What were they going to do once they reached his car? He supposed they could use a brick to smash one of the windows, if there happened to be any bricks lying around the parking lot, but smashing wouldn’t get the car started. That was, if the mime hadn’t used Gus’ keys and driven off in the Echo.
He hadn’t, which was the first good thing that had happened to Gus all day. But when they got to the parking lot, Shawn didn’t go to the Echo. Instead he started looking in the trash barrels that stood outside the park’s wrought-iron fence. The first two were empty aside from trash. The third, however, held their clothes.
“How did you know they’d be here?” Gus said as he pulled his underpants on under his tissue paper diaper.
“I sort of figured that not even a mime would risk life in prison to steal some clothes he could buy at Goodwill for under a buck,” Shawn said, slipping on his jeans before he stepped into his shoes.
“Then what was that all about?”
Shawn dug in his pockets. “Not my wallet,” he said, fishing it out and flipping through it. “Or any of the four dollars left inside it.” He checked Gus’ pants before tossing them to him. “Or your wallet, or your car keys.”
“This doesn’t make any sense at all,” Gus said. “Could it all have been some bizarre mime initiation ritual?”
Shawn dug in his pants again, and his face turned grim. “The necklace is gone,” he said. “We’ve been set up.”
Chapter Eight
The freeways on the drive back to Santa Barbara were nearly empty, the sky was a vivid blue, and dolphins were dancing in the waters off the Pacific Coast Highway. But Gus didn’t notice any of that. His foot was jammed down on the accelerator and his eyes locked on the road ahead.
In the passenger seat, Shawn snapped shut his cell phone in frustration. “I can’t believe Lassie hung up on me again.”
“When he understands what’s happening, he’ll listen.”
“That’s the problem,” Shawn said. “Before he can understand, he has to listen first. And as soon as I start to tell him the story, he bursts out laughing and hangs up.”
“If you tell him we were held up at gunpoint-”
“In a public men’s room by a killer mime who stole our clothes.” Shawn finished Gus’ sentence for him. “Last time I tried that he put me on hold, then forwarded my call to Papa Julio’s Casa de Pizza.”
“What did he say when you mentioned Ellen Svaco?”
“One word,” Shawn said. “Who?”
Gus tried to make sense of this. Had Lassie simply forgotten he’d sent the teacher to see them, or did this suggest something more ominous? “There’s got to be something we can do.”
“You can start by getting off the freeway here.”
Gus had been so agitated he hadn’t noticed they were almost at the Los Carneros Road exit into Isla Vista. Giving his rearview a quick scan, he tore across four lanes and flew down the ramp, slamming on the brakes for the stop sign at the bottom. Making sure there was no cross traffic, he turned left onto Los Carneros and headed into town.
“Maybe we’ve got this all wrong,” Gus said. He could see the traffic light at Hollister straight ahead. It was red. He gunned the car, figuring to make the next green. “How do we know this was a setup?”
“Do you really have to ask?”
Gus checked to make sure Shawn was wearing his seat belt. He was. Which meant there was no point in slamming on the brakes to watch him go flying through the windshield. Instead he pressed his foot on the accelerator as he turned right through the green light onto Hollister.
“Are you asking if I have to ask why anyone would send us to a public garden to be held up by a mime?” he said through clenched teeth.
“It was a rhetorical question,” Shawn said. “Because the answer is so obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention.”
“I guess I’ve been a little distracted,” Gus said. “Little things like being kidnapped do that to me.”
“You should work on that,” Shawn said. “You let the bad guys know they can throw you off with a little gunplay and you’ll never have a moment’s peace.”
“That’s good to know,” Gus said in a close approximation of the tone his mother used to use when she caught him feeding his brussels sprouts to the dog. “Thank you so much for the advice.”
The light ahead was turning yellow. Gus floored it and made a fast left onto Storke Avenue.
“It’s the least I can do,” Shawn said. “As an experienced private detective, I have a duty to train the generation that’s going to follow me.”
“You’ve been a private detective for five seconds longer than me,” Gus said. “And that’s only because you said my fly was unzipped when we were walking up to the licensing window, and I stopped to look, so you got your license first.”
“Which is why I feel I should share my experience and knowledge with you,” Shawn said. “So let’s walk through what we already know.”
Gus didn’t want to walk through anything, but he knew he’d never get any answers unless he played along. “Ellen Svaco lost her necklace, so she went to the police to ask them to find it,” he said. “They wouldn’t help, so she came to us. We did find it, but then it was stolen by a gun-wielding mime.”
“Very good,” Shawn said. “You’ve got it all exactly right. Except for one small detail.”
“What’s that?”
“All of it,” Shawn said.
Gus turned right onto El Colegio Road and immediately slammed on the brakes. There was an unbroken line of cars in front of him. He cursed to himself, remembering why he hated coming to Isla Vista. Home of the University of California- Santa Barbara, and situated along some of the most beautiful coastline in California, Isla Vista needed to cram tens of thousands of penniless college students into some of the world’s priciest real estate. That meant packing dozens of people into apartments barely big enough for one, which gave the town a population density somewhere between that of Lower Manhattan and central Beijing. And since rents even for those cramped spaces were so high, very few of the students could afford a car. That meant the streets were flooded with alternative modes of transport-all ridden by people who sincerely believed that traffic laws applied to everyone on the earth except them.
Fortunately the address Ellen Svaco had given them wasn’t too much farther, and they’d have to cover only a few blocks of the town’s main business district before they’d turn right, so there would be no need to cut across lanes of traffic. But Gus knew it could easily take fifteen minutes to go a quarter mile through the area, and there was no other way to get there.
Gus resisted the urge to punch the pedal and simply shove the other cars out of his way and tried to put his adrenaline rush to work understanding what was going on.
“I was there for all of it,” he said. “I remember it as if it happened today. Because it did.”
“Lassiter had no idea who Ellen Svaco was,” Shawn said.
“She never went to the police. She told us that story to manipulate us into helping her.”
“Why all this intrigue? She lost her necklace on a field trip.”
The car inched forward.
“I don’t think it was lost,” Shawn said. “I don’t think she’d ever had it. And I have a feeling if we asked at her school, we’d discover that the Descanso Gardens field trip was her idea. But it wasn’t really a field trip.”
“Then what was it?”
“A handoff,” Shawn said. “She brought the kids there as cover so she could collect the necklace.”
“From the tree?”
“From the lost and found,” Shawn said. “I’m sure someone turned it in a few days before.”
“Why so long?” Gus said. “And why the lost and found? Why not just give it to her?”
“Whoever had it must have been worried he was being followed,” Shawn said. “He couldn’t take a chance
