure out if you keep your eyes open while you’re driving,” Shawn said. “She’s turning left up ahead, by the way.”
“Yes, I saw the signal.”
“And then she’s going to make an immediate right,” Shawn said.
“And you know that how?”
“The same way a Martian dissolves in a tank of water,” Shawn said.
The Porsche turned left half a block ahead of them. By the time the Echo followed, the sports car had disappeared. All they could see were the high stone walls that hid the local multibillionaires on one side of the street from the mere single-billionaires on the other. But when Gus found a side street leading up to the right, he took it and saw their target right in front of them.
“If you even pretend for one second you did that with magic . . . ,” Gus warned.
“But it is magic,” Shawn said. “The magic of social climbing.”
The road jaunted to the left, and Gus saw the Porsche driving through a set of massive wrought-iron gates. A sign over the gates read LITTLE HILLS COUNTRY CLUB.
“Little Hills?” Gus marveled. “Isn’t this the most exclusive country club in the country?”
“They like to think they’re just particular,” Shawn said. “For instance, they completely repealed their ‘N
o Irish need apply’ when Ronald Reagan came back to the area to live at the ranch after his presidency.”
“Ronald Reagan wasn’t Irish,” Gus said.
“No, but his great-grandparents were,” Shawn said. “And that was a matter of great concern for the membership committee.”
The Porsche stopped briefly—almost wistfully, Gus thought—at a sign that directed members toward a parking lot on the left and guests to one on the right, then slid right into the lot.
“Now what?” Gus said as the Porsche pulled into a spot.
Shawn pointed to a narrow road paralleling the guest entrance and a small sign at its mouth reading SERVICE ONLY.
“That way.”
Gus steered the Echo down the narrow gravel road. “What are we looking for?”
“We’ll know when I see it,” Shawn said.
After a couple hundred feet, the road opened up to a plaza ringed by small, Spanish-style buildings.
“Just wait here,” Shawn said, and leapt out of the car. He ran into the open bay of what looked like the service station at the never-built Spanish Conquest Land at Dis neyworld, grabbed something off a shelf above a couple of partially disassembled golf carts, then threw himself back into the Echo’s passenger seat. “Now go, go, go!”
“What was that all about?” Gus said, throwing the car into reverse and backing down the narrow road to the junction.
“Something for snakes,” Shawn said, gesturing for Gus to drive into the guest parking lot.
As the Echo made the turn into the lot, the majesty of the Little Hills Country Club spread out in front of them. The golf course ambled over acres of real estate more valuable than anything outside Midtown Man hattan. And rising out of the emerald sward was the clubhouse, a Spanish castle that looked like Papa Bear to the ursine Baby that was the Higgenbotham house. Gus pulled into a space a couple of rows behind the Porsche. “Now what?”
Psych: Mind Over Magic Page 16
