Psych: A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read p-1

by William Rabkin

  Gus poked his head between a rusted-out Accord and a newer Sonata. He was almost back to the shack. The ring now was loud and clear, but there was no one around. Gus crawled forward and froze. Now he realized where the ringing was coming from.

  Gus reached up into the open window of his own beloved blue Echo and flipped open the glove compartment. He pulled out Shawn’s ringing cell phone and flipped it open.

  “Shawn!” Henry Spencer’s voice nearly took Gus’ head off.

  Gus glanced up to see that Shawn had made it over to the Echo. He handed him the phone.

  “It’s for you,” Gus said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “ She tased me! And then she did this.”

  Henry pushed Shawn through the front door into his house. Gus followed, stunned at the damage. The table and floor were covered with the charred, soaked remains of hundreds of photographs. A thick coating of ashy soup covered the hardwood; ashes clung to every surface. The smell of burning chemicals hung in the air.

  Shawn studied the scene carefully. “She burned all your pictures?”

  “They’re not my pictures,” Henry said. “They belonged to a client.”

  “Really, a client?” Shawn said. “Is that what you call the old folks you do your little hobby for?”

  Henry leveled an accusing finger at this son. “Aha!”

  “‘Aha’?” Shawn said. “I don’t see an ‘aha’ here. Gus, do you see an ‘aha’?”

  “I see a big mess,” Gus said. “I’m not getting much in the way of ‘aha’.”

  Henry’s accusatory finger didn’t move. “She said you were embarrassed by my scrapbooking. That you thought it made me look like an old lady.”

  “Look, I said she’s crazy. I didn’t say she was stupid.”

  Henry grabbed Shawn and dragged him over to the wreckage on the table. “This is really funny to you, isn’t it?”

  Gus couldn’t look at Shawn. If he did, he knew they’d both burst into giggles. Not because they didn’t take this seriously. When Henry had picked them up outside the impound lot, his muscles still twitching slightly from the electric shock, his skin pale, and his eyes red, they were both terrified that something awful had happened. And when he demanded they come with him without saying anything except “your friend stopped by,” they jumped into the truck without a question. Gus knew how guilty Shawn must feel about Tara’s assault on his father; he felt guilty himself, even though he couldn’t figure out any way in which he was more than fractionally responsible.

  But Gus and Shawn had been getting called on the carpet together for decades now, and the pattern was always the same. It didn’t matter how seriously they took their scolding or how much they feared their punishment. If they looked at each other, they’d start laughing. And while they could sometimes manage to hold off the giggling fit until the lecture was done, as soon as anyone told them that the situation wasn’t funny, they were lost.

  “Of course not, Dad,” Shawn said. “Not the part about her shooting you with a stun gun, anyway. I hate to think how much that must have hurt.”

  That was a small lie, Gus knew. They both welcomed the thought of Henry’s pain, since it was the only thing that was keeping them from bursting into inappropriate and unintended laughter.

  “If we’d ever thought she’d come to see you, we would have called with a warning,” Gus said.

  “She did this because you wanted her to.”

  “No!”

  “So you didn’t want me to stop scrapbooking?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Shawn said. “I’d like to see you maintain some dignity.”

  “Like when I was lying helpless on the floor, my muscles twitching uncontrollably?”

  “Maybe a little more dignity than that,” Shawn conceded.

  “I don’t know what’s more disturbing,” Henry said. “The fact that there’s a lunatic out there acting out your deepest desires, or that you have so little respect for me that you don’t trust me to live my own life.”

  “It’s a tough call, but I’m going to go with the lunatic,” Shawn said. “Gus?”

  “Lunatic, definitely,” Gus said.

  “A lunatic you just happened to tell what an embarrassment your old man is.”

  “I never did that,” Shawn said.

  “Then how did she know?” Henry demanded. “She read your mind?”

  “You know, there’s a really funny thing about that,” Shawn said. “She thinks she did.”

  “Tara believes that Shawn is beaming her orders psychically,” Gus said.

  Henry stared at Shawn, his anger momentarily eclipsed by disbelief. “She what?”

  “It’s true,” Shawn said. “I thought it made her happy to help out. You know, the way some people claim to like picking up litter or helping the homeless or standing outside supermarkets trying to get me to sign petitions. Anyway, it turns out that Tara thinks she’s my psychic mind slave.”

  “Oh, Shawn.” Henry thought wistfully back on the days when he could lift his son over his knee and paddle some sense into him. “I told you this psychic nonsense would bring nothing but trouble.”

  “It’s brought me a lot besides trouble,” Shawn said. “This time it just happened to drop a little trouble along the way.”

  “And the second she told you this, what did you do?” Henry said. “Did you take her to a doctor? Bring her to the police so they could hold her for psychiatric evaluation? Try to ease her out of her delusion?”

  “Well-”

  Henry’s hands were twitching again. Gus wasn’t sure if it was the aftereffects of the stun gun or sheer rage.

  “No, let me guess. You took advantage of her mental illness and used her as a servant. Just like you take advantage of everybody.”

  “I don’t take advantage of people,” Shawn said. “Do I, Gus?”

  “Yes, Gus, go ahead and tell him.”

  Gus stared down at the ground. It was a trick he’d been trying since he was three-ignore the problem and wait for it to go away. It hadn’t worked yet, but Gus was hoping this time might be the charm.

  “He can’t do it, Shawn. Because he knows the truth-you’ve been taking advantage of him for years.”

  Shawn looked shocked at the accusation. “I don’t take advantage of Gus.”

  “It just always works out that you get whatever you want no matter what it costs him.”

  “Yeah, it works out that way,” Shawn said. “No, wait. It doesn’t always work that way. I do lots of things for Gus.”

  “Name one.”

  “I kept him from going to Guatemala with the chess club, because I knew his delicate system couldn’t handle all those Latin American germs.”

  “And because you didn’t want to be alone for two weeks.”

  “So it was a win-win,” Shawn said. He turned to Gus. “Come on, Gus, tell him he’s crazy.”

  It’s amazing how much detail you can see in the plainest of wood floors if you really look, Gus thought. The pattern of the grain was so interesting he couldn’t bear to lift his eyes from it.

  “Gus?” Shawn was pleading now.

  Henry fixed Shawn with a piercing stare. “You use people, Shawn. You manipulate them, and you take advantage of them. Most people don’t mind too much, because you’re a fun guy to be around. But this time you’ve used a terribly sick person, and it’s got consequences.”

  For a moment, it looked like Shawn was going to argue. But before the first words were out of his mouth, he saw the look on his father’s face and reconsidered.

  “I don’t think I treat people all that badly,” Shawn said. “But I’ll concede I might have made a mistake with Tara. What I took to be an adorable eccentricity turned out to be a psychotic compulsion, and if I had realized that earlier, I probably could have saved us all a lot of trouble.”

  “Us all?”

  “Well, you more than me,” Shawn admitted.

  “That’s a beginning.” Henry patted Shawn on the shoulder,
then picked up one of the less charred file boxes from the floor and handed it to him. “This is a better one.”

  Shawn stared at the soggy mass of charred cardboard. “That’s a box.”

  “More precisely, it’s an empty box. At least it is until you get busy cleaning this mess into it. Then it will be a full box.”

  “I’ve got to find Tara,” Shawn said.

  “Yes, you do,” Henry said. “But first you need to restore my house to the way it was before she showed up here.”

  “Couldn’t we just burn the rest of it down? It’ll be faster.”

  Henry picked up another box and handed it to Gus. “He’s going to get you to do most of the work anyway. You might as well start now.”

  Gus didn’t bother to argue. He took the box and started dumping sodden photos into it.

  “And while we’re cleaning up your house, what are you going to do?” Shawn said.

  “I’m going to sit in my chair and watch you work,” Henry said. “And when I’m done enjoying that, I’m going to try to figure out what I can tell the Perths.”

  Shawn picked up a stack of prints, each one of the happy couple sitting on their living room couch and staring straight into the camera.

  “Maybe you can tell them that something interesting finally happened to them.”

  Henry scowled at his son, then headed for the armchair in a far corner. But just as he settled in, there was a knock at the door. All three men froze.

  “She’s back,” Gus said.

  “What do we do?” Shawn said.

  Henry pulled himself out of the chair. “I don’t know what you two brave souls are going to do, but I’m going to answer the door.”

  “What if it’s Tara?” Shawn whispered.

  “Then you can send her a psychic order to commit herself to the nearest nut hatch.” Henry walked to the door and threw it open.

  His first thought was that someone had left a mannequin on his porch as a joke. The man was frozen absolutely still, one hand outstretched in retreat from the door it had just knocked on. After a brief moment, the man seemed to come to life, the hand retreating mechanically to his side.

  Henry glanced back over his shoulder. “Shawn,” he said, “this has got to be for you.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The ride through the mountains to Eagle’s View seemed even longer than it had before. The first time Gus had spent most of the drive terrified at the probability that he was being chauffeured by a psychopath. Looking back, that seemed like such a small problem, on a level with being caught reading under the covers with a flashlight or attracting the attention of the mean kids from first grade or all the other things that used to send him into a panic when he was six.

  Now Gus realized that there was a great advantage to having a psychotic stalker as your driver: You didn’t have to worry about where she was or what she might be doing.

  As Shepler piloted the car mechanically through the hairpin curves, Gus tried to keep his mind on the possibility that Steele’s assistant might slip into one of his mind-freeze moments just as they rounded a switch-back, and send them plummeting hundreds of feet to a fiery death. But as with most of Gus’ attempts to keep a cheery thought in the face of imminent disaster, the appealing notion of dying kept being replaced by the more troubling image of what Tara might be doing now.

  It was an issue he’d tried to raise with Shawn when Shepler first showed up at Henry Spencer’s door. Shawn, not surprisingly, had seen his arrival as a reprieve from the onerous task of cleaning up his father’s house. Of course he tried to hide that fact from Henry by insisting he was motivated only by his fiduciary duty to a man who’d entrusted him with an investment fund of one hundred million dollars. And that started an entirely different argument.

  “Please tell me that this is another attempt to cheat your way to the world Monopoly championship,” Henry said.

  “First of all, that wasn’t cheating,” Shawn said, jumping back into an argument that had reached an armistice fourteen years ago as if they’d been in the middle of it when Shepler knocked on the door. “I was going to bring the concept of monopolization to Monopoly itself. If I’d been successful, it would have changed the game forever.”

  “Whatever,” Henry said. “It’s a silly game for silly children, and nothing a grown man should be wasting his time on.”

  “As opposed to say, cutting out pictures and gluing them into albums?” Shawn said.

  “I’m preserving my clients’ precious memories, and if you think that’s a waste of time, I feel sorry for you,” Henry said.

  “And I’m being paid to invest Dallas Steele’s money,” Shawn said. “Maybe you can feel sorry for me about that, too.”

  “Technically speaking, we’re not getting paid,” Gus said. “Not until we show a profit.”

  “If I wanted to speak technically, I would have chosen a profession that required some actual knowledge,” Shawn said.

  “Maybe that might have paid some actual money,” Gus said.

  There was a discreet throat clearing from the front door. Shepler stood at the doorstep like a vampire waiting for an invitation into the house. “Mr. Steele has a small window available and would very much like to speak with the two of you.”

  “I’d think in that monstrosity of a house he’d have every size window you could think of,” Shawn said. “How did you find us here anyway?”

  “Is that how you talk to a man who entrusts you with one hundred million dollars?” Henry said.

  “This isn’t that man,” Shawn said. “And how would you talk to someone who gave me a hundred million dollars?”

  “First I’d make sure his straitjacket was on securely,” Henry said.

  “Oh, well, as long as we’re speaking respectfully,” Shawn said.

  Gus glanced at his watch. He figured that Shawn and Henry could keep going at each other for at least another three minutes, which was fine with him. He needed the time to figure out what they should do.

  The first choice was easy-they could go with Shepler. After all, Steele had entrusted them with a huge responsibility, and if he wanted to meet, it seemed ungenerous to refuse. It was disconcerting to have Shepler simply arrive with a summons, Gus had to admit, but he’d never met a multibillionaire before. Maybe that was how they did things.

  Still, Gus didn’t like to think that Steele could send his minion for them whenever he wanted, and they’d be expected to jump. Even ignoring the question of just how Shepler had tracked them down to Henry’s house, there was the issue of the precedent this would set. If they agreed to come now, would that say that they’d be available for Steele no matter what they were doing? What if they were in the middle of a case? What if they were undercover? What if they were tracking a dangerous suspect?

  And that was what was really troubling Gus. They weren’t tracking a dangerous suspect, and they should be. Tara was somewhere out there planning to enforce some twisted version of Shawn’s desires, which was a truly terrifying thought once you considered how twisted Shawn’s own version of Shawn’s desires could be. She was a monster they had helped to create, and it was their responsibility to track her down and put her back in a cage. Beyond that, someone had taken half a dozen shots at them, and that seemed like something that could use some investigating.

  Unfortunately, by the time he’d come to this realization, Shawn was already halfway to Shepler’s car and Henry was yelling after him, “This mess is going to be here when you get back!”

  Gus gave Henry an apologetic smile along with the half-filled box of charred photos and ran after Shawn.

  As soon as Henry’s house had disappeared from the Bentley’s rear window, Gus tried to make Shawn share his urgency. “We have got to make this meeting short,” he said. “We’ve got to find Tara.”

  “What’s the hurry?” Shawn said. “Odds are she’ll find us sooner or later.”

  “The hurry is what she might do in that time between sooner and later.”

&nb
sp; “She’s only doing what she thinks I want, right?” Shawn said. “It’s not like she’s going to kill anybody.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Shawn thought about that. “I think I’d remember if I sent her psychic orders to commit murder.”

  “You mean you did order her to tase your dad?”

  “Not exactly,” Shawn said. “But I’m pretty sure I was complaining about his ridiculous scrapbook hobby at least one time she was driving us around.”

  “And who else were you complaining about?” Gus said. “What are we going to do to protect all those people?”

  Shawn glanced out the rear window as the car began the long slow ascent up the mountains. “For the moment, nothing.”

  Gus couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “She’s already beaten one guy into the hospital.”

  “If you can call him a guy,” Shawn said. “What kind of man is going to be taken out by a girl?”

  “And she set your father’s house on fire.”

  “For which the neighborhood-improvement committee will probably give her a medal.”

  “Do you think this is funny?”

  “Not Monty Python funny, but maybe Brady Bunch funny. You know, no big laughs, but a wry smile, a warm chuckle, and that nod of recognition that we’re all riders in the same cockeyed caravan of life.”

  Shawn glanced out the back window again. Gus wanted to grab his face and force Shawn to look at him. Pretending it was all a joke wasn’t going to make this any less serious.

  “Then let’s not think about her innocent victims for a minute,” Gus said, forcing his voice to stay calm. “Let’s think about us. The police know she beat up that BurgerZone kid, and if they don’t know what she did to your father, they will soon. If she acts again now that we know what she’s doing, they will come after us.”

  Shawn glanced out the rear window again. “So that’s what you’re so worried about? That Tara’s going to do something awful before we can stop her?”