“It’s not,” Gus said.
“Gus was asking why I thought it was appropriate to announce my intentions to you in a room that was designed as a complete fraud,” Steele said. “The reason for that is as simple as it is obvious. Because you are complete frauds. And tomorrow the whole world will know.”
Chapter Fifteen
Gus watched the line of light creep across the eastern lip of the cereal bowl. After six hours of staring into the darkness, the newly revealed view of the valley should have been a refreshing change. But all it did was make Gus realize that the press conference was going to start in a couple of hours, and they still had no plan for what they were going to do.
At least Gus didn’t have a plan. Shawn seemed to have come up with one on his own. The light snoring from the adjoining room suggested that he had put it into action.
Gus knew that he should be the one sleeping peacefully. Shawn should have spent the entire night staring hopelessly out the window. After all, it wasn’t Gus who had a reputation as a psychic to protect. It wasn’t Gus who’d be singled out for the greatest ridicule.
But there was going to be plenty of ridicule to go around, and even a fraction of it would be enough to cover Gus with a veneer of shame he’d never be able to scrape off. Everyone they’d ever met, everyone they were ever going to meet, everyone in the whole world they’d never meet would think of them as phonies. His name would be a punch line on the late-night shows. He thought back on all the ways the kids in middle school had twisted “Guster” into obscene variations, and shuddered to contemplate what highly paid comedy writers could do with it. He’d finally managed to convince his parents that his work with Shawn was a real career, not a distraction from his conventional job pushing pharmaceuticals; there was no way they’d take Psych seriously now. If he ever wanted to have another civil conversation with them he’d have to go back to pharmaceutical sales full-time-if his company didn’t fire him first. He wasn’t sure about the exact wording, but he was pretty sure that there was a clause in his contract that said being exposed on national television as a fraud was grounds for termination.
The scale of their losses was that huge. In a matter of weeks, they had not only lost the entire hundred million dollars Dallas gave them to invest-they were now actually thirteen million dollars in the red.
Shawn and Gus’ first disastrous investment was an electric car that could run six hundred miles on a single charge. Gus thought it had the potential to change the world, and it might have-but only as long as no one ever drove above seven miles an hour. It turned out that once the cars hit the eight-mph mark, their batteries burst into flame. Except that “burst” didn’t adequately capture the true quality of the explosion that ensued. Two late-night janitors had decided to drag race through the factory in a couple of test models, and investigators were still trying to figure out exactly how deep the crater was.
At least that damage was confined to an abandoned corner of New Mexico. Shawn and Gus had also invested Steele’s money in a company called Urban Petroleum that planned to use their new low-footprint technology to drill for oil where no one had ever been able to drill for oil before. Their first well, a demonstration project, was set up inside a vacant storefront on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, right across from Rockefeller Center. That way, when oil started gushing the Today show wouldn’t have to go far to cover them. Unfortunately all they discovered was that there was a subway tunnel right under their drill, along with the main water, sewer, and electric lines serving all of Midtown. The only gusher they hit was a gusher of lawsuits.
And then there was the Transformatrons, the Chinese toy boats that turned into battling robots. At first they were every bit as successful as Shawn had predicted. They might have taken over the entire toy business if only some of the consumers hadn’t insisted on immersing their toy boats in water. It seemed that the Chinese manufacturer had used a special glue, which, when wet, dissolved into a substance chemically identical to a powerful hallucinogenic drug.
The rest of the investments failed less spectacularly, but not one of them had earned a nickel yet. Still, the huge financial disaster wasn’t the worst part. That was the joy Dallas Steele took in the loss. As Dal laid out the scope of their failure, his smile only got broader.
“How can you be so happy?” Gus had finally managed to choke out after Dallas finished listing their disasters. “You just sat by and let us blow a hundred million of your dollars?”
“He wasn’t sitting by,” Shawn said. “He was actively involved. Weren’t you, Dal?”
Steele gave him an ironic bow. “I did preview some of the files before I asked Shepler to send them over.”
“Preview and edit, I’d say,” Shawn said. “Removing key information that would keep any intelligent investor away.”
“Oh, much more than that,” Steele said. “I took out information that would have scared off even you two. But you’ll be happy to know I’ve restored it all now, so if you try to claim you were framed, there’s plenty of evidence to prove you’re lying.”
“But why?” Gus said. “It cost you a fortune.”
“It would be worth three times that,” Steele said.
“If all you wanted was to humiliate us, you could have just written us a check for fifty mil, and we would have done it ourselves,” Shawn said.
Steele turned his blinding smile on Shawn. “As I told you, my wife was quite impressed with your work at the Veronica Mason trial. She thinks you’re some kind of miracle man. And I hated the idea of my beloved bride actually believing in nonsense like psychic powers.”
Gus tried to make sense of what he was hearing. “You spent a hundred million dollars, you destroyed half of Midtown Manhattan, you blew a hole in Arizona-all to win an argument with your wife? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“As Shawn said, you don’t understand how rich people live,” Steele said.
As the line of sunlight crept down the bowl, Gus tried to catch any glimpse of metallic red. His last sighting of Tara’s car had come hours ago when they were still driving up to the pass. It seemed almost impossible that she’d stayed up in the mountains waiting for them. And yet that impossibility was his only hope for any benefit to come out of their trip up here. It sure wasn’t coming from the press conference.
The next two hours passed with the same mixture of tedium and anxiety as a death row prisoner’s final moments. There was the last meal of Gus’ favorite breakfast foods, which he could barely bring himself to nibble at. There were the hearty words of encouragement that it was all going to be over soon, and he’d be in a better place. Gus suspected that such sentiments would be no more convincing coming from a prison chaplain than they were from his oldest friend, even assuming that the priest wouldn’t keep interrupting his homilies to ask, “Are you going to eat that?” And then there was the heavy jangling of keys outside the cell door-or in this case, the trilling of Shepler’s cell phone as he fielded calls from reporters who’d gotten lost on the way to the press conference- followed by the long, slow walk down the last mile. In this case, the last mile was actually that, since they had to make their way down the twisting stairs, then through endless corridors until they finally arrived at Eagle View’s private theater, where the spectators were waiting for Steele to flip the switch on Shawn and Gus.
During the entire endless march, Gus and Shawn hadn’t said a word to each other. Gus had barely looked up from his feet, while Shawn was lost in what some might have assumed was worry but what Gus knew was actually just his usual prenoon haze. Now that they were finally standing right outside the chamber, it seemed that they should have some kind of significant last words. Gus couldn’t find any. It was up to Shawn to say what they both felt.
“Shep tells me there’s a bowling alley in this place,” he said. “After we’re done with the press conference, what do you say we do a couple frames?”
Before Gus could answer, Shepler pulled open the great doors and ushered them through. “Enjoy the press conference, gentlemen,” he said. “I have to run the sound and the lights, so I can’t be with you. But I will be watching from the booth.”
That there was no explosion of sound as the doors closed behind them was merely the failure of the world to live up to what was going on inside Gus’ mind.
Gus always loved the idea of having an actual theater in a home. Not a wide TV with a popcorn machine
