The Call of the Mild

Chapter Twenty-Three

The mood in Rushton, Morelock, and Weiss’ palatial conference room was somber. Even the view of the sunlight-speckled ocean seemed dimmer than it had when Shawn and Gus first took their seats.

That was only appropriate to the occasion. The firm’s senior partner had announced Archie Kane’s death as soon as the other five lawyers assembled around the mahogany table, and then spent the next half hour eulogizing his protege.

But beneath whatever sorrow the people in this room might have been feeling ran another emotion. Gus could feel the tension in the air, almost smell the suspicion. And he had no question what the cause of it was.

It was him.

More precisely, it was him and Shawn. They had been sitting on either side of Rushton at the head of the table when the other lawyers filed in for the meeting. But Rushton hadn’t introduced them, hadn’t even spared a single word or even a glance to acknowledge their existence. It was a testament to his power over his junior partners that not one of them asked anything about the two outsiders. Most of them wouldn’t even look at the detectives except in furtive glances, when they seemed to think no one would notice.

This left Gus free during Rushton’s eulogy to study those faces that were so studiously not looking at him. Three men, two women, all in their midthirties to early forties, all polished, buffed, waxed, and tanned to perfection. Gus didn’t know if there was such a thing as a human equivalent to the full detailing to which he treated the Echo every six months, but if there was, these people had it done to themselves on a weekly basis.

At first Gus was so blinded by the lawyers’ uniform perfection he could barely tell them apart. But as Rushton continued to speak, he began to spot differences between them. The first one who stood out was the closer of the two women. She had jet-black hair cut in bangs that fell low on her brow, and piercing blue eyes, a combination Gus suspected had not been crafted by nature. As he looked around the room, his eyes kept being drawn back to her. He tried to tell himself that it was because she had a uniquely forceful personality that overwhelmed the room even as she sat silently absorbing Rushton’s words, but the fact was that she was a dead ringer for Tanya Roberts in Beastmaster, except that she wasn’t climbing out of a sylvan pool naked. In Tanya’s honor, Gus mentally nicknamed her Kiri.

Feeling he was being unfair, Gus made himself focus on the other woman in the room. At least he did until his eyeballs began to hurt. It wasn’t that the short blond wasn’t beautiful. He assumed she was, anyway, since everyone else in the room could have been sculpted by Michelangelo. But her hat, her dress, her shoes, her purse, even her watchband were all such a bright green they seemed to radiate light with the intensity of your average lighthouse beacon. The result was that she seemed to be surrounded by a shimmering emerald haze not unlike a fairy’s aura in a Disney cartoon. He decided to call her Tinkerbell.

That made the man next to her Captain Hook. Not that he was missing a hand or had a habit of glancing nervously around the room for a ticking crocodile. But he had a wolfish, grasping look even as he attempted to convey the appropriate sorrow for his fallen comrade. Gus could practically see him laying out all the ways in which this new turn of events could be used to his advantage and how it could hurt him.

It was the man sitting next to the Captain whom Gus found most intriguing. He didn’t quite fit in with the others. Sure, his skin had that perfect poreless sheen, and each of the hairs on his head was so precisely cut and shaped that Gus suspected his barber trimmed only one before switching razors, and his suit fit better than Gus’ own skin and moved with his body so easily it seemed to have been woven out of mercury.

But unlike the other lawyers, this one actually seemed to have the occasional emotion, and some of these even played out on his face. There wasn’t a lot of sentiment present, and in another context Gus might never have noticed anything at all. But in a group of peers who betrayed somewhat less of whatever they were feeling than a group of department store dummies, the slight twitches and frowns this lawyer displayed and then banished almost as soon as they first appeared might as well have been semaphore signals. There was only one word for a man whose every emotional response is so much bigger, louder, and more extravagant than anyone else’s, so Gus decided to call him Shatner.

He’d turned to appraise the next lawyer in line when he noticed that the man had turned to stare directly at him.

They were all staring at him. Kiri and Tink and Captain Hook and Shatner and the guy who did not know he was waiting for a clever nickname. What did they want? Was he supposed to say something?

Gus realized he’d stopped listening to Rushton’s speech several minutes ago. Now he tried to call up back whatever might have penetrated his ears but bounced off his brain. It was no use. He had no idea what he was supposed to do or say.

Gus could feel himself starting to panic. Under the table his knees were beginning to tremble. In another couple of seconds, he’d begin to do something he was sure no one else at this table had ever done: sweat.

Fortunately one of the lawyers who had been staring at him-a man whose white-blond hair, golden skin, and muscled physique would have led Gus to nickname him Doc Savage if he’d gotten the chance-turned to Rushton, a look of disapproval momentarily exposing his brilliant white teeth.

“We have a binding contract with InterTec and are obligated to continue paying them through the end of the year,” Savage said. “If you want to terminate that relationship and bring in our own in-house investigators, we should at least wait until that commitment has been fulfilled so we’re not paying twice for the same service.”

Gus understood now why everyone had been staring at him. Rushton had finally gotten around to the second item of business on today’s agenda, the one he had laid out for Shawn and Gus in his office. Shawn had wanted to be able to come and go at the firm at will, and he suggested that Rushton give him and Gus some kind of official cover that would entitle them to talk to the attorneys there. They could be auditors, Shawn suggested, or personnel consultants, or famous war correspondents who had taken time away from their vital service to the country risking their lives covering the global fight for freedom to write Rushton’s biography. Or caterers, if that was easier.

But Rushton had an idea that was far simpler and more audacious than anything even Shawn would have come up with. He would hire Psych to be the firm’s in-house investigative arm. That way Shawn and Gus could be entirely truthful about what they were doing at Rushton, Morelock, while still working undercover.

“The services are not identical, but complementary,” Rushton said. “InterTec is a fine firm and essential to our growing international business. But Psych has ways of doing things that can only be called unique.”

“I can think of another word for it.” It was Kiri, who was glaring at Shawn with those eyes as if she really could shoot ice bullets out of them.

“And what word would that be?” Gus heard the warning in Rushton’s voice. The dolphins frolicking in the ocean outside the window must have heard it. But either Kiri didn’t hear, or she was so angry she didn’t care.

Gus knew what the word was going to be. He’d heard it enough from people who refused to believe that his partner actually had the ability to read minds, sense auras, commune with the dead, or whatever new trick Shawn invented when it suited the situation. The word was “fraud,” and Gus couldn’t have resented it any more if it hadn’t been true.

Gus could see the letter f forming on Kiri’s lips. But before she could finish the epithet, she seemed to wither under Rushton’s cold stare.

“Fabulous,” she muttered. “And I hope that their first assignment is to uncover the truth about what happened to Archie Kane.”

Good for Kiri, Gus thought. Just like her namesake, this one was clearly no mere slave girl fit only to have her clothes stolen by ferrets, but a trained warrior. In one sentence she had not only put herself directly behind Rushton, but had also managed to deflect any suspicion away from herself. Gus didn’t know if she would turn out to be the one who’d killed the mime, but if she had, he now knew she would also turn out to be a formidable opponent.

“Is there anything you won’t lie about, Gwendolyn?” It was Shatner, and he was looking right at Kiri. So now Gus knew her real name. “We all know what you felt about Archie, and we all know that you are as disgusted as any of us at the idea of bringing these two frauds into this firm.”

There was a long moment of silence. Gus could see the various lawyers weighing the sides here and trying to choose between following Shatner’s lead and saying what everyone was thinking or falling in line behind the boss. Captain Hook in particular seemed to be taking the match out at least a dozen moves and still hadn’t found a convincing end game.

Shawn didn’t look concerned. He stood up casually and greeted the blank faces with a cheerful smile.

“First, I want to thank you all for your warm welcome,” Shawn said. “I want to thank Mr. Rushton for hiring us. And I’d particularly like to thank the gentleman who just spoke up. Because there’s nothing like being called a fraud by a man who dines on human flesh.”