The Call of the Mild

Chapter Eighteen

Gus stared at the floating car, amazed. Not so much at the car itself, of course. He’d lived in Santa Barbara long enough to understand what he was seeing here. The car had driven off the cliffs that towered above this beach and fallen into the water. A team of rescue divers had been sent in to bring it up. They would have spent the last hour painstakingly stretching the uninflated raft underneath the car’s tires. And then, when the vehicle was situated exactly in its center, they would have inflated the raft. The buoyancy would have brought it, and the car, up to the surface, where it could be towed to shore.

No, what amazed Gus was not the way the police were able to get a car off the bay’s floor. It was that Shawn knew it was going to happen. More precisely, it was that Shawn knew it was going to happen and hadn’t bothered to mention it to him.

“Do you have something to do with that car?” the pale officer asked.

“Only to the extent that it’s registered to the law firm of Rushton, Morelock, and Weiss,” Shawn said. “And that Oliver Rushton is sitting down at the water’s edge waiting to find out what it was doing in Peter Tork’s locker.”

“He means Davy Jones’ locker,” Gus explained quickly, before any of the officers could start using the clubs they carried on their belts.

“I never liked Davy Jones much,” Shawn said. “He was always too pretty for me to believe him as a struggling musician. Plus, how big a star could he have been if he had time to play Marcia Brady’s school dance-and for free, at that?”

The pale officer studied Shawn again, and then jerked his thumb back at the man in the wheelchair. “If Oliver Rushton is waiting for you, then you’d better go see him,” he said. “But I’m keeping my eye on you.”

“You really believe this guy?” one of the other beach patrol officers said. “Maybe we should escort him down.”

“Believe me, if Mr. Rushton doesn’t want to talk to him, we’ll know pretty fast,” the pale officer said. “And if he does, you don’t want him to know the name of the cop who kept them apart.”

The tanned officer grimaced, but he moved aside and let Shawn and Gus walk down the beach towards the man in the wheelchair.

“What are we doing here?” Gus whispered to Shawn as soon as they were out of the cops’ earshot.

“You know as much as I do,” Shawn said. Then he slapped himself on the forehead. “Oh, no, you don’t. Because while I was doing intensive research, you were sleeping.”

“The only kind of intensive research you’ve ever done is copy off my test paper,” Gus said.

“Not entirely,” Shawn said. “Remember when we had to do that book report on The Three Musketeers and you wouldn’t let me read what you had written?”

“Because the time before, you copied my report and turned it in first, so I got blamed for stealing from you,” Gus said.

“That was the first time I had to do my own intensive research,” Shawn said. “And it taught me a valuable lesson I still follow today.”

“You were so worried, you stayed up half the night flipping channels,” Gus said. “And by sheer luck you found a station showing a movie of The Three Musketeers, so you wrote your report on that, which might have worked, except you kept referring to D’Artagnan as Logan and speculating about why the Sandmen didn’t take out Cardinal Richelieu, since he was clearly over thirty.”

“Exactly,” Shawn said. “Which is what I did last night. Only without the whole Three Musketeers movie thing, which is too bad because I was hoping to pick up a few fancy fencing moves. But, instead, I came across a report on the early-morning news about a high-speed car chase that ended with a Town Car flying off the palisades and into the ocean.”

“That explains what the car is doing in the water,” Gus said. “And it explains why the police are here. But it doesn’t explain why you thought this had anything to do with the mime.”

“During the chase, the police were able to run the Town Car’s plates and discover that it was registered to the law firm of Rushton, Morelock, and Weiss. Which, if you were extremely familiar with the firm and didn’t feel like using its entire name every time it came up in conversation, could easily be abbreviated as Rushmore.”

“No, it couldn’t,” Gus said.

“I’m pretty sure it could,” Shawn said. “Let’s see-you take the first part of Morelock. That’s the ‘More.’ And then you slap that together with the first part of Rushton. That gives you

‘Rush.’ You put them together and you get something like-wait for it-More Rush. No, better still: Rushmore.”

“But that’s not how law firms abbreviate their names,” Gus said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know why not,” Gus said. “Maybe it’s because the senior partners like to hear their names said out loud. If Rushton, Morelock, and Weiss is too long, they’ll just call it Rushton Morelock.”

Out in the water, Gus could see divers tying nylon ropes to eyes in the raft. One of the divers gathered all the ropes together and started swimming towards the shore.

“Are you sure about that?” Shawn asked.

“I’ve read every one of John Grisham’s books,” Gus said. “And that’s how they do it.”

“Well, then, there are two possibilities,” Shawn said. “One is that John Grisham isn’t always right-which you have to admit seems a lot more plausible after that book about the football player who went to Rome and ate pizza.”

“What’s the other one?” Gus said.

“That we’re about to make a mortal enemy out of one of the most powerful men in Santa Barbara,” Shawn said.