Psych: A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read

by William Rabkin

  Shawn knew he should try to get rid of her. The last thing he needed in his life was a mental patient obsessed with him. But she did seem genuinely concerned about Gus. It didn’t seem right to cast her out before the doctors declared him out of danger. And, while Shawn would never admit this to Gus, it was good to have someone around to talk to in the hospital. A way to keep him from getting too frantic over his best friend.

  Not that he let his guard down around her. Well intentioned or not, she was still nuts. But Shawn spent the next hours studying her, and couldn’t find a hint of malice, cruelty, or danger in her.

  He assumed that once Gus was awake, he’d simply command her to leave them alone. And while the need for a ride from the hospital postponed that plan a little, he still intended to send her away once they got back to the office.

  Once they were back in her car leaving the crime scene, however, Shawn realized that the longer he let this drag out, the harder it would be to stop. He couldn’t let it wait even the short time it would take to get back to the office. He had to let her down gently. “I am not sending you orders with my brain,” Shawn said.

  “I know,” Tara said cheerfully as she accelerated through a crosswalk, cutting off two women pushing strollers. “I’m waiting for my next command.”

  Shawn turned back to look over the seat at Gus, who was listening helplessly. Gus shrugged, and Shawn turned back to Tara. “When exactly did I start sending you orders?” he said.

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “Really? If someone were pushing into my brain and telling me what to do, I think I’d have a pretty good idea who it was.”

  “That’s because you’re a great psychic,” she said. “I’m just a follower. So when I started hearing your voice in my mind, I didn’t know where it was coming from. Can you imagine it? For a few weeks, I thought I was going crazy.”

  “That is hard to imagine,” Shawn said.

  “I can’t tell you how many false leads I tracked down. And then one day I turned on my radio to listen to Artie Pine and heard your voice coming out of it. And I knew.”

  “I knew it!” Gus said. “I knew you should never have gone on Artie Pine’s show.”

  “So why didn’t you ever mention it, if you’re so smart about everything?”

  In fact, Gus had done more than simply tell Shawn not to go on with Artie Pine, whose late-night radio show was nationally syndicated to an enormous audience of shut-ins, paranoids, alien abductees, friends of Bigfoot, and fanatics who’d discovered that their friends and family had started to cross the street rather than hear the newest revelation that the ether had beamed into their brains. Gus had nagged. He had preached. He had urged. He did research on Pine’s topics cross-referenced by frequency, starting with flying saucers and extending all the way to the inevitable conquest of the United States by citizens of Atlantis. Finally, with no other option, he even violated the airspace in the Echo by turning on the show while he was driving Shawn back from a midnight pizza crisis.

  And after all that, Shawn couldn’t understand why Gus didn’t want him to do the show. So there were a bunch of fruitcakes who listened in every night? How could that hurt them? Especially since any one of those fruitcakes might have a case that needed solving, and a couple of extra bucks to spend unraveling some deep, dark mystery.

  “Anyway, once I heard your voice on the radio, the one I heard in my head just kept getting louder and louder, telling me to come to Santa Barbara and follow your every order,” Tara said, tipping the wheel slightly to the left to avoid clipping a bicyclist who’d been riding under the mistaken assumption that the thick white line separating his dedicated lane from the rest of traffic gave him some kind of permission to slow her down.

  “And how did the orderlies feel about that?” Shawn said.

  Tara laughed, and Shawn grabbed the wheel to keep her from steering into an oncoming UPS truck. “I always forget how funny you are in person,” she said. “When I hear you in my head, you’re much more stern.”

  “Well, it takes a lot of effort to project one’s thoughts into the mind of another person,” Shawn said.

  Gus reached up and slapped the back of his head. “Maybe you should stop using so much energy and use your words to tell her what to do,” Gus said. “As long as we’re all together in the car like this.”

  “I suppose I could try,” Shawn said. “Tara, are you ready to receive my order?”

  “I’m always ready for your orders.” She turned to him, her wide eyes boring directly into his. “Please, direct me. I am now under your complete control.”

  “Maybe you could direct her to look at the road!” Gus squeaked, folding himself into the crash position as he saw the back of a stopped Hummer rushing up to meet them.

  “Yes, I think that would be a good idea,” Shawn said. “Tara, I order you to look at the road.”

  Tara tore her eyes away from Shawn’s face and stared out at traffic. The Hummer seemed to fill the entire windshield, and it kept getting bigger.

  “Tara, stop!” Shawn screamed.

  She slammed her foot down on the brake and the Mercedes fishtailed to a stop an inch away from the Hummer’s “My Child Is an Honor Student at Some School You’ve Never Heard of” bumper sticker. Gus clawed at the door handle and threw himself out of the passenger’s side, nearly slamming into the bicyclist they’d almost hit just moments before.

  “You can do what you want, but I’m not letting that crazy woman drive me anywhere!” he shouted to Shawn.

  Shawn’s window glided down silently. “Don’t you think that’s a little discriminatory?” he said. “The mentally handicapped deserve our respect, too.”

  “And I deserve to live long enough for my muscles to stop hurting,” Gus said.

  “That brings up an important point,” Shawn said. “So far, you haven’t been seriously injured as long as you’ve been inside Tara’s car.”

  Gus glared, but he couldn’t find fault with the logic. He opened the door and bent back in. “I’m here, but I’m not happy about it,” he said. “You have to do something.”

  “I’m going to, right now,” Shawn said. He turned to Tara. “I am giving you an order. You will obey this order. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “First of all, you’re going to drive us back to our office,” Shawn said.

  “Safely,” Gus prompted.

  “You’re going to drive us back to our office safely, obeying all the traffic laws. All the important ones, anyway. You don’t have to worry about stopping at yellow lights. No one does that, anyway.”

  “Shawn!”

  “And once you’ve dropped us off at our office, you don’t have to obey me anymore.” Shawn looked back at Gus. “Isn’t this like throwing away a perfectly good toy?”

  “Yes, if the toy happens to be insane and a potential threat to everyone you hold dear,” Gus said.

  “I always wanted one of those.”

  The rest of the drive was uneventful. Tara drove at exactly the speed limit, accelerating above it only when a light turned yellow as she approached the limit line. She pulled up outside the Psych offices and left the motor idling as Shawn and Gus got out.

  As they walked up the short path to their front door, Shawn and Gus kept turning back, Shawn to give Tara one last wave goodbye, Gus to make sure she was really going. But every time they turned, the Mercedes was still idling by the curb.

  Even once they had gotten inside and Gus had locked the door behind them, the Mercedes waited at the curb.

  “She’s still there,” Gus said, checking the window after they’d been back long enough for Shawn to tear through the office fridge, searching for something to drink.

  “And yet Coca-Cola Blāk is gone,” Shawn said, settling for a regular red can. “Why is it that the truly momentous inventions are ignored by the public, while trifles like cell phones, the Internet, and artificial insulin are treated like miracles of science?”

  “What do you think s
he’s doing out there?” Gus said, staring at the car.

  “Idling.”

  “That’s what her car is doing. What’s she doing?”

  “I don’t know, Gus. Why don’t you ask her?”

  “I want her to go away.”

  “So tell her.”

  “You tell her. She’s your psychic slave.”

  “I’m afraid I gave up my power over her when I freed her from my control,” Shawn said. “Because you insisted, by the way. So if anyone’s going to give her an order, it’s got to be you.”

  It wasn’t until fifteen minutes later that Gus was nervous enough to take Shawn’s advice. Opening the office door just wide enough for him to slip through without letting in any lurkers who might be waiting for exactly this chance, Gus squeezed out, slamming it behind him. He looked around. He was alone, and the Mercedes was still sitting at the curb, chugging away.

  Maybe if I stand here and glare at her she’ll drive away on her own, Gus thought. He remembered Old Man Maccoby and how one of his stern looks could chase even the toughest of the neighborhood kids right off his lawn. If only Gus could summon up that force of crankiness in his gaze. He narrowed his lids and felt his irises contract. He was radiating waves of sternness directly at the Mercedes’ driver’s seat.

  Nothing happened.

  Gus sighed. He didn’t have Old Man Maccoby’s gift. And of course, he didn’t have generations of kids spreading rumors around the neighborhood that he had the dismembered parts of missing children hanging from chandeliers in every room, either. That might have helped with the intimidation. He was going to have to handle this up close.

  Taking small steps—the only kind his still-stiff legs would allow—Gus walked as quickly as he could to the Mercedes. He stood outside the front passenger-side window and waited for her to roll it down. He could see her inside, sitting behind the wheel, staring straight ahead. Even after he knocked on the window, she didn’t turn to acknowledge him. Wishing he were anywhere else in the world—well, maybe with the exception of the impound shack—Gus pulled open the car’s door.

  “I couldn’t help but notice you’re still here,” Gus said to her unmoving profile.

  “I’m waiting,” she said.

  “Waiting for what?”

  “For Shawn’s next order.”

  Gus let out a loud sigh of exasperation. “He’s not sending you any more orders. He’s freed you from psychic slavery. You’re free to do whatever you want.”

  “And what I want is to wait for my next order,” she said. “Shawn knows I’ll always be there for him when he wants me.”

  Gus stifled a scream. “He doesn’t want you. I don’t want you. Nobody wants you.”

  “But when he does, I’ll be here. Now would you mind closing the door? You’re letting the air-conditioning out.”

  Gus gave up, going back into the office and only peering out to confirm she was still at the curb every ten seconds or so. “How long do you think she’s going to stay out there?”

  “I seem to recall her gas gauge was just about full when she dropped us off,” Shawn said. “She can probably idle for another six hours or so. Then she’ll have to go get gas.”

  “What if she doesn’t? What if we go out there one day and find her mummified corpse sitting behind the wheel of her dead car?”

  “Then we’ll know she can’t follow us anymore.”

  “We can’t just keep waiting and hiding in here. We’ve got to do something proactive.”

  “As opposed to what? Anti-active?”

  Gus marched over to the desk and swept Shawn’s feet off the computer keyboard. “We don’t know a thing about this woman.”

  “We know she’s got great legs. Fabulous fashion sense. And she deserves her own show on Cinemax.”

  Gus typed furiously at the keyboard. “Maybe that’s enough for you.”

  “I think it should be enough for any man.”

  “I want to know what we’re dealing with. To start with, just how crazy is she?”

  “Do you really need a computer to tell you that? And where are you planning to look? I don’t think there’s a Web site that lists every lunatic in the country by their dress size.”

  “No, just their license-plate numbers.”

  The computer let out a chime, and the screen filled with the uninspiring gray logo of the California Department of Vehicles. Gus went to the window and checked the Mercedes’ plate, then typed the letters and numbers into the form. After a moment, the computer chimed again and a page of information filled the screen.

  “So who is our mystery woman?” Shawn said.

  Gus studied the monitor. “Apparently her name is Enid Blalock, and she lives in Arcata. And according to this, she weighs three hundred forty-five pounds.”

  “Wow, she’s really dropped a lot of weight,” Shawn said. “Do you think she did that for me?”

  Gus barely wasted a glance at him. “She also has green eyes and blond hair, and she was born in nineteen forty-eight.”

  “Don’t see a lot of women over fifty who look that good.”

  “Shawn, she stole that car.”

  “For all we know, there’s a perfectly good reason for her to be driving around Santa Barbara in a hundred-thousand-dollar car that belongs to some fat, divorced Realtor in Arcata.”

  “Give me—” Gus broke off. “Wait a minute. How do you know that Enid Blalock is divorced?”

  “Easy,” Shawn said. “Clearly she’s let herself go physically—I mean, three hundred forty-five pounds is more than a second helping of turkey over the holidays. Hubby loses interest, starts looking into other options. Enid catches him, and he buys her the expensive car to keep her happy.”

  “So then she wouldn’t be divorced,” Gus said.

  “The car’s three years old,” Shawn said. “You think hubby could keep it in his pants that long? So on strike two, she takes him to court.”

  “Okay, fine,” Gus said. “So how do you know she’s a Realtor?”

  “This is California,” Shawn said. “When was the last time you met a divorced woman who wasn’t?”

  Gus had to concede that point. “That doesn’t change the fact that Tara is driving around in her car.”

  “Enid Blalock could be her mother,” Shawn said. “Or maybe Tara works as a valet at Enid’s club, and she’s just looking for a really good place to park it. The point is, Tara is innocent until someone proves her guilty.”

  “Next thing you’ll say is she’s sane until someone proves her insane.”

  “I’m willing to stand up for this woman’s constitutional rights, even if you’re willing to throw them away.”

  “Because she looks hot in a minidress.”

  “That’s not part of the Constitution?”

  Gus gave Shawn’s desk chair a shove and sent him rolling away from the desk. Then grabbed the phone.

  “What are you doing?” Shawn said, scooting himself back toward the desk.

  “I’m calling the police.”

  “What if she’s innocent?”

  “Then the police will make a couple of calls, find out the truth, and there won’t be any problems. But if she’s guilty and we don’t call, it’s going to look bad for us.”

  “You’re right,” Shawn said. “We should call the police. The only question is who exactly we call—the detective we humiliated in front of Veronica Mason’s jury or the one we humiliated in front of her superior officer?”

  “There are more than two people in the Santa Barbara Police Department,” Gus said.

  “I think two people with a reason to hate us are enough for now,” Shawn said, “although historically it’s a pretty low number.”

  “If we turn a car thief over to them, maybe they’ll hate us a little less,” Gus said.

  “You mean the car thief who’s been chauffeuring us around in her stolen car?” Shawn said. “The one who has told top members of the SBPD that she is controlled by my psychic orders?”

  Gus was on th
e verge of coming up with the exact, perfect reply to that when his hand started ringing. He looked down and realized he was still holding the receiver.

  “That’s her,” Gus said.

  “It’s not her,” Shawn said. “Why would she use the phone when she’s got a direct psychic link to my brain?”

  “Whatever,” Gus said. “It’s not going to be good news, whoever it is.”

  “One way to find out.” Shawn tried to grab the phone again, but Gus hid the ringing receiver behind his back. Shawn sighed, then reached across the desk and hit the SPEAKER button on the base station. “Psych Investigations, Burton Guster speaking,” he said.