The neighborhood was one of those quaint parts of the city dating from an ancient time when citizens of Santa Barbara still believed that the population who spent their lives serving their superiors, cleaning their houses, fixing their cars, or serving their dinners, should be allowed to live within a gas tank’s drive from them. The houses were designed and built for people who would use them to live in, possibly raise children in, not simply as markers to prove how much more money they had than their neighbors.
That meant there were no Moorish castles on this block, no Spanish palaces, or quasi-Mediterranean su pervillas. Instead, there were simple, one-story cottages and ranch houses, few with more than three bedrooms and a good number with only one bath. The small front yards were mostly patches of brown lawn, and there weren’t many houses not in need of a fresh coat of paint. A few blocks in either direction, the houses started to get bigger and newer as the older places were being replaced by lot-spanning micromansions, but this area was essentially untouched. Had the real estate boom gone on for another year, this street might have been demolished to make room for a fleet of grander dwellings, but the discovery that the area had been the dumping ground for a local chemical company’s effluent before being developed for housing tended to make the land here less attractive to spec builders. Small wonder that you could still buy a house on this street for as little as eight hundred thousand dollars.
If there were any houses still standing after today, that was. Right now, that seemed to be in question.
Both ends of the block had been closed off by fire engines. A squadron of police cars was arrayed up and down the street, and uniformed officers were pounding on doors, grabbing the residents who opened them, and racing them away beyond the fire engine boundaries. A boxy gray truck loomed in front of a particularly shabby Cape Cod, the words BOMB SQUAD emblazoned on all sides to chase away any residents who might have ignored the police pounding on their doors.
Shawn and Gus stood with Detectives Lassiter and O’Hara, staring at the Cape Cod.
“This is fun,” Shawn said finally. “Tomorrow you should all come over and stand outside my house.”
“No one asked you to come along, Spencer,” Lassiter said. “I think we can handle this perfectly well without your help.”
“What, standing around and watching while no one does anything?” Shawn said. “Nobody does that better than me.”
“He’s the champ,” Gus said. “He never misses an episode of Private Practice.”
“This is called staging,” Lassiter said. “We’re getting all our people into position, evacuating the civilians out of the area, and then we move.”
“That’s not very interesting,” Shawn said. “In the movies, this part is handled in a few quick cuts.”
“Or a montage,” Gus said.
“Only if the house in question is located in 1987,” Shawn said. “And then the audience spends their time wishing all these cops would turn their weapons on Kenny Loggins before he starts another song. The point is, we’re supposed to cut in right before the action starts.”
“If what you want is a movie, go see one in a theater,” Lassiter said.
“That’s a good idea,” Shawn said. He turned to Detective O’Hara, who was snapping her cell phone shut. “How about it, Jules? We could catch a matinee of all twenty-two Bond movies, and probably still make it back before anything actually happens.”
“Shawn, you shouldn’t even be here,” O’Hara said. “It would probably be best if you and Gus moved back behind the line.”
“And miss all the excitement?” Shawn said. “Besides, you brought us here.”
Technically, that was true, but it certainly hadn’t been on purpose. Shawn and Gus had dropped by the police station to see if there had been any test results back on the air in the canisters from the Vegas penthouse. When they got there, they found Lassiter and O’Hara strapping themselves into Kevlar on their way to the door.
“Jules, Lassie!” Shawn said as the two detectives bustled past him.
“Can’t talk, sorry,” O’Hara said. “Come back tomorrow.”
The front door closed behind them.
“They didn’t just do that,” Shawn said.
“They so did,” Gus said.
“Didn’t even stop to apologize,” Shawn said.
“Or to let you have the last word,” Gus said.
“Exactly,” Shawn said. “I have a reputation to protect around here. Whenever anyone leaves the room, I get to make a pithy quip that sums up the essentials of the mise-en-scene in a way that not only adds some much- needed levity to our tragedy-besotted world, but gives a unique perspective that often leads everyone involved to see the situation in the correct light.”
“It’s amazing that they go anywhere without your services,” Gus said.
“It’s amazing they think they can get away with it,” Shawn said.
They could hear sirens starting up and the squeal of rubber on asphalt as a fleet of police cars tore out of the lot.
“What’s more amazing is that they seem to have been right about that,” Gus said.
“Not as long as my name is on this building,” Shawn said, grabbing Gus by the shoulder and propelling him toward the station’s rear exit.
As they made their way back, Gus finally understood what a young salmon must feel when it comes time to spawn. They were definitely swimming against the tide, as a swarm of police officers jostled past them on their way to the front door. Of course, Gus reasoned, a salmon was probably pretty sure that something good was going to happen when he finally reached the end of his upstream voyage, and Gus couldn’t imagine what they were going to find in the alley behind the station, besides a couple of Dumpsters and some really bad smells, but Shawn wasn’t giving him a choice in the matter.
Finally they reached the exit and Shawn threw open the metal door. Lassiter’s car was wedged lengthwise across the alley, an inch of clearance on either side. The detective backed up the sedan until the bumper hit the wall of the courthouse that sat behind the police department, then spun the wheels left, slammed the gearshift into drive, and jerked forward until the front bumper hit the back of the station. He spun the wheels back the other way, jammed into reverse, and made it back three inches before tapping the rear wall again. Through the windshield, Gus could see that Lassiter was talking the whole time. He couldn’t hear anything through the car’s closed windows, but it wasn’t too hard to tell exactly what the detective was saying.
“Come on,” Shawn said to Gus, and pushed him toward the passenger’s side of the car. Before Gus made it to the rear door, Shawn had already slid in behind Lassiter.
“Need a little help, Lassie?” Shawn said cheerily as Gus got in next to him.
“Get out of the car, Spencer,” Lassiter said, putting the stick into drive and inching forward again.
Shawn pulled on the door handle, but the lock didn’t open. “Sorry, Detective, I can’t make it work,” Shawn said. “It’s like you use this car for transporting criminals or something.”
“Transporting criminals is exactly what I don’t want to do right now,” Lassiter said. “Detective O’Hara, please pull these two out of the backseat.”
“You’re almost free, Carlton,” O’Hara said. “Do you really want to take the time? Besides, maybe they can be some help.”
Shawn and Gus put on their most helpful expressions and leaned into the rearview mirror. Lassiter yanked the mirror around so he could see past them to the alley and backed up until he bumped into the courthouse wall. He twisted the wheel around and put the car into drive.
“If I ever find out who moved my parking space, I’m going to be filling out officer-involved shooting reports for the rest of my life,” Lassiter said, pointing up at the RESERVED FOR HEAD DETECTIVE sign stuck onto the side of the station. Gus could make out traces of blue marker poking out from the right side, a WN and a heart’s height above it, ES.
The front bumper scraped the side of the station, and then the car was free. Lassiter flipped on the siren, slammed his foot down on the gas, and the sedan rocketed forth into traffic.
During the short, fast drive to the Lower Eastside, Shawn tried to strike up a conversation with the detectives, or at least supply them with a pithy quip that would sum up the mise-en-scene. But neither Lassiter nor O’Hara seemed interested in chatting, and Shawn was having difficulty summing up the situation when he didn’t
