Chapter Text
Gus didn’t really know why he was still at the office.
He wasn’t prone to inklings of intuition like his partner (though he knew Shawn wasn’t usually, either; he was more logical than Gus preferred to give him credit for). But he was prone to predicting Shawn’s movements, and if he knew his friend, then he knew that at some point during his “nannying,” (as Shawn referred to his police detail) Shawn was going to peel off and try to figure out where Rollins is on his own. And Gus also knew that if Shawn was going to run off at night, he would eventually double back to the Psych office, to regroup for some reason or another.
So Gus had taken to sleeping at the office for the past four nights, so that he could intercept what would no doubt be a stress-addled Shawn (like normal Shawn, but more disconnected from reality, if such a thing were possible). No biggie.
He had been all settled on the couch—beneath his checkered blanket, clutching Eunice, and all—more than anticipating the clattering sound of a hyperactive Shawn unlocking the front door as he watched The Karate Kid .
Gus hadn’t been prepared for the sound of a knock at all.
He hesitated, furrowing more deeply beneath the blanket.
The knock returned, more insistently.
“This is a bad idea,” he told himself, throwing the blanket off of him reluctantly and standing up. It was probably Buzz or Lassie or Jules come to look for Shawn, because Shawn, predictably, had run off somewhere like an idiot. Even still, Gus held tightly to Eunice’s unicorn horn, just in case he needed to defend himself.
He tentatively pulled open the front door, peeking his head around, partially fearing the lanky figure of Rollins there to be standing there like the Roger Rabbit villain. Instead, however, there was a panicked-looking—but still beautiful; Gus’ inner-Shawn, often taking on the role of the devil on Gus’ shoulder, described her as definitely a twelve on the MILF scale, dude —middle-aged woman, about a decade or so older than Gus. She had long, glossy red hair, curled at the ends, and wore sensible jeans and a flannel, which Gus couldn’t quite match to her glamorously styled hair and makeup. She had a large denim tote bag over her shoulder.
“Uh, hello?” Gus said quizzically. He had certainly not expected some beautiful older lady to arrive in the middle of the night. “Can I help you?”
“Oh thank God!” she exclaimed, a hand clutched to her bosom. “I didn’t think anybody would be here! Can I come in and catch my breath for a moment? I’m so frightened! I got this threatening letter from him, and he said not to go to the police!”
Gus stumbled out of the way as the woman shoved herself through the door, watching in shock as the woman fumbled her way through the front room of the semi-dark office, lit only by Gus’ desk lamp and the glowing paused face of young Ralph Macchio. She landed on the chair Shawn and Gus usually tried to keep free of clutter, in the event of a Psych customer coming to visit. Gus let the door shut behind him, but stayed standing where he was. He clutched Eunice’s horn more tightly. True, Gus wasn’t prone to intuition. But something was telling him to be suspicious of this woman.
“Who threatened you?” Gus asked. “Your husband?”
“No, no, he’s not the problem. He’s dead, actually. And we weren’t married, to begin with.” The woman was still panting, her head bent over her tote bag, rifling through it as if looking for something. “It’s his partner. Or ex-partner, I don’t know. Hold on. I’ll show you, and you’ll understand, I know you will.”
Gus still didn’t know how to react. “Show me what? The letter? We probably should go to the police.”
The woman went on, as if she hadn’t heard Gus’ questions at all. “Like I said, I didn’t think anybody was gunna be here!” She stopped rifling through the bag and looked up at Gus, her expression morphing from panic to something more sinister. “But I suppose it’s good. You can help carry in the psychic’s body for me.”
In her hands, Gus saw what she had been looking for: a small handgun, its muzzle pointed right at him.
“Burritos on the way back to the station?” Juliet asked idly, flipping through one of the paper menus that Lassiter kept in the glove compartment of his Crown Vic. “Oo! El Jefe’s has churros, now, did you know?”
Lassiter grunted his assent, steering them back down the 101. They had been tracing red Roadrunner sightings for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, and it certainly was time to return to the station. But Lassiter couldn’t shake…something.
“Why didn’t Spencer show up at the gas station today?” he asked abruptly.
Juliet glanced at him, refolding the menu and placing it carefully back in the glove compartment. “I don’t know. I was expecting him, too.”
“It’s what he would do,” Lassiter said. He knew he sounded frustrated—but that was just what Spencer brought out in him. Or maybe his suspicion had been correct, back at the station, during Shawn’s statement—maybe he really didn’t know the psychic at all.
“He’s been a little un-Shawn-like, this week,” Juliet said. “Yesterday I offered to get him a pineapple smoothie, and he turned me down. I mean, he was pouting about not getting in on the manhunt, but still. Not like Shawn. Maybe it’s the gunshot wound that’s keeping him cautious. It’s probably a good instinct to cultivate,” Juliet amended.
“But not like him,” Lassiter said again, wanting his partner to understand his implication.
“You think something’s wrong with him? Like, physically?”
And there she was, reading his mind for him.
“Do we know his location?” Lassiter asked instead. “Whether he's in trouble, or not, he’s at least doing something he shouldn’t be. Probably. Worth checking in, anyway.”
The upside-down U-shape he had seen earlier that day reappeared again on Juliet’s face. “You really do care. I was starting to suspect, when Shawn jumped off the car, and then back at the gas station, but—”
“Just call Spencer, O’Hara.” Better to cut that off before she got steam.
She shrugged. “Alright, fine.”
She reached to pull her cell phone out of her pocket.
The radio trilled, sounding a familiar, panicked voice. “This is Officer McNab. Bus needed ASAP at 14 Palm Lane. I’ve been shot and a civilian taken hostage. Suspect is John Rollins and an unidentified woman.”
Lassiter felt his partner catch her breath the same as he did.
“That’s Henry Spencer’s address,” he said.
Juliet picked up the radio. “Buzz, this is Detective O’Hara. What happened?”
It was a couple minutes before Buzz responded, during which Lassiter flipped on the siren and banged a U-turn, steering them towards Henry Spencer’s house.
“Detective, I went outside to investigate the vehicle, and Rollins entered the home and shot and knocked Shawn unconscious. The second suspect—the woman—presumably arrived just before me, and locked Mr. Spencer in the basement. When I reentered the home, I was shot at twice—the first missed and the second hit me in the leg. I radioed as soon as I could. But Shawn’s gone. They took him.”
Not again, Lassiter thought.
He swore loudly, then looked apologetically at his partner, who echoed his curse more softly.
“Twice in one week? Bastard’s going for a record,” he said aloud.
Juliet inhaled sharply before speaking into the radio again. “Can you be certain Shawn was alive, Buzz?”
There was some sort of garbled response, as if two people were arguing, before McNab spoke again. “Mr. Spencer says so. I can’t confirm. He says that Rollins mentioned ‘a world of pain’ for Shawn.”
Implying nothing good for Shawn, but seemed to imply that he would be alive for some period of time to experience said pain. “Did Rollins say anything else?” Lassiter asked, forgetting that he wasn’t the one holding the receiver. “And who the hell is this woman?”
Juliet raised an eyebrow at him, but repeated his questions without comment.
“ Mr. Spencer says no. But he thinks it has to do with the welding, he says.” There was a pause. “And the woman was apparently early- to mid-forties, with long red hair. No idea where she came from.”
“Would he take him to the gas station again?” Juliet asked immediately. “The mechanic shop Longmore worked at?”
Lassiter shook his head, clutching the steering wheel more tightly. “Too obvious—he knows we’d look there first.”
Something stirred in the back of his mind—welding tools, a place big enough to hide a car.
“O’Hara, what’s the address for Store-It-Ur-Self?”
Another officer radioed in, cutting Lassiter off. “ Reporting in on the ‘72 Red Roadrunner APB—spotted parked southeast on Ventura.”
Juliet looked sharply at him. “It’s at the corner of Ventura and Willis. But—”
She pressed the button on the radio’s walkie once more. “Buzz, did you see the car that took Shawn?”
It took McNab a moment to respond. “Two vehicles were outside. That’s what struck me as odd. A purple PT Cruiser and a red Roadrunner. No plate numbers for either.”
Lassiter and Juliet locked eyes. “Decoy,” they said simultaneously.
“I don’t think he would take Shawn there alive,” Juliet said. “The Store-It. I think the Roadrunner’s the decoy—we need to find that PT Cruiser.”
She pressed the walkie button again and repeated the request for a bus to be sent to Henry Spencer’s house and put out an APB for the purple PT Cruiser.
Lassiter followed her logic, though it sent a chill up his back. “As in, you think that’s where he would dump the body.”
Juliet shivered at his words— the body , he knew, was a morbid, impersonal way to refer to their colleague—who was more than that, perhaps, to her, and maybe even more to Lassiter, himself.
“You think they go somewhere else first?” Lassiter continued. “Why not just kill him there?”
She fiddled with her phone for a moment, passing it between her hands like it was skipping stone. “Because it’s personal,” she said quietly. “Because I think I know who the woman is. And if I were in her position, I would want to make Shawn’s death personal, if I blamed him for my boyfriend’s death.”
Lassiter considered this for a moment, unsure of what to say in response to what he thought she was implying—that that would be how she would feel if Spencer died.
Juliet gasped suddenly, so loudly that Lassiter nearly swerved into an oncoming truck before righting himself. She put her phone to her ear and was silent for thirty seconds. Her phone dropped to her lap slowly, horror spread over her face, her blue eyes wide.
“Psych office, now, Carlton,” she said quickly, sounding off—huskier than usual, as if she was near tears. “It has to be.”
“What?” Lassiter barked, unable to stand not knowing any longer, though he did sharply cut off a car behind him in order to make a right turn. They were maybe seven minutes from the Psych office, he estimated.
“I have a voicemail from Shawn,” she said, her voice slow and deliberate, as if she was working to keep herself under control. “From three minutes ago. I must’ve missed it, when Buzz radioed—but how, I was holding it the whole ti—”
“Forget that, now, Detective. Just play it,” Lassiter said. What had she heard to shake her up so badly? Lassiter had taken for granted—even throughout the adventure of the previous Spencer kidnapping—that Spencer was invincible, could bounce back from any situation, like a rat in a trap. But maybe not, this time.
Juliet fiddled with her phone for a moment, presumably getting it to play the voicemail on speaker. The voice of an unknown woman played.
“Hi there, sweetheart. Not sure if I got the right girlfriend here—Mr. Spencer seems to be a bit of a player, doesn’t he? What a naughty boy—”
Here, the voice of the woman cut off, and there was an unmistakable sound of a bone breaking, and a deep, guttural scream of pain as a result—Lassiter recognized it as Spencer’s voice, though it wasn’t a noise he thought the man capable of making, as he mostly only heard Spencer and Guster play-shrieking at something not worthy of concern. Something was wrong, wrong with Spencer. Concern sharpened in his gut, pushing him to hit the gas harder.
“Shawn!” another voice called on the other end of the phone, sounding far away—but undeniably Guster’s voice full of panicked worry.
Another faraway male voice—presumably Rollins—yelled “Shut it!”
There was the sound of a scuffle.
The woman’s sickly sweet voice returned. “But I thought I might as well try and reach out to somebody he’s in love with. My Johnny offered this naughty boy that before, after all. And someone ought to hear his last moments alive, other than his idiot partner, dontcha think?”
A pause. “Say goodbye—”
Guster’s voice returned. “No, no, Maureen, wait, you’ve got it wrong—”
A shot. A scream, this one unidentifiable. Then the voicemail cut off.
The first thing Shawn noticed was that he couldn’t move.
The second thing he noticed was that he couldn’t breathe. At least not rightly, not all the way.
He felt like he was in a scratchy cocoon. A dark, scratchy cocoon, in fact.
It took his battered mind several minutes to process his situation. He rubbed his fingers, unable to move freely because of a sticky restraint he registered as tape, against what he thought was fur. Had Rollins stuffed him in a bear suit? That didn’t seem likely. It felt more like carpet, maybe. Perhaps Rollins had taken the time to wrap Shawn up in his father’s living room carpet, creating a Shawn sausage that gave him even less wiggle and breathing room than he had last week. And would make it nearly impossible to kick out the backlights from the trunk, as well.
That didn’t seem to be the only learning from the mistakes of Longmore of yore that his second kidnapper in a week had done (or does it count as only one kidnapping when it was the same guy both times? It sounded like an unrealistic textbook math problem). Rollins had been much more thorough in the duct-taping process than Longmore had been. Duct tape wound its way all the way up his legs and arms, his wrists bound together behind him, pulling back uncomfortably on his shoulder with the gunshot wound—Rollins had been unkind enough to remove his sling. It took longer than it should have for Shawn to realize that Rollins had taped Shawn’s mouth shut, as well, which was what was making it so difficult for him to breathe—and stay conscious— in the stuffy trunk.
While this time he wasn’t bleeding from a gunshot, Rollins had pistol-whipped him pretty hard at his father’s house. He couldn’t tell if it was the freely-bleeding head injury or the claustrophobia, but he was finding it increasingly difficult to stay awake.
Which wasn’t good, because Shawn had a feeling he really needed to be on his A-game if he was going to get out of this alive.
A plan. A plan. He needed a plan. But what plan could there be? Buzz and his father were possibly dead (those two gunshots he had heard before passing out kept replaying in his mind, the bang! bang! so loud and visceral that Shawn could feel his headache worsening, and he couldn’t, couldn’t linger on what it would mean if his last words to his father had been a not-very-funny joke about housebroken dogs—he had completely missed a very obvious opportunity for a Beethoven reference), Shawn could barely keep himself awake, and who knows what waited for him when the car ride ended.
If the car ride ever did end. It was just as likely that Rollins parked the car somewhere and torched it, with Shawn wrapped up inside, as it was that he dragged Shawn out of the car into some undesirable location.
He attempted to wiggle onto his stomach, but all that did was tire himself out, and he had to stop once he had gotten onto his side—flipped onto his not-shot shoulder, luckily. Shawn didn’t think he had ever been so hot and dizzy in his life, not even that time he and Gus had gotten sun poisoning in Cabo and had had to hitch a ride to Mexico City in an unventilated tour bus full of equally sunburned Canadian tourists. He could feel sweat pouring down his forehead and the back of his neck, his hair drenched and sticking to his forehead in a way that made him want to swipe his hand through it.
The car lurch to a sudden stop. Shawn felt his heart stop, nearly overwhelmed by dizziness again, his vision and memory blanking out for a moment. He wasn’t sure how long the car idled before he heard the sound of a door opening and closing and the car pulled off again.
A plan, a plan. He needed a plan. To remember what his dad had taught him. But his head hurt so badly, and his nostrils were working overtime just to get him enough air, and it was so hot, and when he next blinked, the blackness enveloped him fully.
“B-body?” Gus stuttered out despite himself.
A feeling that Gus hadn’t felt in years overwhelmed him, conjuring a memory from years ago: eight-year-old Gus had spent hours constructing a house of cards, using two full decks, as he was determined to beat the world record for largest house of cards. And, naturally, just as Gus was placing that last, delicate card on the top, Shawn came storming into Gus’ father’s garage, rambling about some half-brained and somehow still brilliant scheme to prank the kid who had stolen Gus’ juice at lunch the week before, and Gus had been distracted. And the whole careful castle he had built had come tumbling down.
That’s what Gus felt occurring inside him when the beautiful woman said that his best friend was dead: like his whole carefully constructed and beautiful life had been destroyed.
Shawn had tried to help him rebuild the castle, of course, this time with superglue involved. The two of them had ended up with cards stuck all over them, like paper soldiers.
Gus swallowed a lump in his throat. Shawn couldn’t be dead. Shawn didn’t die. What was the point of all of it if Shawn died?
The redheaded woman grinned at him, baring her teeth. “Oh, well, he’s probably not dead. Yet. There’s time to change that, soon.”
Gus didn’t have time to feel relieved before the woman stood from her seat, gesturing him further into the office with the muzzle of the gun. “C’mon, then. Let’s go get him from the back. And hands up, cutie.”
Gus half-heartedly raised his hands up, walking stiffly through the semi-dark office towards the back door. Once they reached the door, he felt something sharp jab him between the shoulder blades— the gun.
“Go on, open it,” she said. “And don’t think about running. My boyfriend was a sharpshooter, and he taught me a thing or two.”
Something clicked for Gus, in that moment, and he froze as he opened the door. “You’re Long—MacQuarrie’s girlfriend, aren’t you? Shawn said he talked about you. It seemed like he really loved you. I’m sorry for—”
Another jab between the shoulder blades. “I don’t need your apologies. I need you to help this scumbag move the other scumbag into your idiotic little office.”
In the back alley behind the office, a purple PT Cruiser was parked, the trunk open, revealing a familiar-looking rolled-up carpet. A man with lank hair and even lankier frame sat on the car’s hub, smoking. Gus recognized him as the boogeyman of the past week—Rollins, who was responsible for killing the woman who was currently holding Gus’ hostage’s boyfriend, who was also responsible for kidnapping his best friend. Again.
Rollins tossed the cigarette onto the ground and stubbed the embers out with his foot. “Maureen, who the hell is this? I thought you said this place would be empty.” He peered closer. “Hold on. I know you. You’re this dick’s—” he patted the lumpy carpet in the trunk, which Gus only now processed as Shawn, the panicked dread he felt earlier at the idea of a dead Shawn returning “--psychic partner, or some shit. Aren’t you? You were driving that stupid little blue car with the pretty blond cop.”
Gus wasn’t sure if he was supposed to answer, and he didn’t think he could have, even if he had wanted to. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the unmoving figure in the trunk.
The woman moved out from behind Gus—though she still kept the gun trained on him—and waltzed towards Rollins. “I found him inside, having a little sleepover with himself. It’s fine—we’ll just lock him in the storage unit with the body when we’re done. It matters shit-all if he can ID us later. Or we can take him as a hostage, if things go sour sooner than expected.” She sighed. “Anyways, him being here saves me the manual labor of moving the psychic.”
Rollins shrugged and stood. Gus was shocked at his ambivalence—he had assumed a man on the lam would be fairly anxious.
Rollins looked at Gus blankly. “Well, come on, then,” he said after a few seconds. “I’ll grab this end, you grab the other.”
A jolt of revulsion shot through Gus at the suggestion of moving his best friend into position for his murder. He shook his head, refusing to move from the spot.
The woman—Maureen, Gus supposed—gestured at him again with the handgun. “Go on.”
Gus reluctantly stepped forward. Rollins was already pulling one end of the carpet— no, one end of Shawn, Gus corrected himself silently—out of the car roughly. Gus stepped forward more quickly to wrap his arms under the other end, fearful that Rollins would let Shawn drop onto the ground—and Gus couldn’t determine which end was Shawn’s head.
Rollins heaved Shawn up without giving Gus proper warning, and he scrambled to lift his friend—no easy feat, despite the arm workouts Gus had been doing lately—and keep up with Rollins’ fast pace through the alley and back into the back door of the office. Once they reached the back room, Rollins unceremoniously dropped his end of Shawn onto the ground in front of the couch and the still-moony face of teenaged Ralph Macchio on the television. Gus prayed that he had his friend’s head on his side as he set his carpet-wrapped friend down as gently as possible—Rollins could have fractured Shawn’s neck with that drop.
Maureen followed after them, shutting and locking the back door behind her. The gun lolled lazily in her hand, but Gus was sure that she hadn’t been kidding about the sharpshooting capabilities.
“Unroll him,” she said to Rollins. He obeyed, crouching in order to find the edge of the carpet. He began to yank the carpet out from under Shawn’s body, like a terribly sloppy magician.
“You know Shawn didn’t kill MacQuarrie, right?” Gus asked. He really did feel badly for Maureen—it had been a hard week for her, too. He was sure if she knew the whole story, she would turn on Rollins and forget about whatever insane vendetta against Shawn she wanted to see through. “It was Rollins. Shawn would never kill anybody. Talk to him for thirty seconds and you would know that. This is a big misunderstanding.”
She ignored Gus, her attention on Rollins and Shawn, and Gus turned his gaze there too.
Rollins had unraveled Shawn completely. Gus couldn’t restrain a gasp when he saw him, and he immediately moved forward to kneel by his friend’s head, despite Maureen and Rollins mutual sounds of displeasure.
If not for the rapid—too fast, Gus was sure he was having difficulty breathing—rise-and-fall of his chest, Gus would have thought Shawn was dead. Unconscious and coated in dust, sweat—his old green Apple Jacks shirt that he was wearing was soaked through into a darker green with sweat, where it wasn’t criss-crossed with silver duct tape—and blood. Gus could see that the back of his head was dark with blood, clearly from some injury caused by Rollins or Maureen. His hair was beginning to curl up from sweat where it wasn’t matted with blood. Gus thought his week-old bullet wound looked aggravated, too, as he could see a faint circle of blood beginning to form on Shawn’s shoulder through his shirt, though he supposed that could be dust or sweat.
He was practically mummified in duct tape, as it wound insanely around his body from ankle to shoulder, and there was a peeling piece over his mouth, as well, which Gus immediately pulled off, certain that was part of what was making it so hard for Shawn to breathe.
Shawn’s skin was terrifyingly hot to the touch. As soon as the tape was off his mouth, Shawn gulped in some wheezy breaths, as if he had been nearly suffocated. Which, Gus realized with horror, he most likely had been.
Suddenly, desperately, Gus needed Shawn to be awake. He needed his friend to wake up and look at him, to replace the terrifyingly un-Shawn-like still and bloodied figure in front of him, to replace the memory that persistently recurred to him of eight-year-old Shawn covered with superglued playing cards, laughing at something eight-year-old Gus had said.
Shawn and Gus had discussed one-of-them-is-kidnapped scenarios at length before—mostly because both of them had been taken hostage at some point during their tenure as psychic detectives. A consistent facet of their Liam Neeson’s Taken plans—as Shawn referred to them, obviously—was that both he and Gus keep something sharp enough to cut through any restraints in their jeans pocket. Gus bent over Shawn’s unconscious self, attempting to disguise his own fumbling in his pocket for the fountain pen he kept in his jeans pocket for just this purpose.
He lifted Shawn’s head and torso into his lap, sliding the pen into one of Shawn’s sweaty palms, bound together at his back, just in case Shawn woke up and could use it. Gus gently shook his shoulder. “Shawn! Shawn! Wake up!”
“Get away from him,” Maureen said calmly. She was standing closely above Gus, now. When he didn’t move, she spoke again. “You heard me. Step back.”
“No,” Gus said, surprised at how annoyed he sounded—not afraid, not angry. Just profoundly irritated at the suggestion of moving away from Shawn at that moment.
Maureen seemed not to mind his resistance, and nudged Shawn’s torso with the toe of her sneaker. She looked at Rollins.
“You hit him too hard,” she said, sounding annoyed, herself. “Now he won’t even be awake to know I’m the one killing him. Do you still got his phone?”
Rollins looked cowed in the face of this woman—what did she have over him? Gus wondered. He supposed the whole murdered-her-boyfriend thing was a weighty IOU. Rollins scrambled in his pocket, pulling out something and handing it to Maureen. Gus recognized it as Shawn’s phone with its distinctive green Psych case.
She held it out to Gus immediately. “Open it,” she commanded. “I know you know the password.”
The gun wobbled at him, and he reluctantly took the phone, entering Shawn’s passcode. He handed it back to her.
She scrolled through something on Shawn’s phone, the glow of the phone lighting her beautiful face oddly. “Hm. Which one is his fucking girlfriend? Juliet or Abigail? He called them both so many times in the past month.”
An idea occurred to Gus—it had worked for Shawn last week, after all, so why not now?
“It’s Juliet. Though Abigail is also…sorta,” Gus answered limply. He looked guiltily down at Shawn, who still wasn’t stirring.
Maureen raised her eyes from the phone, narrowing them at Gus. “He’s got two girlfriends? Christ.”
“Maureen, I think it’s a bad idea,” Rollins cut in meekly. “One of the girls is the blond cop, I think, and that’s how things went south with John—”
“Don’t tell me how things went south with Johnny. I know. And I know it’s all your fault. The only reason I got you out was so that you would help me do this. If you aren’t helping me, then I don’t need you here.” She clicked off the safety of the handgun. “So are you here to help, or no?”
Rollins didn’t answer, just lowered his head and moved to sit on the edge of Shawn’s desk, near Shawn’s feet. To Gus’ surprise, he crouched in front of Shawn, unwrapping the duct tape binding his ankles.
Maureen nodded to herself. “Good. Let’s give Juliet a ring, let her say goodbye to her two-timing Romeo.”
She hit something on Shawn’s phone, and it must’ve been the speaker button, as the office—eerily silent except for Shawn’s still-rapid breathing—filled with the sound of the ringing phone.
The ringing seemed to stretch on forever. And then, finally: “You’ve reached the voicemail of Juliet O’Hara. Once I’m available, I’ll be sure to return your call. Just leave me a message!”
There was a beep. Maureen smiled again, as viciously as before. “Hi there, sweetheart. Not sure if I got the right girlfriend here—Mr. Spencer seems to be a bit of a player, doesn’t he? What a naughty boy—”
Here, as if he had been taught a cue, Rollins raised his foot high in the air and brought the heel of his work boot down, hard, on Shawn’s now-untied left ankle. Gus knew he would never forget the crack of Shawn’s ankle shattering, nor the harrowingly guttural scream that came from Shawn immediately after. Shawn’s head jolted up in Gus’ lap, his eyes blinking open blearily, though he didn’t seem to really register what was going on.
“Shawn!” Gus yelled reflexively. Shawn flinched at the proximity of the noise.
“Gus?” Shawn mumbled, blinking more furiously, confusion beginning to scrunch his features.
“Shut it!” Rollins yelled. Gus realized too late that he was storming over to where Gus was. Rollins seized Gus by the arm, pulling him backwards until his back was against the couch, and slung a punch, colliding with Gus’ chin.
Gus was stunned for a moment, seeing stars in his vision before he snapped back into himself, shoving Rollins away from him and swinging his own punch, which, surprisingly, connected with Rollins’ cheek, sending the man spinning before he lurched back towards Gus.
Faintly, Gus registered that Maureen was still speaking into the phone.
“But I thought I might as well try and reach out to somebody he’s in love with. My Johnny offered this naughty boy that before, after all. And someone ought to hear his last moments alive, other than his idiot partner, dontcha think?”
A pause, during which Gus managed to land another punch to Rollins’ side.
“Say goodbye—” Maureen began.
Gus felt his stomach drop, and lurched towards Maureen and Shawn—who was only just beginning to stir, having flipped onto his stomach and seemed to be straining against the tape around his wrists.
“No, no, Maureen, wait, you’ve got it wrong—” Gus began, but it was too late. His lunge towards Maureen missed, and he ended up on the floor in front of her feet.
Maureen had dropped Shawn’s phone to the desk and had both hands on the handgun. Gus watched in horror as she leveled her shot and fired.
Gus screamed reflexively again at the sound of the shot going off. He ducked his head under his hands and hurled his body towards his friend, landing on top of Shawn’s back with an oof.
Shawn made a small noise of protest, presumably because Gus had landed on him with his full weight in an effort to shield him from Maureen’s bullet, but Gus paid no mind to his friend. His attention was locked on the collapsed form of Rollins on the other side of Shawn, his eyes wide open and unblinking, a bullet wound blemishing the center of his forehead.
“Woah,” Gus said aloud.
“Ow,” Shawn wheezed from underneath Gus. His face was turning red again. Gus immediately rolled off his friend, landing at Maureen’s feet once more. He wondered if Shawn had realized Gus had given him his fountain pen.
Maureen was pointing her gun at Gus. “Move out of the way, pretty boy,” she said to him, sounding a little shakier than she had before. Perhaps she minded killing more than she had let on before. “This is between me and your friend.”
Gus remained where he was, in his seated position blocking Shawn’s head. She had to be out of her damned mind if she thought he was going to let her kill Shawn, even if she had killed Rollins instead—and he still wasn’t convinced that she was a total villain.
“Maureen,” he began slowly, raising his hands in supplication. “Really, genuinely, I’m not trying to trick you. But you have already killed the man responsible for your loss. And I’m just guessing—just a feeling—that killing him, and definitely killing more people, isn’t going to make you feel better.”
Maureen blinked her wide green eyes at him—previously steely with vindictive resolve, but now full of something more mutable. “You don’t know what I’m feeling,” she said. “Not at all.”
“I don’t,” Gus answered honestly. He was surprised at how confidently he spoke. “I’ve never experienced anything like what you’ve been going through in the past week. But do you really, genuinely believe that killing Shawn, and hurting all of the people who love him the way you loved John—is going to make that feeling go away?”
Maureen still had the gun locked on him, though it lowered a fracture.
“I’m sorry, Maureen,” Shawn mumbled, slurring his words a bit. Gus didn’t think he was completely conscious, his eyelids fluttering rapidly. “Your boyfriend was kind to me. And he didn’t deserve what happened to him.” He sucked in a deep breath. “But the last thing he talked about with me was about how much he loved you. More beautiful than Maureen O’Hara, he said.” Shawn paused once more, and Gus wondered if it was because he was trying to cut through his wrist restraints or if he had passed out again—both seemed likely. But then he spoke again. “I think his love for you saved my life.”
And those words made Maureen’s arms drop, as if they were a spell lifting a curse.
“I miss him,” she said, and released a sob that sounded to Gus as if she had been holding in for a long time.
The gun struck the ground as Maureen dropped it, her hands coming up to cup her face. Tentatively, Gus stood up and put his hand on Maureen’s shoulder, feeling obligated to comfort her in some way. On the floor, he heard the sound of something snapping and Shawn exhale a sigh of relief as he brought his arms—stiffly, as his forearms were still taped to his torso—to his side, the tape around his wrists falling away. He must have found the Liam Neeson Taken pen after all.
At Gus’ touch, Maureen’s shoulders lowered, and she collapsed into him. Surprised, he wrapped his arms around her in a hug, which she returned, tightly.
Five minutes later, that was how Juliet and Lassie found them—Shawn still on the floor, trying to unpeel the tape from his lower limbs without aggravating his now-broken ankle, and Maureen crying on Gus’ shoulder.
“SBPD! Freeze!” Lassie said as the two of them burst through the door. The surprised expression on Lassie’s face would have been comical if not for the dread he could see written over Juliet’s, which lifted when she saw Shawn doing an odd-sort of worm dance on the ground, clearly alive—Gus supposed she must have heard that voicemail Maureen had left. That couldn’t have sounded like it had gone well for Shawn.
“Shawn?” Juliet asked, confused, her gun lowering. “Gus? What happened? Are you guys okay?”
She kneeled next to Shawn, tucking her gun into her holster to help him tear away the tape still looping around his body. When she nudged Shawn’s feet by accident while unwrapping his leg, Shawn hissed in pain.
“What, Shawn?” she asked, though Shawn didn’t respond right away. His eyes were half-lidded, and Gus thought it likely that he would pass out again before the ambulance arrived. Juliet, in a moment of tenderness that surprised Gus, moved forward and cupped Shawn’s cheek, staring at him intently. “Shawn?”
Shawn’s eyes slipped closed, leaning into Juliet’s hand. “Jules,” he mumbled. “I meant it. I meant it.”
Juliet bent her head towards Shawn’s whispering something to him that Gus couldn’t hear. Gus didn’t know what Shawn was referring to, or if his best friend’s double concussion in a week was making him speak gibberish, but Juliet seemed to have it handled. Meanwhile, Gus still had the sobbing murderer widowed girlfriend in his arms.
Lassiter walked up to his side. “Who’s this, Guster? Is that Rollins on the floor?”
Maureen broke away from him, then, sniffling, looking evenly at Lassiter—as if she had retained her perfect composure from earlier in the evening after that burst of emotion. “Maureen Curley, Detective,” she said. “I’ve done some bad things tonight. I hope it’s not too late for me to make up for them.” She half-turned to Gus, smiling at him. “Thank you, for helping me see the fruitlessness of what I was doing.” She frowned again. “Though you really need to tell your friend to stick to one girlfriend, and treat her right.”
Carlton Lassiter was unnerved.
This fact disturbed him further because of how generally unflappable Lassiter considered himself; Stonewall Jackson was his hero for a reason, after all. The man had been immovable, physically and emotionally, just as Lassiter thought of himself. But the quiet Shawn Spencer stretched out in the back seat of Lassiter’s Crown Vic undeniably unnerved him, there were no two ways about it.
Another black-and-white had arrived shortly after Lassiter and O’Hara arrived, which had been perfectly timed to take away MacQuarrie’s ex-girlfriend—Maureen Curley, who had conspired to break Rollins out in order to kill both Rollins and Spencer in revenge for her boyfriend’s death, or so Guster had explained—back to the station. Meanwhile, Lassiter, Guster, and O’Hara had been waiting at the Psych office for the ambulance to arrive for fifteen minutes before the bus had radioed in and it was decided that Lassiter could get Spencer to Santa Barbara Cottage sooner than the bus would arrive. Guster and Lassiter had half-carried Spencer to the backseat of Lassiter’s Crown Vic. Guster had offered to give his statement to Juliet, and Spencer refused to go to the hospital without Guster, so Lassiter and Spencer had been sitting in silence for longer than Lassiter felt comfortable with, as Guster and O’Hara talked outside of the car.
“Spencer?” Lassiter asked, hating how tentative he sounded. Tentative was a little too close to sounding like concern, yet another emotion that Carlton never felt, especially around Spencer, the most irritating person alive.
Spencer, whose dirt- and blood-streaked forehead was resting against the rear passenger-side window, jerked up, almost as if he had been asleep. “What?”
Lassiter actually didn’t have anything to ask him. He had hoped that Spencer would start babbling about something incoherent when prompted as he usually did, like one of those Zoltar machines. He desperately wanted O’Hara to appear and relieve him of this duty.
“Do you want water?” he finally asked.
Spencer half-nodded.
Lassiter scrambled around in the backseat and found a crumpled plastic water bottle, half-filled— most likely O’Hara’s—and handed it to Spencer, who took it and gulped it down gratefully.
After another couple minutes of silence— couldn’t O’Hara and Guster hurry it up, already? —Spencer finally spoke.
“Did you think I did it?”
Lassiter blinked. “Did what?”
There had really been nothing to do, in Spencer’s case. He had been trussed up and half-conscious from his head injury for the entirety of his kidnapping and the subsequent conflict.
Spencer shifted heavily forward over the console, reaching to fiddle with Lassiter’s radio, not sitting back until he had found some ‘80s station. It was some The Cure song— “Boys Don’t Cry,” maybe? Lassiter could never even bluff his way into understanding most of Spencer’s pop culture references, even though he had lived through the ‘80s, too.
Lassiter watched Spencer avoid his gaze. Instead, Spencer stared out the windshield, his glazed-over look watching O’Hara speak to Guster outside, who stood with his arms crossed, the unicorn Pillow Pet tucked under his arm. Guster’s forehead was creased in concentration, though he kept looking towards the Crown Vic after every time he spoke.
“Longmore,” Spencer whispered. He looked at Lassiter out of the corner of his eye, as if nervous. That surprised Lassiter more than anything else that night. “MacQuarrie. Did you think I killed him? And that I was lying about it?”
Lassiter released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Christ, Spencer. No, I didn’t. Not for a second.”
Spencer twitched—not in excitement, or agitation, or whatever emotion usually caused his hyperactivity. It was something else. Relief.
“I thought you did,” Spencer said. “During my statement. I know we aren’t best friends, Lassie—” Lassiter half-growled at the old nickname “—but we are, actually. I know you know what I mean. And I know how you feel about Psych, but the idea of you actually thinking I would do something awful and not own up—” Spencer interrupted himself with a laugh. “That hurt. Not as bad as my shoulder, obviously—or as my head right now, matter of fact, or my ankle—but it didn’t feel good. And I need you to know. That I didn’t.”
Lassiter’s chest was warm. He hoped it wasn’t a heart attack. “Spencer, you're a damn good detective. I won’t say it again—probably—but I’ve known that about you since the day we met. And beyond being a good detective, you’re a good…whatever. I know you didn’t kill anyone and try to cover it up.”
Shawn was sort of grinning now, as if regaining his typical irritating bravado. Lassiter was almost glad. “Then what was all that about the shot I made?”
Lassiter snorted, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “I just don’t know how you made it. I’ve never seen you hold a gun, and the one time I do, you shoot out a truck from a moving car with a gunshot wound to the shoulder. I didn’t think you could still surprise me.”
Spencer’s grin was nearly full-power. “Well, it’s sort of sweet, your suspicion about my capabilities. When you put it that way. Like you think I’m Superman, or something. And I can’t believe you would doubt my ability to pull a trick pony out of a hat, after all this time.”
Lassiter snorted but didn’t speak for a moment, instead watching Juliet pat Gus on the shoulder outside of the car and the pair turn towards the car, Juliet moving towards the passenger seat as Guster moved around the car to take the back seat opposite Spencer. He wanted this semi-vulnerable conversation over before the others joined them.
“I can’t believe it either, Spencer,” he finally said. “I guess I should just resolve myself to being amazed by you for the rest of forever.”
Guster and Juliet opened their car doors at the same time, activating a flurry of various conversations and squabbling about how Gus should sit, considering Spencer’s broken ankle (which ended up resting on top of the unicorn pillow in Guster’s lap) and O’Hara’s scolding Shawn for insisting on waiting for them when he needed to be treated as soon as possible, and debates as to whether anyone had called Shawn’s father, and drawing of names as to who would have that sure-to-be-difficult duty, but despite all of that, Lassiter couldn’t lift his eyes from his rearview mirror, where he could see Spencer’s grin growing brighter.
Lassiter thought he knew what he was grinning about.