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
