The Call of the Mild

Chapter Seventeen

The sun had crested the hills east of Santa Barbara, the fog had retreated to the horizon, and the ocean was sparkling in the morning light. The waves off Hendry’s Beach should have been filled with surfers finishing up their predawn runs.

But the few surfers who were here were out of the water, pressed up against a line of crime scene tape thirty feet back from the berm. Beyond the tape a small battalion of uniformed officers and red-jacketed lifeguards patrolled the sand, keeping the crowd of onlookers away from the wet-suited divers who were emerging from the surf. The only onlooker allowed inside the police perimeter was an ancient man in an electric wheelchair, who sat at the waterline staring sadly out to sea.

Shawn and Gus made their way through the crowd to the tape.

“You still haven’t explained what we’re doing here,” Gus said.

“Because sometimes words aren’t enough,” Shawn said. “A strong visual can convey all the meaning of pages worth of verbiage in so much less time.”

“Does that include all the time since you woke me up to tell me you’d found the mime?” Gus said. “Because it’s been more than two hours, and you can fit a lot of words into one hundred and twenty-seven minutes.”

“Don’t forget, a chunk of that time was spent eating breakfast,” Shawn said. “You wouldn’t want me to talk with my mouth full. That would be rude.”

“In between bites, I’m sure you could have squeezed in an answer to a simple question or two,” Gus said. “Like ‘what do you mean you found the mime?’ ”

“You’ve got a point,” Shawn said. “That would have taken only six words: ‘I mean I found the mime.’ Or I could have answered your follow-up question, ‘Where is the mime?’ That would have been only three words.”

“And if you had taken a break between bites of your breakfast burrito, which three words would you have used?”

“In regard to the mime’s current location?” Shawn jerked his thumb towards the divers emerging from the surf. “In the water.”

He lifted the crime scene tape and ducked under it. Just as Gus joined him on the other side, a uniformed officer stepped in front of them.

“Hey!” the officer said. “Didn’t you see the tape?”

“Of course I saw it,” Shawn said. “That’s why I ducked under it. If I hadn’t noticed it, I’d probably still be stuck in place, trying to figure out why I couldn’t move forward.”

The officer put a beefy hand on Shawn’s shoulder. “Did you happen to notice the words written across the tape?” he said.

“He didn’t bother,” Gus said. “Because a strong visual can convey so much more than any number of words.”

“And a patrol car can convey your ass straight to jail if you don’t step behind the tape,” the officer said.

Gus glanced down the beach and saw that two other officers had noticed the disturbance and were on their way to assist. He and Shawn had met a lot of cops in the years since they’d been working as private eyes, but the ones patrolling this scene didn’t seem to be among them. Not surprising, since the officer blocking their way had a deep tan and premature wrinkles strongly suggesting he had been working beach patrol for many years, and try as they might to get beachfront crimes, Psych’s cases rarely brought Shawn and Gus down to the ocean.

“Maybe we should do what the officer suggests,” Gus said.

“That would be the prudent course of action,” Shawn said.

“You’ve got that right,” the officer agreed.

“Unfortunately, we’re not prudes,” Shawn said. “We’re private detectives, and we’ve been asked to meet our client on this very beach at this very time.”

“Are you, now?” the officer asked, although the question mark seemed to Gus to be more of a rhetorical device than an indication of true curiosity.

“We are now,” Shawn said. “We also were then. And we still will be ten minutes from now, which is more than I can say for you and your present job as a police officer if you prevent me from speaking to my client, who happens to be one of the richest and most powerful men in Santa Barbara.”

There was a flash of uncertainty on the cop’s face. An officer on beach patrol spends his life confiscating beers, finding lost children, and putting out bonfires. None of these activities brings him in contact with the elite of Santa Barbara, who either own their own beach or know someone who does, and therefore he is rarely threatened with the force of the local political establishment. This cop didn’t seem particularly intimidated by Shawn’s warning, but he was intrigued enough to signal his fellow officers to back off a step.

“Are you threatening me?” the officer said.

“Of course not,” Gus said before Shawn could answer.

“I don’t threaten people, Officer,” Shawn said. “My lawyer does. Of course most of the time the person he’s threatening is me because I haven’t paid my bill. But the point remains, that scrunched-up old geezer in the wheelchair is my client, and if you don’t let us through to see him, all sorts of bad things are going to happen.”

“Like what?” the officer said.

“Well, for one thing, a late-model automobile is going to rise up out of the bay like the Red October, ” Shawn said. “And do you really want to hear Sean Connery trying to sound Russian? Wasn’t the Spanish accent in Highlander painful enough for you?”

Up until this moment, Gus had been feeling pretty good about the new day. As frustrated as he was by Shawn’s refusal to explain what they were doing at the beach, the idea that he really had found the mime promised that today would be substantially better than the previous one. But now the officer was fingering the snap on his holster, and Gus was beginning to anticipate a second day of staring into gun barrels.

The other two uniformed officers joined them at the tape. One of them was as tanned and lined as the first, but the other, Gus was pleased to see, was both pale and wrinkle-free.

“What’s going on here?” the pale cop said.

“These two clowns claim they’re private detectives,” the first officer said.

“Actually, only this clown claimed to be a private detective,” Shawn said. “The other clown is too much of a chicken to have said anything, and in fact is wishing that I had never woken him up this morning.”

“Really?” Gus said. “You think it’s better to be a clown than a chicken?”

“People rarely coat clowns in batter and drop them into boiling oil,” Shawn said.

“There’s always a first time,” Gus said.

The pale officer looked at Shawn, then at Gus. “I’ve seen these two around crime scenes before,” he said. “I think I even escorted them off one once at the instruction of Detective Lassiter, but he had me bring them back right after. So what is it you want here?”

“I was trying to ward off disaster,” Shawn said. “But it looks like I’m too late.”

A dozen yards beyond the surf’s edge, the bay had begun to boil. At least that’s what it looked like to Gus. The surface of the water was bubbling; waves seemed to be breaking far from shore. And then the waters parted and a shiny black object bobbed to the surface. As the water poured off it, Gus could see it was a long Town Car floating on an enormous inflatable raft.

“I’m warning you, if Alec Baldwin steps out of that thing, no one tell him he’s been replaced by Harrison Ford,” Shawn said. “And for heaven’s sake, don’t mention the name Ben Affleck.”