Mind-Altering Murder

Chapter Five

Gus glanced at his watch, then looked down at the orange chicken congealing on the plate in front of him. When the kid in the paper hat with a panda on it had dropped it on his table forty-seven minutes ago, Gus had picked up the plastic fork and made an attempt to eat a little of it. Even after two tines snapped off somewhere between the outer layer of citrus-flavored goo and the inner shell of deep-fried chicken skin, he still thought he might nibble at a couple of the smaller pieces. But before he could yank a chunk of chicken out of the rapidly hardening sauce, his stomach growled a warning and sent a tendril of bile into the back of his throat. If he tried to swallow anything from this plate, he’d have reason to regret it.

It wasn’t the quality of the food that was turning Gus’ stomach. He’d eaten at several Chop Them Sticks outlets since they started popping up a few years back, and the Orange You Glad You Ordered the Chicken was always exactly the same-hardened nuggets of dubious poultry in a sauce that tasted like double-strength orange Jell-O. That was fine with Gus, who had long believed that an entree that doubled as dessert saved both time and money.

Gus looked back at his watch just in time to see the larger hand slide over the four. In ten minutes it would be twelve thirty, and in ten more his flight would start boarding. He’d timed the walk from the strip of fast-food restaurants to the terminal and he knew it wouldn’t take him more than five minutes. Security wouldn’t add more than another five. The Burbank airport’s main midweek function was as a commuter portal, and since even the most laid-back techie tried to get to work no later than noon, the lines were rarely long this time of day.

Better yet, Gus was leaving from the smaller of the two terminals. He’d decided to fly into San Francisco, even though it would cost half as much to land in Oakland. It wasn’t simply the convenience of being able to hop on a BART train at SFO that would take him to his ultimate destination-for the difference in ticket price Gus could have hired a limo in Oakland and still had money left over for a substantially better lunch than the one in front of him.

It was, in fact, the ridiculously higher ticket price that convinced Gus to fly from Burbank to San Francisco. He didn’t think he’d left any clues about his trip, even making his plane reservations from what might have been Santa Barbara’s last pay phone. If he’d been careless, though, he didn’t want to make it easy for Shawn to track him down. That meant doing the opposite of what his friend would know he’d normally do. Which was, of course, to take the easiest flight or the cheapest, those two rarely occurring together.

If he’d cared about cost, he would have flown out of LAX, where competition between airlines served to keep prices low. If convenience had been the key, there were frequent, if ludicrously costly, flights from Santa Barbara International to the Bay Area. Driving eighty miles down the always jammed 101 to Burbank only to spend as much as he would on a ticket from Santa Barbara was the dumbest thing he could have done.

He thought he’d made it out of Santa Barbara without being noticed. Shawn had scheduled himself for another immersion in Criminal Genius and was without a doubt completely occupied in burning down a police station or looting an orphanage when Gus slid behind the wheel of the Echo and headed out of town. But if Shawn had begun to suspect that Gus was trying to slip away unnoticed, he might try to track down his flight. With a limited amount of time before his plane took off, Shawn would have to prioritize his search, and terminal two at Burbank would barely kiss the bottom of the list.

Gus’ stomach released a fresh flare of acid and he thought he could feel a piece of the lining burn away. This was all so absurd. He was sneaking around as if he were cheating on his spouse, and it was tearing his insides apart. What he should have done was just tell Shawn he was heading up to San Francisco for the afternoon, and on the off chance that there were any follow-up questions, simply told him the truth.

Except if he did that, he’d have to take the consequences. If he lied, if he snuck around, then he could put off that moment for just a little bit longer.

It didn’t matter if his stomach felt like a face hugger had planted an egg in him and it was about to burst out. Once Shawn learned the truth, their entire lives as they knew them would be over. To postpone that, he’d take a little pain.

Gus looked at his watch again. The minute hand had moved ahead a couple of clicks. It was time to start moving. He checked all the tables in the restaurant, in case Shawn had slipped behind one while he was staring at his food, but he was the only customer. Shawn was clever enough to go undercover behind the counter, but unless he was also clever enough to have become Chinese over the past couple of hours, Gus was safe from all three members of the Chop Them Sticks team.

Gus slid out along his bench, then grabbed his tray and deposited his uneaten lunch in the trash. Normally he would have felt guilty about throwing away so much perfectly good food when there were hungry people all over the world, but he had more pressing things to feel guilty about right now, so this would have to wait. Besides, judging by the number of similarly full trays in the bin, this might not have counted as “perfectly good.”

The air outside the restaurant was hot and dry; it stank of jet fuel and deep-fry oil. The sun blasted down through a cloudless sky and the heat waves radiating up from the asphalt made it feel like there hadn’t been a breeze in days. Gus longed to be back in Santa Barbara, hanging out at the pier with Shawn, feeling the soft salt spray on his face. Instead he quickened his step and crossed the street to where a narrow concrete sidewalk snaked along the lanes of the airport entrance.

As he’d expected, the airport was practically deserted. Gus made a left at the Southwest counter and walked quickly through the narrow corridor that connected the two terminals. Fishing his driver’s license out of his pocket, he stepped up to the United counter.

The ticket agent glanced at Gus’ license, then typed his name into the system. “Looks like we’re up for a quick trip today, Mr. Guster,” he said. “We have you booked on the nine o’clock return flight tonight.”

“That’s right,” Gus said.

“Must be business, then,” the agent said, printing out Gus’ boarding pass. “If you were going to San Francisco for pleasure, there’s no way you’d be coming back in only six hours.”

“Business,” Gus agreed, feeling a sudden urge to confess everything to the complete stranger who was beaming across the counter at him. To explain everything he’d been feeling over the past couple of months and why what he was doing wasn’t really a betrayal. Instead he scooped up his driver’s license and boarding pass and walked toward the gate.