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It may be in poor taste, but Shawn blames the baby.
There’s better people to blame: Lassie, Jules, Ricky Gervais, Shawn’s dad, the kidnapper-- Shawn never likes to think poorly of his mother for anything, especially not so recently after she narrowly escaped Mr(s). Yang, but he could blame her too.
For the first time, Shawn is considering that not doing something sometimes sucks just as bad as doing something. Either Mom or Dad could have told Shawn that she was in town, not even for a business trip or conference, just for a personal visit to a friend getting divorced! Neither of them did. Which is worse: Mom, who didn’t reach out to tell him, or Dad, who lied about who he was picking up from the airport.
Or is Shawn the worst of the three for not picking up the signs?
No. No, this time it isn’t about him, is it? For all that Shawn wants attention and adoration from any dumpster he can scrape his tongue across, this time the only connection he has is the one he should have seen when he was seventeen and his mom left and his dad’s response was to keep a tally each month of if Shawn got into less trouble when grounded or in the drunk tank at the station. This time, it was about keeping Shawn out. And they did it. Big win for the Spencer parents.
So who could blame Shawn for dropping off a quick little ‘change of emergency contact’ form at the station! And if he overheard Chief Vick raising hell about a missing person’s case, who could blame him for listening and cataloging the details! And once he had those details, who could blame him for trying to get Gus to work the case with him!
“It’s Chief Vick’s babysitter, and she’s convinced the kid is missing even though nobody at the station believes her!” Shawn shouts over the din of Gus switching out his office slippers for work loafers. “She’d let us on the case if we breathed near it. Plus, my psychic vibes are going wee-wee-wonkers on this one.”
“Vibes don’t pay bills, Shawn,” Gus says as he throws a smart-looking cardigan over his dress jacket and button-up. “And even if they did, you’re not really psychic.”
Before Shawn can focus on a retort, he has to point out, “Dude, three layers? Are you selling insulin to Santa?” It’s chilly out, sure, but that’s chilly for Santa Barbara. Gus can usually handle a tough-knuckled February breeze.
Gus tilts his nose up, just a smidge, a micro-tilt, truly. He’s touchy about this, but not above teasing. “My iron is low, Shawn,” he snips. “The doctor says I need to eat more red meat and spinach.” The micro-tilt goes away, and Gus is back to his standard of cool confidence. “And I’ll have you know this client is way more lucrative than Santa’s insulin. If I can impress Mrs. Chang, we can rest on our laurels for the rest of the year.”
“My laurels don’t need rest, Gus,” Shawn whines. “My laurels need a case!”
“Laurels aren’t a body part, Shawn,” Gus says, but he’s still packing his work case as he says it, so he really means business. Shawn flops into a chair and tries to pay attention while Gus tells him, “Laurels are a type of Mediterranean tree. Also known as a bay tree. It’s where we get bay leaves for cooking.”
“We don’t live in Mediterranea,” Shawn mopes, trying to rope Gus deep enough into a bickering match to convince him to stay. “We don’t use laurels for cooking, and I need a case.”
But Gus now has his case packed, his cardigan buttoned, and is making his way to the door. As a peace offering before he goes, he indulges one last quip: “My mom’s butter squash soup uses bay leaves, Shawn. She taught both of us how to make it in tenth grade. Investigate by yourself for once.” Despite intentionally bringing up that Mrs. Guster taught Shawn a Guster family secret recipe, he keeps his voice characteristically serious, bordering on harsh, so Shawn doesn’t feel coddled. Gus is good at that.
He still blames the baby, because babies take blame like a champ. They can’t argue back.
Shawn swans into the Santa Barbara Police department carrying a Costco-sized package of pecans Gus got with the intention of making a pie for Mrs. Chang. Gus will be peeved later, but not pissed, because he knows in his chocolate truffle gooey-on-the-inside-somewhat-firm-on-the-outside heart that no medical professional wants a pecan pie gifted to them, especially not a widower as Gus is likely actively figuring out she is. Mrs. Chang would have to eat the pie by herself which is both depressing and a hyperglycemic nightmare. Truly, Shawn is saving Gus by using the pecans as a pretend baby for his psychic episode entry to the case.
Chief Vick, however, sees him, sees his swaddled nuts, and gives him a frantic, dismissive wave. “Clearly you already know. You’re on the case.” She’s recently peeled a hangnail off her left ring finger, so the marriage is at least turbulated by the missed babysitter. That, and the dark circles and mussed hair of a night spent unexpectedly placating a two-year-old, means the Chief is desperate, and potentially a little off the rails. She always is with Iris.
Shawn wonders if his mom was ever this worried about having someone else to pawn him off on. Probably not, since his dad was always ready and willing to take Shawn on another wilderness trip to trial-by-fire star navigation.
But the Chief let him on board so easy he didn’t even get to do his thing. Absolute buzzkill. And she’s already off to her computer, probably looking for a replacement babysitter for the date she and her husband rescheduled for. She’s fidgeting with the wedding ring.
There’s no way Shawn is touching that with a ten foot pole, not after how up his ass she was when her friend dated his dad, so Shawn rewraps his purloined pecans and sashays over to where Jules and Lassie are muddling through paperwork at their desks.
He falls to his knees next to their desk, seized nuts staying securely swaddled and adequately baby-like despite their tumble out of his loving arms. “I can’t do it!” he cries, drawing the attention of a few. Buzz says hi, and Shawn says hi back before collapsing back into hysterics. “I can’t take care of the baby! Something is stopping me!” He mimes as though an invisible wall separates him from his nut-faced child, banging on the wall and slumping fully to the floor. “I’m trapped! I’m trapped and I can’t get to the—”
“Spencer, some of us have work to do,” Lassiter snaps.
Even Jules is unenthused by his performance. “You really think the babysitter was kidnapped?” she asks. At least his psychic powers still hold some persuasive pull. Jules has put down her pen, and Lassie’s eyes are no longer rhythmically scanning back and forth across each line of the firearm discharge report Shawn can see reflected in his stainless steel thermos.
Since he’s got their attention, Shawn collects his plundered pecans, drapes the sweater he’d swaddled them in over his shoulders, and shuffles to his feet. “Yes, I’ve had a vision,” he says simply. “Very clear. Babysitter’s kidnapped,” because this is the babysitter Chief Vick has been using since Iris was nine months old, and besides the girl clearly needing the money enough to humor Vick’s weird police chief hours, the girl sends Chief Vick pictures of Iris every hour or so. Chief Vick loves that she’s found such an attentive babysitter, but the pictures only happen because the babysitter is genuinely attached to Iris (and, honestly, who wouldn’t be).
Unfortunately, this is not an impressive show of psychic force to Jules, who gives that flat little smile she does when someone disappoints her but she wants to be supportive anyway, or Lassie, who rolls his eyes.
Shawn presses on. “Trapped somewhere, probably,” because that would be the surest reason a babysitter who genuinely loves the baby and seriously needs the cash wouldn’t text a loyal, repeat client that they couldn’t make it. “I would bet money it’s a friend or classmate, though the spirits disagree on anything more specific,” because that would explain why the parents weren’t the first ones to report her missing.
Already stacking up the paperwork she’s procrastinating on, Jules stands and says, “We were just gonna go talk to the babysitter’s parents if you wanted to join?”
“O’Hara, do not invite chaos,” Lassie gestures with a snappy head-tilt to Shawn, who is demurely cradling his nuts, “into this incredibly open-and-shut runaway case.” He enunciates each word like it might make him more right to do so.
All the better for Shawn to dance in a spritely circle around him in approximately twenty-four hours and sing an improvised, though still tasteful, I-told-you-so song.
“Come on, Lassie,” he jibes, “it’s got to be better than your fourth weapon discharge form this month.”
Lassiter’s arm immediately, damningly, scrapes over his desk, dumping everything into a hastily-opened drawer, which he promptly slams shut and then stomps to his feet, expression imperious.
Oh. So that was an off-duty firearm discharge, which he is being reprimanded for because he’s already taken the maximum amount of overtime for this month and Chief Vick has a strict No Vigilante Justice, Not Even for Muggers, Especially Not With Department Property policy. Good to know.
“Stop snooping on my desk,” Lassie growls, and Shawn skips to the car so he can pretend to fight with Juliet for shotgun.
The parents are total blockheads. Buffoons, really. Bunglers and birdbrains, the both of them.
They don’t even think their daughter is missing. As Lassiter and Juliet give them that smooth jazz version of interrogation that bereaved parents who don’t yet know to grieve get, Shawn half-listens while he lets his eyes bounce all over the room.
Two dead daughters-- Angela and Jolene, forever nine and ten years old, little picture above the fireplace. The missing daughter, Victoria, is seventeen, with just one elementary-school picture in the hallway between the kitchen and the bathroom, and the youngest, Isbel, has a baby photo on a shelf in the kitchen. So Mom and Dad are still stuck at, what, a decade ago it looks like? They haven’t updated the pictures since then, much less the kitchen hand towels, which are faded and nearly grey with overwashing when Shawn wipes his hands on them after swiping some delicious artisanal sharp cheddar from the fridge. Gus can say what he likes about white people and their cheese: it is one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments-- up there with Halle Berry and Chris Evans.
The youngest is like a little ghost. Shawn sips on a mug of homemade chai he heated up out of the pitcher from the fridge and watches her watch the cops with impressive stealth for an eleven-year-old. Her fists clench and unclench as she looks between Lassiter and O’Hara, her eyes trained on whichever of them is speaking.
With a step closer, he says, “Cops really know how to ask all the wrong questions, don’t they?”
She startles, but tries not to show it. Eleven-year-olds are great. It’s that intersection of the seriousness of being old enough for the age to include two digits and the beautiful last hurrah of childish whimsy before middle school. They’re also very hard to lie to. Much harder than 35-year-old detectives who are so wrapped up in their finally-finalized divorce to notice details like eleven-year-olds watching them with the focus of a bird of prey.
“You don’t dress like a cop,” she says. And then, looking at his drink, says, “And cops don’t steal mom’s chai.”
“That is because they are foolish lackadaisies who don’t understand how hard it is to get good chai in Santa Barbara.” Shawn doesn’t even like chai, but he’s heard Gus complain about it. He’ll have to ask Mrs. Two-Dead-Daughters-and-Counting for the recipe.
The eleven-year-old seems to appreciate him making fun of Santa Barbara’s finest. About time somebody did. She asks, “What’s a lackadaisy?”
“It’s someone who does not get things done very fast.” Gus’s voice echoes in Shawn’s ear that that isn’t quite right, and that ‘lackadaisy’ isn’t a noun used to refer to a ineffective or careless person at all, it’s an archaic interjection, like ‘alas,’ and it’s spelled--
But Shawn interrupts that thought with another sip of chai so spicy he can tether his brain back to what he was talking about. Which is the cops being ineffective and lackadaisical needing a noun form.
And the missing babysitter, Victoria Grabbel. Right.
Another sip of chai.
“I’m a psychic, can I see your sister’s room?” he asks. Isbel’s eyes go wide and she agrees on the condition she can ask him three questions about the future. He already knows what she’ll ask, so he says that sounds fine.
After telling Isbel that the sixth grade will be full of tribulations, but nothing she can’t handle; that the boy she is fighting over with her friend is not even nearly worth it; and that her sister will be found within twenty-four hours, Isbel sits sullenly on Victoria’s comforter.
“She’s missing,” Isbel mutters. “I know she is, but Mom and Dad tell me I can’t possibly know that. And the cops are all lackadaisies.” Shawn will have to apologize to Gus for leading a child astray in the realm of five-dollar-words. “But you’re not a cop. And you’re gonna find my sister, right?”
Shawn takes in the room. A well-made bed. An empty hook next to the door. A closet with only two empty hangers and one empty spot on the shoe shelf. Assignments, half-done, organized in neat piles at the far side of the desk. A calendar above the desk with homework highlighted in green, babysitting highlighted in pink, and shifts at Frenchie’s Cafe highlighted in yellow. Yeah, he’s got everything he needs from here.
“Didn’t I just divine that I’d find her within 24 hours?” He crosses his arms and gives Isbel an imperious glare. “I don’t appreciate my psychic talents being cheapened by repetition.” But she’s got that whole tough-kid thing going on, so he adds, “Of course I’m gonna find her. Just stay on well-lit streets until we figure out where I’m finding her at.”
While Jules and Lassie head back to the station to cross-reference the parents’ statements with Chief Vick’s texts of where Victoria said she would be coming from, Shawn skips ahead a few steps and makes his way to Frenchie’s.
The owner is a greasy-looking man, who is not named Frenchie, nor is he descended from or related to anyone named Frenchie. Even when told that a girl’s life could be at stake, Ernesto does not budge. His father’s name was Jose, and his father’s name was George, and his uncles are Jesus, Fernando, and Richard. A massive blow, to be sure, but Shawn Spencer isn’t a fake psychic detective for nothing.
Shawn hardly needs to ask Ernesto anything; the shift board is right behind him above the grill, and Victoria’s name is on Thursday night for four hours and Sunday morning for six hours. It’s Saturday, so Ernesto won’t have much to tell him. “She clocked out all normal,” Ernesto insists, “nothing strange happened here. Not in my restaurant.”
So something strange definitely happened here, but Ernesto is a bit of an asshole to his employees and nobody told him. Shawn can’t say that out loud. He says the closest thing he can get away with: “How can it be your restaurant when you’re not even Frenchie?”
The man blunders through explaining how he bought the business from some old guy, and Shawn asks if he can talk to some employees. Ernesto clearly doesn’t like that, even though the place is practically a matinee showing of an Adam Sandler movie as far as attendance, but it would look suspicious as hell to turn away a detective, fake psychic variety or not, for no reason.
There’s two waitresses and a hostess stand in a gaggle near the entrance to the kitchen, and they have much more helpful information.
“Vicki’s okay, right?” the hostess asks. Shawn replies that he is endeavoring to find her alive and well.
“There weren’t a lot of customers on Thursday.” One of the waitresses tells him with a shrug, “A few families. An old guy’s birthday. Oh, and Vicki’s regular, of course. He comes in for all her shifts.”
If Shawn was truly able to pick up on psychic wavelengths, this one would be luring him in like a cartoon mouse gets pulled in by the wafting scent of a windowsill pie. It’s baffling that nobody else on the force seems to even see the personified scent of a right turn for a case, much less do they feel its personified tug toward the proverbial pie. “Let’s start with the regular,” Shawn says with a smile.
From what the girls said, it’s a guy from Vicki’s school. A starting linebacker for the Santa Barbara High Pirates named Wendall. He’s weird, never making eye contact and sometimes rocking back and forth in the back-wall booth he always asks for, but he’s nice to Vicki and she doesn’t mind the autism in the face of the generous tips Wendall leaves. The linecook remembered that Wendall drives a Toyota Corolla in a custom-green wrap. Not some disgusting lime green shit, the line cook insisted, like the color might make or break the case (and maybe it will, Shawn hasn’t psychic’d that far ahead yet), it’s like a sage green. Murdered out windows. Real nice work, for a Corolla.
Great! Barely two in the afternoon and Shawn already has the case ¾ solved.
Now he’s just got to find where a sage green Toyota Corolla calls home, and he’ll find Wendell.
He has to swing by the office to use Gus’s laptop to look up custom auto-body shops in the area. He calls them in order of how far they are, because he’d really prefer not to bring his incredibly-cool, incredibly-conspicuous motorcycle all over town. The second one responds proudly that they are the only auto-shop in Santa Barbara that does custom wrapping, and so Shawn has his huckleberry.
When Shawn sobs that he’s recently been in a fiery crash and that the paint job on his Mustang will never be the same and that the only consolation he can think of is to get his repaired beauty custom wrapped in sage green, he is met with perhaps the only sympathetic audience that lie could have found. It would have played even better with Gus here to play the supportive friend comforting Shawn in his time of need, or better yet they could have gotten the Blueberry wrapped but it landed well enough that they pull out the catalogue of wraps to order from, and they’d have to call the Blueberry the Artichoke or something if they got it wrapped, so probably the whole thing is fine as-is.
Shawn only needs a moment of scanning the back pages of the catalogue to see Wendall Bruner – 1441 April Ave, Santa Barbara, CA
“No!” Shawn suddenly shouts, “No, I’m not ready!” the auto techs all give him the same sympathetic glances a widow might get when she refuses to toss the first shovel of dirt on her husband’s lowered casket. He escapes out the open garage doors of the auto shop, and nobody chases him.
April Avenue, according to MapQuest, is on the other side of town. Motorcycle it is, as much as Shawn hates to be so irresistibly awesome that it blows any chance of hiding in plain sight. On occasions, one must choose between being a suave undercover agent and being a rough-and-tough biker.
Gus would call him on that. He’d say Shawn is neither, and he’d be right, but when Shawn compared them to Joe Huff and Lance Dockery, Gus would do that pleased shoulder shrug thing he does when he’s received just the right ego-boost for the moment and relent on the condition that they keep on record that he is way more attractive than Sam McMurray, which Shawn would of course agree with.
If Gus were here, he’d also have a car, so they wouldn’t need the motorcycle at all.
Shawn tries to distract himself with how it’s a good thing he’s on his own. At the very, very least, it’s better than being with his dad, who would be telling Shawn how he’s stupid for getting involved in a missing person’s case where nobody even thinks the girl is really missing, and if it’s a criminal smart enough to have gotten her when she wouldn’t be missed then Shawn is even stupider for hunting the kidnapper down alone. He’d tell Shawn to go home, get a real job, and to find a girlfriend before he’s too old for his personality to come off as cute.
Shawn is glad he’s alone.
Or, at least, he is until he parks his motorcycle across the street from 1441 April Avenue, walks toward the empty-looking house, and then sees a sage green Toyota Corolla pull into the driveway behind him with a linebacker in the driver’s seat.
Has Shawn Spencer called Santa Barbara’s finest by a myriad of teasing little nicknames over the course of his life and, yes, even the past six hours he’s been on this case? Of course he has. But he hopes that the universe, Chief Vick, Juliet, and Lassie know that he was only kidding, and that he doesn’t think they’re lackadaisies-- the validity of that word in Scrabble aside.
He just hopes they find him.
Him and Victoria, that is.
She’s set up in a bed in Wendall’s parent’s basement. One hand is fuzzy-handcuffed to a series of zipties that connect to the foot of the bed, but what’s keeping her there is the broken leg. It’s not bad enough to break skin, but it is bad enough that Shawn can tell it’s broken, despite being zip-tied to a pipe connected to the washing machine across the room.
Victoria is giggling. “Ooh, man, Isbel is gonna be so mad I didn’t help her with her art project.”
It’s not Shawn’s style to tell a young lady her tibia is poking through her skin, but he does want to ascertain if Victoria is even on this planet. “What happened to your leg?” he asks.
“Sh,” Victoria hushes, still giggling, “he told you not to talk to me.”
“He didn’t tell you not to talk to me though, now did he?” Shawn prompts, trying very hard to smile and laugh back at her. Mirroring does wonders for getting people to say things they otherwise might think to hide.
She laughs again, loud for a moment, and then she slaps a hand over her mouth. “Sorry!” she whisper-shouts. “He hugged me really tight,” she tells him at a whisper, “but I didn’t want a hug, so I kicked my feet, and one of them hit the back door.”
“Of the house?” Shawn asks.
“Of Frenchie’s, silly.” She tugs blankly on the fuzzy handcuffs, with the same level of care that one might pull on the hem of a sleeve. “He told me he loved me and gave me a hug, and then I kicked the door, and then he put me in his car and gave me soup and medicine instead of doctors. I don’t even like soup, so now he brings me sandwiches.”
The pieces begins to focus together like a snapshot off a flip-phone camera: the picture sucks.
Shawn needs to get out of here. Wendall cares about Victoria. Her broken leg is propped up on two pillows. He’s giving her (if Shawn’s reading the bottle on the shelf near the exterior stairwell door correctly) morphine pills, his own prescription. He’s feeding her foods she prefers. Her clothes are unruffled, except for some creased wrinkles where she’s been sleeping on them.
This was an accidental kidnapping.
Shawn doesn’t need to be psychic to see it all playing out: Wendall, giant and awkward and terrible with reading social cues, meeting Victoria at the backdoor of Frenchie’s after she got off shift; he meant to confess his feelings and sweep her off her feet, but she panicked at being lifted off the ground before she’d even had a chance to reply and, kicking with both feet, managed to hit the metal back door of the restaurant with enough force to break her leg; Wendall panicked and put her in his car, telling her he was going to help her; she assumes hospital, but he gave her some of his old morphine prescription and she was down for long enough that he was able to sneak her into his basement through the exterior cellar-door stairs.
And then he panicked and did what any terrified autist would do: he kept his routine and went to school the next day.
It explains why Wendall, despite Shawn posing a huge threat to his whole kidnapping thing, didn’t hurt him. This is a terrified seventeen-year-old who doesn’t know how to get out of the hole he’s digging, so he just keeps digging it. The kid has nothing on his side but his incredible linebacker size and strength, so when he sees an obstacle he just picks it up and shoves it in his basement to deal with later-- Shawn can see that in the mess of college admissions papers on the table that, judging by the dust, haven’t been touched in weeks, at least.
So the kid will crack. Like a glowstick at a toddler’s birthday party, although with less of a snap involved as long as Jules and Vick can keep Lassie on a leash.
A bigger problem is that Victoria can’t exactly be part of an escape plan, and Shawn doesn’t want to wait down here forever for Wendall’s sandwich delivery-- not least of all because he squeezed out of the zipties, like, ten minutes ago and the door to the stairwell is unlocked and that amounts to two halves of one whole gift horse which Shawn would not like to look down the mouth of.
If he gets out, he can have the police here in twenty minutes.
That settles it. Shawn Spencer will take the cowards’ way out and escape alone.
He stands, which makes Victoria laugh. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” he tells her, and he hopes that, if there’s any part of her that’s scared, it’s covered up by the morphine.
The Santa Barbara Police Department does not seem to be in a psychic-search tizzy, but Shawn is sure that’s a facade of composure to keep the public calm despite his disappearance.
It’s only when he sees Gus, cardigan over his arm, getting in Lassiter’s face near the water cooler that he puts things together.
Gus is angry. Angry enough that he’s worked up a sweat in his iron-deficient-triple-layer.
Lassiter is defensive, leaning against the water cooler casually without noticing that his hair gel is losing its iron grip on the cowlick at the front of his hairline.
Juliet is visibly listening in, with her pen alternating between paperwork and being chewed on.
Angry Gus + Defensive Lassie + Anxious Jules = Nobody knew Shawn was gone.
Which is rude. He cracks the case for them and they don’t even bother looking!?
Shawn takes back his mental demur of calling the whole department lackadaisies. He’s emailing Merriam-Webster tonight to get his version of the word added to the dictionary.
Adjusting his posture and gait, Shawn staggers up behind Lassie, and successfully scares the daylights out of him by slamming a hand on his shoulder, as if for balance. The fact that Lassie flinches means the divorce is going worse than initially assumed and that Gus really got under his skin with whatever he was saying.
“Shawn!” Gus says, “How are you here!?” Shawn shifts off of Lassiter’s shoulder into Gus’s waiting arms to swoon dramatically.
Good ol’ Lassie is quick on the turnaround though. “Because he was never kidnapped,” he snaps, and starts to stalk off.
“I was kidnapped,” Shawn cries after him. Loud enough for Buzz, across the room, to snap his head up, giant, golden retriever puppy eyes wide and horrified. Good. Shawn needs this to be public enough that he gets taken seriously for once. Victoria’s broken leg needs care sooner rather than later. “I’ve just barely managed an escape—”
Lassiter stalks forward, and Juliet comes behind him to ward off the worst of the temper flare Lassie’s eyes warn of. “Spencer, if you are messing around—”
Gus’s voice is just two degrees below vicious when he retorts, “Would he lie about that?” Then, remembering this is Shawn they’re talking about, he bites back the rest of what he was going to say.
“What happened, Shawn?” Juliet asks, ever the believer.
“I was clairvoying—”
“Not a word, Shawn,” Gus says with a pat on Shawn’s arm, which Shawn takes as a sign to stand up on his own. “You were divining.”
“I’ve heard it both ways,” Shawn waves him off. “But as I felt the psychic pull toward our missing girl, right up to the house, suddenly I felt arms grab me!” Here, he ups the dramatics again, drawing Gus’s arms, which Gus helpfully allows, around his neck and chest, just like how Wendall grabbed him. Buzz and Jules are in on the theater of it, and Lassiter’s arms are crossed, so he’s actually listening. “And they dragged me down a set of stairs,” he slips out of Gus’s arms to sink to the floor, banging on it, “to a basement!”
“Did you see who had you?” Juliet asks. At least she’s writing details down.
Shawn waves his fingers near his temples, lets his gaze slip to the floor as if concentrating deeply. “It all happened so fast, but… yes. Yes, I think I did.” He snaps his gaze back up,”If you get me a sketch artist, I can have a perfect-to-life portrait-- no, there’s no time! She’s still down in the basement!”
Lassiter nearly draws his gun he gets so incensed. “There’s another victim!? Lead with that, Spencer!” Shawn would have loved to, if they believed a word he said outside faux-psychic episodes. “Where is this house?”
As though the whole thing is immeasurably difficult for him to drag out of some aural ether, Shawn stands slowly, face in his palms. “Calendars… with little cats on them doing funny poses…” He’s so glad Gus is here to help him pull this off. “January… February… March… May… June… July—”
Gus catches it. “You skipped April—”
“Yes!” Shawn cries. “April! The avenue of flowers!”
“April Avenue?” Juliet guesses.
And Shawn points at her. “April Avenue. Green house. Flowers out front. Cellar door on the,” he wiggles his fingers again, like tuning an unplugged TV, “left side.”
The house is nearly as Shawn left it, only Wendall’s sage green Corolla has been replaced with a smooth silver Chevy Malibu. The cellar door is open. A bad feeling opens up Shawn’s stomach like a baseball bat to the ribs.
“Should have found a way to bring Victoria with me,” Shawn mutters, more to himself than anything.
“I prefer my best friends alive,” Gus replies, voice still sharp with anxiety.
And Shawn finally thinks to ask, “How’d you know I was missing? You hadn’t even gotten back to the office yet.” The silver sales case is still buckled into the backseat, and Gus hates to bring it anywhere that isn’t directly related to a pharmaceutical client, citing Shawn’s propensity to put him in situations that might jeopardize more company property.
But Gus sniffs, proud of how well they know each other (as he should be, it might have just saved Shawn’s life). “You didn’t reply to my text about picking up Quatro Quesos Dos Fritos.”
It’s hard to stifle the smile before they get out of the car and step onto the active crime scene.
Except the gurney that runs back to the waiting ambulance has a 40-something-year-old woman on it, not Victoria. She’s got a dazed look in her eyes and blood all over her shoulder and left arm, but she’s well enough to ask what’s going on and where she is.
Gus and Shawn reach the door to the cellar just as Lassiter and Juliet ascend the steps.
“Thanks to your time-wasting,” Lassiter spits, “Wendall Bruner is on the lam. With whoever his victim is.”
Gus has to get back to work. He’s meeting Mrs. Chang for dinner to close the deal, and she’s a woman who, apparently, does not renegotiate-- dinner plans or otherwise. Before he leaves, he has a hushed conversation with Jules and Lassiter over near the cellar door, but Shawn is more preoccupied by the blood on the entryway of the house, where Wendall’s mom, Andrea, was found. There wasn’t even an attempt to clean it, even though it would be a dead giveaway that Wendall had escalated to violence. There’s handprints all over, shoe prints, and a few jean-textured spots on the ground where it looks like Wendall was on his knees.
Wendall was trying to help his mom.
This giant fool of a kid saw his mom, bleeding from the head, tried to help her, and when nothing he did made a dent he ran, thinking that if he called the police they’d find Victoria in the basement.
Lucky for Wendall, the EMTs said the blood made the injury look worse than it is as they wheeled Andrea away, and Shawn eavesdropped on Buzz’s walkie that Andrea reported that she saw a girl tied up in the basement, panicked, and slipped on her way into the house to call 911. Wendall didn’t even hurt anyone.
Not that Lassiter is in a prisoner-taking mood today.
A car pulls up somewhere in the distance, and the headlights flash in Shawn’s eyes, just a hair above the lights of the police cruisers and the tail-lights of the Blueberry as Gus drives off in a hurry to meet Mrs. Chang for dinner.
It’s a sage green Corolla.
Shawn weaves past officers setting up lines of yellow tape and forensics teams going to test that the blood is all from Andrea and a million other officers doing all the stuff Shawn’s dad told him he’d be stuck doing forever if he didn’t get his head out of his ass.
Jokes on Henry; Shawn gets to go confront kidnappers by himself and, if he’s lucky, he even gets to be part of the crime himself some days. And he did it all without getting his head out of his ass.
“Wendall,” Shawn says carefully as he approaches. “Your mom is alive, but you need to come clean to the cops—”
Wrong answer! The last thing Shawn sees is Wendall’s fist going for that special spot, right between the eyes.
And when Shawn manages to unflinch from that punch, it’s to sobbing. Victoria is clearly out of morphine, or maybe Wendall forgot to bring it with him, but her leg didn’t get any less broken in the past seventy minues. Shawn shuts his eyes before his consciousness can be discovered.
“He’s a liar,” Wendall is seething. “He tried to lie about my dead mom to get me to talk to the cops!” The shouting hurts Shawn’s head.
“Maybe,” Victoria’s voice is trembling, fear or pain, even though Shawn didn’t see her tied to one of the blue plastic chairs Shawn’s held to with a jump rope, “maybe he was telling the truth.”
A high, terrible, keening noise comes from Wendall, who is panicking just as much as Victoria. “You didn’t see her!” he cries. “There was so much blood, Vicky.”
“Don’t call me that,” she snaps, voice low with warning despite her sniffling.
“I didn’t even tie you up!” Wendall reasons. He sounds genuinely confused. “I’m sorry I forgot the morphine.”
“You kidnapped me and won’t drop me off at a hospital for my broken leg!” Victoria screeches. Ouchies for Shawn’s head again. “You cannot call me a nickname!”
“Okay!” Wendall relents, and now he’s crying too. “I’m sorry. Victoria. I’ll call you Victoria. Please stop yelling.”
“Worried the cops will find us in a locker room on a Saturday?” Victoria snarls, sarcastic. Pain makes her angry. Reasonable, but Shawn now has to contend with two loose cannons instead of one. Very hard to do with a concussion, but he’ll manage. He’ll probably have to, if he ever wants to eat pineapple again.
But Wendall has been effectively cowed. “It hurts my ears,” he says softly, sniffling.
Silence, for a moment. If the SBPD didn’t realize Shawn was missing after a three-hour absence in the middle of the day last time, they won’t be missing him after being gone for half an hour at night. Probably they won’t miss him until tomorrow afternoon, when Henry Spencer will get pissed that Shawn stood him up for flank steaks at the house. Of course, then maybe Henry will call the department, realize Shawn turned in a change of emergency contact form because the department will tell him they can’t just release information about the whereabouts of a contract employee to random citizens, and maybe Henry will just throw up his hands and go back to M.A.S.H. reruns. Then Gus will get back to the office on Monday afternoon, see that Shawn isn’t there or anywhere else, and then the case might get moving.
“I have to go to Canada,” Wendall says, out of nowhere. What’s this kid got in Canada? Shawn’s head hurts too much to try and puzzle it out.
Victoria asks for him anyway: “Canada? No, I need a doctor, Wendall.” Good for her. Her body, her choice, or something. The longer Shawn remains conscious, the more cobwebs he has to peel back from every thought.
“I can’t go to jail!” It would probably be prison. “It’s all fluorescent lights. And there’s no privacy when you go to the bathroom. And what if my cellmate is one of those guys trying to write songs and he sings at all hours!”
“Wendall!” Victoria shouts, and then groans. Must’ve bumped her leg. “Go to Canada. I don’t care. But I. Need. A. Doctor.”
Shawn nearly slips off his chair. He hadn’t realized his balance was starting to go, and his head snaps up, and his eyes blink open on instinct.
It’s only after he’s made eye contact with Wendall that he realizes he couldn’t possibly fall off the chair because he’s tied to it. That, and the fact that the room is spinning around the center point of Shawn’s vision, means this concussion is upgrading to first class. He tries to look around. Hats. Wendall has a beanie on. One hat. Nausea sticks its neck out from his stomach to his throat like the Loch Ness Monster sticks its neck out from whatever the name of that lake is.
Shawn wishes his mom liked him enough to have dinner with him when she came to town.
Wendall has something in his hand. It’s not a hat. He raises it, and in the split-second it crosses Shawn’s center-point of vision, he sees it’s a baseball bat. Wooden one. Older, but good quality. Stickers, so it’s not a family heirloom.
In all his noticing, he forgets to notice it swing down into his ribcage.
“Wendall, what the hell!?”
An actual baseball bat to the ribs hurts way worse than the metaphorical statement, and Shawn promises himself that he’s telling Merriam-Webster, since they’re the only ones who might listen to him while Gus is at work.
“He knows everything, Victoria! He’s psychic and a liar and he’s gonna tell the cops!”
The accuracy of statements like that has got to be important to Mr. Merriam and Mrs. Webster, right? Journalistic integrity or something.
“I’m so sorry,” Wendall sobs.
The second time the baseball bat swings, Shawn’s chair falls over. Strike. Henry showed up to all the Little League games Shawn and Gus played in, but when the game was over he’d spend hours asking Shawn why he didn’t just do better? Shawn stopped going, and Henry added baseball to the list of things Shawn quit.
The floor should be cold, because it’s bare concrete, and it should come with the instant, pop-rocks tingle of active infection, because it’s the floor of a locker room, but the floor is warm and soothingly wet. Must be freshly mopped.
The door slams open. From the sound of the gunshot and the noise Wendall makes as he sinks to the floor, it’s the Lassiter Left Shoulder Special. Great. Santa Barbara’s finest indeed.
There’s a lot of words, but something is stopping Shawn from understanding them. He’s heard of people hitting their head so hard they reboot in another language-- or was that a Linux desktop computer? Someone takes a picture of him, which is funny until they then get down next to his face and he tries to look at them and they startle backwards so hard Shawn gets dizzy.
They shout something directly into Shawn’s face, which makes him throw up.
It’s only when Shawn takes a deep breath to clear the puke from his trachea that he realizes he’s been cut out of the jump rope holding him to the chair, and he is now on his side on the floor.
And then there’s Buzz. Wide-eyed, covered in blood, Buzz spends a few seconds shouting at someone, but he covers Shawn’s ears to do it, and then taps the side of Shawn’s face. “Shawn, do you know your name? Wait! Uh, what day is it?”
Shawn swallows the texture of vomit. “Not a lucky one.”
Lassie and Jules swim up, their heads bobbing in and out of that central vision point as they bicker.
“I can’t believe you told me he was dead!”
“O’Hara, you are sitting in his blood. It was a reasonable assessment!”
“Wait a little longer and you’ll get your wish, Lassie,” Shawn says, and any cool points that his sudden ability to speak gets him are immediately ruined by the fact that he throws up again.
“Lassiter—”
“EMTs are on their way.”
Buzz asks, “Can’t we get him upstairs?”
Each detective snaps at once. Lassiter with, “Not unless you want him actually dead,” and Juliet with, “You’ll destabilize his neck.”
They wait. Shawn would love to talk about something. Anything, really. It doesn’t matter what because the cobwebs of thought are getting so thick they’re catching fruit flies of unconsciousness, and those black dots are getting big enough that he isn’t sure he could hold a thought for longer than baby Iris could hold a spoon. Chief Vick has a picture of Iris’s first solid meal on her desk, which is the only clue Shawn has that the Vick household was worried about developmental delays. Three hats in the room. Two blue baseball hats on the foresnics team and one green beanie on a cop running messages to people.
Shawn has no idea how he got to the hospital. There’s no hats in the room, which is a relief, because no tacky fishing hat on the table next to his bed means his dad isn’t around.
Gus is though. And Jules and Lassie. They’re all just outside the double room he’s in. Victoria is on a bed across the room from him, texting, her leg still a funky shape. They haven’t been here long.
“I tell you not to let him out of your sight,” Gus is ranting, voice a piano wire, “and in less than five minutes, he gets re-kidnapped! What kind of police are you? Protect and defend, my ass.”
Juliet reasons, “He’s a grown man, Gus.” She sounds tired, like maybe Gus has been yelling at them for a while. “How could we have gotten eyes on him so quickly anyway?”
Gus’s slight pause before he speaks is the cavernous silence of a judgemental glare. Shawn can practically feel it. “I don’t care how you do it. I care that my best friend got kidnapped twice today, and you didn’t even notice it the first time, and the second time was right after you promised me to my face that you would keep an eye on him.”
“Won’t happen again, Guster,” Lassiter says.
This time, the cavernous silence is punctuated by Shawn passing out.
When he wakes up, Gus is sitting in the terrible plastic chair next to the bed. Across the room, Victoria’s parents and Isbel are all speaking in quiet tones, comforting her. Victoria isn’t even crying anymore, the absolute champ.
“If you get kidnapped again, I am taking you off as a tax dependent,” Gus says sternly. “My insurance premiums are already too high. I can’t be legally connected to this.”
“Missed you too, buddy,” Shawn says. He’s smiling. He can’t help it. Might be his turn on the morphine. He tries to sit up. Strike! Never mind. Not enough morphine for that maneuver. “What’s the damage?” he asks through a grimace.
Gus snaps his arms crossed, so he’s unnerved but it’s not too bad. “Concussion, three broken ribs, and your ankle is sprained.”
“Did you at least get a good picture of Jules carrying me out like a princess?”
“Buzz tried to throw you over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. The EMTs were pissed. I was pissed.”
Gus is getting heated. Time to change the subject. “How was dinner with Mrs. Chang?”
“She loved me, obviously.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Shawn feels his smile return. “So, our laurels are resting?”
A minutiae of tension leaks out of Gus’ shoulders. Success. “You could say that.”
Shawn’s eyes flick across the room. Victoria’s dad is wearing a navy bucket hat. Isbel has a bandanna over her hair, but that doesn’t count as a hat. Isbel is claiming first dibs on signing Victoria’s cast, which has yet to be applied.
“Go back to sleep, Shawn,” Gus instructs. “Stop counting peoples’ hats.”
Shawn smiles. There’s no fishing hat on the nightstand. “Gus, don’t be the longest hair on Vin Diesel’s head,” he mutters, “I’m not counting anything.” His eyes drift shut.
“Your dad’s not coming,” Gus interprets correctly. Huge win, having a best friend since first grade. They’ll read you like a bedtime story. “Juliet and Lassiter told him to scram in the lobby.” And the eyes are back open, Shawn tries to get the story out of Gus with a glance, but Gus looks both worried and conflicted. He won’t spill now.
“Scram?” Shawn teases instead.
“Leave,” Gus snips back. “Decamp. Skedaddle. Get out— Shawn, why didn’t you tell me you two fought big enough to remove him as an emergency contact?”
Victoria’s dad turns to glance at them, and he gives a pleased nod to Shawn before returning focus to his daughter. How long does it take to get someone in here to set that poor girl’s leg?
Shawn doesn’t want to tell Gus there was no fight, that he’s past fighting and just wants to be around people who want him there. He could tell Gus maybe half of that before the vibes got thrown into horrible, grainy fluorescence– and he certainly can’t do it now, while the painkillers are putting his ability to focus on par with an SNL skit.
“Who told you,” he asks instead.
“Chief Vick,” Gus sighs. “She called him on accident, then checked your paperwork. She feels awful, because she also thinks you two had some big fight.” Gus waits, and waits, and when Shawn is more interested in looking out the window at the great big nothingness of the light-polluted nighttime sky of Santa Barbara than telling him about the nonexistent fight, he continues. “She told Henry he’s no longer welcome at the station except as an explicit guest of a current member of the force.”
“Ouch.” Shawn didn’t realize anyone would be so serious about a change in emergency contact form. He also didn’t expect the form to get use so quick.
Finally, a pair of nurses come in. They speak quietly to Victoria and her parents, then begin rolling the bed out of the room, while the family follows. Isbel spots Shawn, conscious and talking, and tries to get her parents to stay behind and talk to him, but they assure her they’ll thank him once Victoria is all better. At least they’re prioritizing their living kids now.
“Your phone’s in an evidence locker, so Henry’s been blowing mine up for three hours,” Gus says, voice less hushed now that they’re alone. When Shawn, with a hilarious amount of effort, quirks an eyebrow, Gus answers the unasked question, “I haven’t picked up. I’m still waiting for my best friend to tell me how bad it is.”
He’s really gonna make Shawn talk about it. Ughhhhh. “Can your best friend tell you when he’s not on drugs? Two sentences is my current max at a time.”
“I hear that,” Gus says. “Get some sleep, Shawn.”
The beautiful swell of morphine takes him under.