The Call of the Mild

Chapter Eight

The freeways on the drive back to Santa Barbara were nearly empty, the sky was a vivid blue, and dolphins were dancing in the waters off the Pacific Coast Highway. But Gus didn’t notice any of that. His foot was jammed down on the accelerator and his eyes locked on the road ahead.

In the passenger seat, Shawn snapped shut his cell phone in frustration. “I can’t believe Lassie hung up on me again.”

“When he understands what’s happening, he’ll listen.”

“That’s the problem,” Shawn said. “Before he can understand, he has to listen first. And as soon as I start to tell him the story, he bursts out laughing and hangs up.”

“If you tell him we were held up at gunpoint-”

“In a public men’s room by a killer mime who stole our clothes.” Shawn finished Gus’ sentence for him. “Last time I tried that he put me on hold, then forwarded my call to Papa Julio’s Casa de Pizza.”

“What did he say when you mentioned Ellen Svaco?”

“One word,” Shawn said. “Who?”

Gus tried to make sense of this. Had Lassie simply forgotten he’d sent the teacher to see them, or did this suggest something more ominous? “There’s got to be something we can do.”

“You can start by getting off the freeway here.”

Gus had been so agitated he hadn’t noticed they were almost at the Los Carneros Road exit into Isla Vista. Giving his rearview a quick scan, he tore across four lanes and flew down the ramp, slamming on the brakes for the stop sign at the bottom. Making sure there was no cross traffic, he turned left onto Los Carneros and headed into town.

“Maybe we’ve got this all wrong,” Gus said. He could see the traffic light at Hollister straight ahead. It was red. He gunned the car, figuring to make the next green. “How do we know this was a setup?”

“Do you really have to ask?”

Gus checked to make sure Shawn was wearing his seat belt. He was. Which meant there was no point in slamming on the brakes to watch him go flying through the windshield. Instead he pressed his foot on the accelerator as he turned right through the green light onto Hollister.

“Are you asking if I have to ask why anyone would send us to a public garden to be held up by a mime?” he said through clenched teeth.

“It was a rhetorical question,” Shawn said. “Because the answer is so obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention.”

“I guess I’ve been a little distracted,” Gus said. “Little things like being kidnapped do that to me.”

“You should work on that,” Shawn said. “You let the bad guys know they can throw you off with a little gunplay and you’ll never have a moment’s peace.”

“That’s good to know,” Gus said in a close approximation of the tone his mother used to use when she caught him feeding his brussels sprouts to the dog. “Thank you so much for the advice.”

The light ahead was turning yellow. Gus floored it and made a fast left onto Storke Avenue.

“It’s the least I can do,” Shawn said. “As an experienced private detective, I have a duty to train the generation that’s going to follow me.”

“You’ve been a private detective for five seconds longer than me,” Gus said. “And that’s only because you said my fly was unzipped when we were walking up to the licensing window, and I stopped to look, so you got your license first.”

“Which is why I feel I should share my experience and knowledge with you,” Shawn said. “So let’s walk through what we already know.”

Gus didn’t want to walk through anything, but he knew he’d never get any answers unless he played along. “Ellen Svaco lost her necklace, so she went to the police to ask them to find it,” he said. “They wouldn’t help, so she came to us. We did find it, but then it was stolen by a gun-wielding mime.”

“Very good,” Shawn said. “You’ve got it all exactly right. Except for one small detail.”

“What’s that?”

“All of it,” Shawn said.

Gus turned right onto El Colegio Road and immediately slammed on the brakes. There was an unbroken line of cars in front of him. He cursed to himself, remembering why he hated coming to Isla Vista. Home of the University of California- Santa Barbara, and situated along some of the most beautiful coastline in California, Isla Vista needed to cram tens of thousands of penniless college students into some of the world’s priciest real estate. That meant packing dozens of people into apartments barely big enough for one, which gave the town a population density somewhere between that of Lower Manhattan and central Beijing. And since rents even for those cramped spaces were so high, very few of the students could afford a car. That meant the streets were flooded with alternative modes of transport-all ridden by people who sincerely believed that traffic laws applied to everyone on the earth except them.

Fortunately the address Ellen Svaco had given them wasn’t too much farther, and they’d have to cover only a few blocks of the town’s main business district before they’d turn right, so there would be no need to cut across lanes of traffic. But Gus knew it could easily take fifteen minutes to go a quarter mile through the area, and there was no other way to get there.

Gus resisted the urge to punch the pedal and simply shove the other cars out of his way and tried to put his adrenaline rush to work understanding what was going on.

“I was there for all of it,” he said. “I remember it as if it happened today. Because it did.”

“Lassiter had no idea who Ellen Svaco was,” Shawn said.

“She never went to the police. She told us that story to manipulate us into helping her.”

“Why all this intrigue? She lost her necklace on a field trip.”

The car inched forward.

“I don’t think it was lost,” Shawn said. “I don’t think she’d ever had it. And I have a feeling if we asked at her school, we’d discover that the Descanso Gardens field trip was her idea. But it wasn’t really a field trip.”

“Then what was it?”

“A handoff,” Shawn said. “She brought the kids there as cover so she could collect the necklace.”

“From the tree?”

“From the lost and found,” Shawn said. “I’m sure someone turned it in a few days before.”

“Why so long?” Gus said. “And why the lost and found? Why not just give it to her?”

“Whoever had it must have been worried he was being followed,” Shawn said. “He couldn’t take a chance on meeting Ellen Svaco in person. And then something happened-maybe he caught a glimpse of whoever was following him. He panicked. He ran-but first he stopped by Descanso Gardens and turned the necklace in to the lost-and-found booth. Somehow he let her know it was there.”

“So why didn’t she just go pick it up?” Gus said as the car moved forward another couple of inches.

“She must have thought there was a chance she was being followed, too,” Shawn said. “If she was, it might seem suspicious for her to zip off to La Canada a day after her contact disappeared from around there.”

“That’s why you said the necklace had been there a couple of days.”

“You can’t just slap together a school field trip in an afternoon,” Shawn said. “And she needed the cover.”

“So she went to Descanso Gardens, but she didn’t pick up the locket.”

“Something made her suspicious,” Shawn said. “I’d guess it was having her other necklace stolen.”

“There’s another one?”

“Yes, but this one is just a regular necklace,” Shawn said.

“Remember there was a scratch on her neck? I thought that was from her snagging the chain on a tree. But what if whoever was following her got a little ahead of himself and tried to steal her necklace-only it was the wrong one?”

“So she sent us,” Gus said.

“Only they followed her to our office, and then they followed us the rest of the way,” Shawn said.

“Who is ‘they’?” Gus said. “Was the mime in league with Ellen Svaco or against her? And who or what is this Rushmore he claimed he was protecting?”

“Those are three of the questions we’re going to ask her.” Shawn drummed on the dashboard like Desi Arnaz with a bongo. The traffic in front of them moved forward, and Gus saw they’d reached Ellen’s street. He made a hard right turn onto a treelined residential boulevard and pressed the accelerator to the floor. Within seconds they’d reached Ellen Svaco’s address, a small bungalow a block from the ocean. The were three shallow steps leading up to a small porch in front of the door. And on the porch, facing the door, was a man.

If you had only one word to describe the man, it would be “average.” Average height. Average weight. Average suit. The only remarkable thing about him was his hair, which looked like it had been designed for the Romulan incarnation of Mr. Bean.

His hair and the gun he held in his right hand.