Psych: A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read

by William Rabkin

  “What’s the question?”

  “That is a question.”

  “What?”

  “That’s another question. And where did it get us? Nowhere. Whereas I actually have an answer.”

  “Fine,” Gus said. “Congratulations.”

  “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  “I think you already know the answer to that one, too.”

  “I can’t help but notice a small tone of hostility in your voice ever since we left the police station,” Shawn said.

  “Why would I be hostile?” Gus said. “Just because you’ve gotten us mixed up with a psychotic stalker?”

  “Gus, I don’t think anyone could have anticipated that Tara would turn out to be crazy.”

  “I could have,” Gus said. “And you know how I know that? Because I did. And I warned you. But it was convenient for you to ignore the fact that she was a raging psycho because she was doing your laundry.”

  “And doing a good job, too.” Shawn rubbed the fabric of his shirt. “She really managed to get my clothes soft.”

  “Maybe they’ll let her launder our prison uniforms,” Gus said.

  “We’re not going to prison, because I’ve found the answer,” Shawn said. “Look.”

  He pointed out at the crane in the distance.

  “That’s not an answer—that’s a crane.”

  “It’s both,” Shawn said. “It’s the reason John Marichal was killed.”

  Gus stared at the crane. It stood on thin legs and had a yellow metal operator’s cab between the base and the jib. He tried to imagine it in action, the great jaws falling on a car, crunching through the windows as they lifted it through the air and dropped it into the crushing mechanism. He’d never seen one working in real life before, but he knew he’d seen one in a movie. It came to him in a flash: Goldfinger. Bad guys put another bad guy in the trunk of a car and sent it to the crusher. That was where Shawn had found his answer.

  “There’s no way that fat creep was planning to rob Fort Knox,” Gus said. “And why is it that movie keeps coming up?”

  “It’s a coincidence,” Shawn said. “Or maybe it’s enemy action. Anyway, you don’t need to jump all the way to the denouement to figure out what’s going on here. Stop at the ‘bad guy in the trunk’ moment. Imagine that as an ongoing business concern.”

  “How many agents of the British Secret Service do you think there are out here?” Gus said. There just didn’t seem to be much of a market for such a service.

  “He was disposing of bodies,” Shawn said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. “Let’s say you’re a killer. You knock off your victim, and you’re looking for a way to get rid of the evidence. You bring it down to Marichal, he sticks it into the trunk of an abandoned car, and crash, crunch, it’s part of a metal cube heading for the smelter.”

  Gus had to admit, it sounded like a plan. But there were too many loose ends. How would you market a scheme like that? It was true, according to Chief Vick, that Marichal’s father was a crook, too, so there might be some old family friends in the business. But that was all the way across the country. Marichal had only been here a few months. It wasn’t like he’d had time to build up a large social network.

  Still, as Shawn said, it was an answer. Maybe it would do for now. He looked over at the crane again, and his heart sank.

  “Nope,” Gus said.

  “What do you mean nope?” Shawn said. “I give you a perfectly worked-out theory, and all you give me is ‘nope’?”

  “Yup.”

  “I refuse to accept that,” Shawn said.

  “Then maybe you should accept this.” Gus took off across the lot, leading Shawn through a maze of autos, first the recently impounded vehicles the police had towed in for repeated parking violations, then generations of dead cars, killed by head-ons, rollovers, and plain neglect. As they walked, shapes changed from soft curves to sharp corners and back to curves again. Colors came and went as fashions changed. It was like an open-air museum of automotive styling, as long as you could look past all the crumpled metal.

  Finally they reached the area directly under the crane. Nothing here seemed to have been made after Richard Nixon’s second inaugural.

  “Look at this,” Shawn said, peering at the license plates. “New Mexico, Utah, Florida, Minnesota, Delaware. It’s like cars from all across the country came out here to die.”

  “More like to rest in peace,” Gus said. “And that’s exactly what they’ve been doing for decades.” He pointed at the tires on a few of the cars. They’d decayed away until they were barely shreds hanging off the wheels. “They’re not doing a lot of car crushing here.”

  Shawn looked so deflated, Gus almost felt guilty for bringing him out here. Shawn’s theory was good. The only real problem with it was that it wasn’t true. Not that that was going to stop Shawn.

  “Maybe Marichal was planning to go into the body-disposal business,” Shawn said. “And a rival wanted to stop him before he got started.”

  “Or maybe we should look for a new theory,” Gus said.

  Something whistled past Gus’ ear. Metal popped behind him. At first, he thought Shawn had chucked a headlight at him. But Shawn was looking around for the source of the sound, too. He pointed at the trunk of a sixty-nine Ford Fairlane.

  “Was that hole there before?” Shawn said.

  Gus bent down to peer at the small round hole in the trunk just as the rear windshield shattered over his head.

  “Duck!” Shawn grabbed Gus and pulled him down to the concrete behind a yellow sixty-five Thunderbird with Florida plates.

  “Someone’s shooting at us!”

  Three more holes blossomed in the cars around them. Shawn poked his head above the hood, then dived to the ground as the rearview mirror shattered.

  “Who is it?” Gus said. “Could you see anything?”

  Shawn shook his head. “He must be behind one of these cars. We’ve got to find a way to sneak up on him.”

  “How can you sneak up on a guy when you don’t know where he is?”

  Shawn thought that through for a moment. “One of us needs to stand up to draw his fire. The other one can see where the shot comes from.”

  “Go ahead,” Gus said. “Stand.”

  “I would,” Shawn said. “But he’s already shot at me once. He probably wants a new target.”

  “That is the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard.”

  “Really?” Shawn said. “I thought it showed some ‘outside the box’ thinking.”

  “‘Outside the box’ is where we need to be,” Gus said. “We’ve just got to figure out where that box is.”

  Shawn was about to answer when they heard the faint sound of a cell phone ringing across the lot. “That’s him!”

  The phone rang again. Shawn pointed across the lot at the place it seemed to be coming from. Then he pointed to Gus and swept his arm around to the west. Gus would creep up on the assassin’s left flank. Shawn thumbed his own chest and indicated he’d go around the other way. They gave each other a grave thumbs-up, and each duck-walked in his chosen direction, making sure to keep his head below the level of the cars.

  Gus crept forward, his knees screaming at the strain, using the sound of the cell as his homing beacon. As he squeezed through the gap between two rotting Cressidas, the phone stopped ringing. He froze. Now what? He was about to lift his head above the trunk line in hopes of catching a glimpse of the shooter when the phone started ringing again.

  Gus started toward the noise. Now another question began to gnaw at him. Why didn’t the killer answer his phone? Or if he wasn’t going to pick up, why not just turn it off? Why did he let it keep ringing like this? For one triumphant moment, Gus realized they must have taken him out. But then he remembered that they had never returned a shot, and in fact didn’t even have a gun. It seemed extremely unlikely they’d scored any kind of hit, let alone a kill shot. Could it be a trap?

  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.”