on physical appearances. And then he felt the equally familiar pang of irritation at feeling guilty about making that kind of judgment. Ever since his mother had caught him making fun of Bobby Fleckstein’s new glasses in second grade and made him sit in the corner for ninety minutes, Gus had felt guilty every time he made a snap judgment about another person. And since his careers as a pharmaceuticals rep and a detective both depended on his ability to size up a new contact immediately, Gus spent a lot of his time feeling guilty. And irritated.
“Okay,” Gus said. “I guess she isn’t really here to regain her powers so she can return to Hell and battle her father for the kingdom.”
“Glad we got that out of the way,” Shawn said. “You can come back in now, Tara.”
Even after his gracious concession, Gus half expected her to materialize before them in a puff of sulfur. Instead she clacked her way in, spike heels turning the floor into a cribbage board behind her.
“I didn’t realize how amazing you were,” Tara said, waving the newspaper.
“Not many people do,” Shawn said. “But I’ll be happy to make sure that you are one of the select few.”
“I mean what you did at that trial,” Tara said. “You told me you were there to give justice a helping hand. But this is much more than that.”
“I start out trying to lend an appendage, but once I’m involved, my whole body gets into it,” Shawn said. “If you’d like a further demonstration of the principle, I’m sure it can be arranged.”
Gus tried to focus enough to read the headline on the newspaper. No matter how many times he squeezed his eyes shut, every time he opened them he saw the same words: “Veronica Mason Innocent.” Of course that would be the lead-in story in any afternoon paper. But Santa Barbara didn’t have an afternoon paper.
Gus snatched the newspaper out of Tara’s hand and felt lightning bolts of pain shoot up him arm. He squinted through the tears of pain clouding his eyes and tried to make out the date above the headlines. “Shawn, this is tomorrow’s paper.”
Tara let out an excited gasp. “You get newspapers from the future?”
“Ever since a man named Lucius Snow saved my life as a child,” Shawn said. “He gave me the gift… and the great responsibility that comes with it.”
“That’s amazing,” Tara said.
“That’s not you,” Gus said. “It’s Kyle Chandler in Early Edition .”
“Next you’re going to tell me I don’t coach high school football in small-town Texas, either,” Shawn said. “That poor Jason Street. What’s he going to do with his life now that he’s in a wheelchair?”
“Shawn! This newspaper is from Wednesday. The trial was on Tuesday.”
“And on Thursday, it’s dollar day at BurgerZone.”
“What I’m trying to say, Shawn, is how long was I unconscious?”
“Not that long,” Shawn said.
“How long?”
“Remember Titanic?”
“Sure.”
“About that long.”
“That was only four hours,” Gus said. “She hit me before lunch.”
“Sorry,” Shawn said. “How long it felt.”
“Oh, my God.”
Tara kneeled down next to the couch and took Gus’ free hand. “It was a long, long night, and a longer morning,” she said. “But Shawn was with you every minute of that time.”
“And now we’re going to get the guy who did this to you,” Shawn said.
“The impound attendant?”
“Exactly. He’s hiding something, and he thought he could scare us away by waving his shotgun at us.”
“Actually, I think he thought he could scare us away by killing us,” Gus said.
“Either way, he was wrong. And we’re going to take him down.”
“Did the police find out anything?”
“The police?” Shawn said. “What do they have to do with anything?”
“Didn’t you call them to say he’d tried to kill us?”
“So they could bungle the case the way they did with Veronica Mason’s?” Shawn asked. “This guy is ours, and we’re going to make sure he pays for what he did. We’re going to spend every minute of every day uncovering his criminal conspiracy. We’re never going to stop until-Hey!” Shawn shoved the newspaper at Gus, pointing at a small boxed headline in the bottom right corner. “Look at that.”
Gus focused on a small headline that read “Local Businessman to Invest in Area, details page six.”
“Way to focus, Captain Attention Span,” Gus said.
“Just look,” Shawn said.
Gus managed to stretch his arms far enough apart to open the paper to the correct page. At least it was the page indicated by the tease. All Gus saw was a large ad promising that the junior partner in a major mattress company would commit suicide if he were forced to sell his stock at the insanely low prices his senior colleague had promised.
“‘You’re killing me, Larry?’” Gus read.
“Oh, we’re killing him all right-but Larry’s got nothing to do with it.” Shawn pointed to a small article running directly under the mattress chain’s generous delivery policy.
“‘A venture capitalist has pledged to invest several billion dollars in the Santa Barbara economy, helping local companies compete on a national playing field,’” Gus read.
“Keep reading.”
“‘Santa Barbara native Dallas Steele, who spent the last ten years as the managing partner of a New York investment bank-’” Gus stopped. “Dallas Steele? From high school?”
“Check the photo,” Shawn said.
Gus peered down at the tiny article. There was nothing but type. “There is no photo.”
“Exactly!”
Lost, Gus dropped the paper and stared at Shawn’s beaming face. Tara beamed beside him. “I don’t get it,” he said.
“No, he didn’t get it and we did,” Shawn said. “That jerk Dallas Steele comes swaggering back into town-”
“I don’t remember him being a jerk.”
“That’s the brain damage talking,” Shawn said.
“You said there was no brain da-”
“He was the biggest phony at Santa Barbara High,” Shawn said. “With his perfect hair and perfect GPA and perfect football season and perfect girlfriend.”
Tara looked confused. “He doesn’t sound phony to me. He sounds like the real thing.”
“That’s the worst kind of phony. The genuine kind.”
“You’re right,” Tara said. “No wonder you hated him.”
“He was always nice to me,” Gus said. “I mean, when you tried to rent me to the football team as a tackling dummy, he talked me out of it.”
“Depriving you of badly needed income, to say nothing of extra PE credit,” Shawn said. “And all so he could say he’d helped out some geeky loser.”
“He never called me a loser.”
“Everyone called you a loser, Gus,” Shawn said. “It was the parachute pants. Anyway, there’s only one loser now, and that’s international phony Dallas Steele.”
“It says here he’s a multibillionaire.”
“And he’s still not happy,” Shawn said. “He’s got to come back to Santa Barbara and lord it over us all. And that might have worked, if it wasn’t for us meddling kids. We knocked him right off the front page. He’s probably sitting in some palatial estate right now, leafing forlornly through today’s paper, wondering exactly how his high school nemeses Shawn Spenser and Burton Guster bested him.”
Shawn held up his hand for a high five. Gus tried to reach up for it, but his arm wouldn’t rise above his rib cage. He didn’t really understand why he was supposed to be fiving, anyway. Dallas Steele was a billionaire investor, and Gus had spent the last day in a near-vegetative state because he couldn’t scrape up the cash to
