Psych: The Call Of The Mild Part 3

"You're never going to get away with this," Gus said. "There are dozens of witnesses."

"And they're all staring right at us," Shawn said, waving his hands wildly. With each wave, another few people turned towards them.

Gus and Shawn exchanged a look; then Gus shouted to the throng of parents, kids, and gardeners who were staring at them from the snack bar area. "Help! He's got a gun!"

Gus didn't know what to expect. Best-case scenario would be a squad of beefy, well-armed security experts descending on them. Second best might be dozens of cell phones dialing 911 at the same instant. He would have settled for one irate mom with a canister of pepper spray on her keychain.

What he didn't expect was what happened. The crowd was still for a moment. Then they burst into laughter.

"Don't laugh," Gus commanded them. "This is serious. He could kill us!"

But the crowd only laughed harder.

"Has this whole town gone crazy?" Gus asked Shawn.

"Look behind you," Shawn said.

Gus risked a glance over his shoulder. The mime had hidden his gun under his shirt. To the crowd of onlookers, it might well have been his finger. His painted face was alternating between a mask of furious anger and an impressively accurate impersonation of Gus' fear.

"I so do not look like that," Gus said.

"Really?" Shawn said. "This man is holding us at gunpoint, and you're worried that his imitation of you is too mean?"

The killer mime said something urgent and harsh. It sounded like "ash oon." Shawn and Gus turned back to look at him and saw that as he said the syllables again, his ruby lips were locked into an evil scowl. Because of course he couldn't let his audience see him speaking.

"Ash oon?" Shawn said. "I'm afraid we don't know what that is."

There was a click from under the mime's shirt. He had c.o.c.ked the pistol.

"But if you wanted us to step into the bathroom, we could do that," Shawn said.

As the crowd cheered them on, Shawn and Gus marched towards the public restrooms, a low, wide building faced with river rock and brown-painted wood.

"Inside," the mime hissed. Shawn pushed the door open and led Gus in. The mime followed them inside and slid a latch locked behind them, as the faint sounds of applause came through the walls.

The bathroom was surprisingly clean for a public facility in midsummer. The linoleum floor was shiny and dry; the three stalls' white paint was fresh and unmarked by graffiti. All the discarded paper towels had somehow made it into the receptacles. And the room deodorizer was a mild clove scent.

Still, there were many other places Gus would have preferred to be. And none of them contained gun-toting mimes.

"Take off your clothes and throw them on the ground," the mime said.

Shawn winced. "My mother always told me not to take off my clothes for strange men in a public restroom."

"Then I'll shoot you," the mime said. "If I have to kill you to protect Rushmore, I will."

"I know some people really love that movie," Shawn said, "but this seems a little over the top. And can you really tell me that Olivia Williams would have ever forgiven that idiot kid after he almost killed Bill Murray?"

"Stop it!" the mime shouted. "Get undressed now!"

"I don't see a back door in this building," Gus said. "Once you pull that trigger, everyone outside will know you're not an adorable mime."

"If such a thing exists," Shawn said.

"How long do you think that latch will hold out once the police bring the battering ram?" Gus said.

"I've got six bullets in my gun," the mime said. "Two for you, three for him, and one left over for myself. The latch will hold out long enough for that."

"How come I get three and he only gets two?" Shawn said.

"Take off your clothes," the mime said. "I won't tell you again."

"What do we do?" Gus whispered to Shawn.

Shawn stared at the mime. Then he lowered his gaze and pulled off his T-shirt.

"You, too," the mime snapped at Gus.

It took Gus a lot longer to get down to his boxers than it did Shawn, who had apparently dressed with exactly this scenario in mind. Even his shoes were slip-ons, which he slipped off in less than a second. Everything Gus was wearing seemed to have more b.u.t.tons than he remembered, and his fingers slipped and fumbled with every one. Somehow the laces on his standard brown dress shoes had been tied into triple knots, and it took what felt like hours for him to undo them. After a few more hours, Gus stood next to Shawn, dressed only in his boxer shorts, his bare feet adhering to the linoleum.

"I didn't say get ready to go swimming," the mime said.

"All your clothes."

Gus wanted to sneak a look at Shawn to see what he was going to do. But he didn't dare. He was afraid he'd find courage in his friend's eyes, and then he'd refuse to do what the mime was demanding, and then they'd both be dead. He bent down and quickly stripped off his shorts, covering himself with both hands as he straightened up.

"Now kick them over here," the mime commanded, and Gus did. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a blur of movement that must have been Shawn also following the order. The mime scooped up all the clothes with his free arm, then gestured with the gun. "Into the stall."

"Could we go into separate stalls?" Shawn said. "Because they're really only meant for one person, and I don't think we should be doing a lot of touching in our present condition."

The mime didn't answer. He lowered the gun to where Shawn had strategically placed his hands.

"You know, one stall sounds fine," Shawn said. "It'll be much warmer that way."

Shawn and Gus scurried into the middle stall and slammed the door shut behind them. Gus turned the latch firmly, locking them in.

"Oh, yeah, that will do a lot of good," Shawn said. "No one's ever gotten through one of these before."

"You want me to leave it open?"

Shawn didn't. Each stood pressed against a stall wall, trying to pretend the cold metal wasn't lowering their body temperatures with every pa.s.sing second.

"Are you almost done with our clothes out there?" Shawn finally called out.

There was no answer.

"Maybe you could finish up with our underwear first?" Shawn suggested hopefully.

Still no answer came.

"What do you think he's doing out there?" Gus whispered.

Shawn pressed his eye to the crack at the edge of the door and tried to peer out.

"One of two things," Shawn said. "Either he's taken our clothes and woven them into a cloak of invisibility, or he's gone."

Shawn pulled open the stall door and stuck his head out. The mime was gone. And so were their clothes. Shawn checked every stall and tore through all the trash cans, but the mime hadn't left them so much as a sock.

"What do we do now?" Gus said.

"We're taking him down." Shawn bolted to the door.

"You can't go out there," Gus said as Shawn reached for the door handle.

"Watch me."

"It's not me who's going to be watching," Gus said. "It's all the moms out there with their little kids."

"So what do you suggest? That we just stay in here until everyone has gone home and we can slip out without anyone seeing us?"

"That's not a bad idea," Gus said. "But my car keys were in my pants pocket. So even if we do get out of here, we've got to walk through one of the San Gabriel Valley's least progressive suburbs stark naked. How long do you think we'll last out on those mean streets without any clothes?"

"I'm still waiting for a suggestion."

"There are a lot of people out there," Gus said. "Sooner or later, most of them are going to need to use the bathroom. And when they come in, we can beg them for a piece of clothing. It may take some time, but we can piece together enough clothes to walk out of here."

"Because most people who come to a public garden wear an extra pair of pants just in case."

Gus fumed. Of course Shawn was right, but that didn't make it any more pleasant to have his only idea shot down.

"Maybe if we wish really hard, the magical elves will hear us and weave us a new set of clothes," Gus said.

Shawn beamed as if Gus had said something brilliant. "That's it," he said.

"Elves are it?"

"Not elves," Shawn said. "We'll make our own clothes."

Chapter Seven.

When Gus was four years old, his mother dressed him up as Cupid for a Valentine's Day party. He wore a fluffy cotton diaper, a pair of wings, and a halo. And nothing else. She paraded him through a houseful of adults, all of whom cooed over the adorable little cherub.

For the rest of his life, Gus treasured that memory. Not because he enjoyed the evening; it was as miserable an experience as anything he'd ever suffered. But from that night on, no matter what happened to him, no matter how great the humiliation, he could always think back and tell himself, "At least it wasn't as bad as being Cupid in a diaper."

That thought never failed to make him feel better. When he was in first grade and spilled water down his pants, giving the entire school the impression that he'd wet himself, he took solace in the knowledge that this moment was less embarra.s.sing than parading around in a diaper and wings. When he mistimed a kiss aimed at Santa Barbara High School's third-string cheerleader Missy Summerland at a victory rally and ended up locking lips with a wide receiver, he knew that this was not as bad as being naked Cupid. Even the time that he and Shawn gave a lengthy and thorough reveal to a baffling case only to be informed that a different suspect had confessed hours before, Gus comforted himself with the thought that at least he wasn't wearing a diaper and wings while presenting the conclusion.

But that memory could do him no more good. Because he'd finally experienced something more humiliating than that Valentine's Day appearance. And it involved diapers, too.

These weren't the fluffy, opaque, completely secure diapers his mother had dressed him in. No. These were made out of flimsy paper toilet seat covers. Flimsy, near-translucent paper toilet seat covers.

Shawn had emptied the dispensers from all the stalls and both men had done their best to wrap the covers around their midsections in such a manner that they'd stay up on their own. But without tape or pins, there was no way to keep them together, and Shawn and Gus had to walk out of the men's room clutching wads of paper to their fronts and backs. If there was a single person in the Gardens who didn't stare at them until they were out of sight Gus never noticed him.

The humiliation might have been terminal for Gus. Fortunately, the burning sun had heated the asphalt path almost to the melting point, and he could use the agony he felt every time he set down one bare foot to take his mind off the embarra.s.sment.

Beyond the mortification of both soul and flesh, there was one other major problem Gus was wrestling with: What were they going to do once they reached his car? He supposed they could use a brick to smash one of the windows, if there happened to be any bricks lying around the parking lot, but smashing wouldn't get the car started. That was, if the mime hadn't used Gus' keys and driven off in the Echo.

He hadn't, which was the first good thing that had happened to Gus all day. But when they got to the parking lot, Shawn didn't go to the Echo. Instead he started looking in the trash barrels that stood outside the park's wrought-iron fence. The first two were empty aside from trash. The third, however, held their clothes.

"How did you know they'd be here?" Gus said as he pulled his underpants on under his tissue paper diaper.

"I sort of figured that not even a mime would risk life in prison to steal some clothes he could buy at Goodwill for under a buck," Shawn said, slipping on his jeans before he stepped into his shoes.

"Then what was that all about?"

Shawn dug in his pockets. "Not my wallet," he said, fishing it out and flipping through it. "Or any of the four dollars left inside it." He checked Gus' pants before tossing them to him. "Or your wallet, or your car keys."

"This doesn't make any sense at all," Gus said. "Could it all have been some bizarre mime initiation ritual?"

Shawn dug in his pants again, and his face turned grim. "The necklace is gone," he said. "We've been set up."

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 pa.s.senger seat, Shawn snapped shut his cell phone in frustration. "I can't believe La.s.sie 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?"