Read Online A Fatal Frame of Mind by William Rabkin - Free Book Online Page B

going to be, but he knew his partner well enough to imagine. No doubt Shawn was going to insist that Gus donate all his income from his pharmaceuticals sales route to Psych, or demand that Gus call him “sir” whenever they were in public, or let Shawn use his legs as a pillow if he got sleepy on a stakeout.
    If he’d had any more energy, Gus might have once again muttered “Whatever.” Instead, he shrugged. Let Shawn make any rule that amused him. They’d be in force only as long as Gus stayed with Psych, and after tonight’s fiasco he wasn’t sure how much longer he wanted that to be. He’d been playing at private detective for a few years now, and he’d been having fun. He’d even done a pretty good job from time to time.
    But now he saw that whatever successes they’d had were nothing more than luck. He clearly had no idea what he was actually doing, and when his luck ran out he had no way to compensate for it. People got hurt. Maybe people even got killed, all because they trusted in him.
    “Okay, here it comes,” Shawn said. “The most important rule of all. The one that’s going to change Psych forever, whether we like it or not.”
    “Why?” Gus was surprised that his tongue had bothered to form the syllable, but apparently some of his reflexes were even more powerful than his exhaustion.
    “Why what?”
    “Why will it change Psych forever, whether we like it or not?” Gus said. “There’s no one at Psych besides us, so if we don’t like one of your rules, we can simply ignore it.”
    “You can’t just ignore rules,” Shawn said.
    “You do it all the time,” Gus said. “And when I hesitate before breaking a rule, you get mad at me.”
    “That’s completely different,” Shawn said. “Those are other people’s rules. Man-made rules. I’m talking about the laws that are set out by the universe, like gravity or entropy or the way it’s impossible to get the last bits out of a shampoo bottle no matter how hard you shake it.”
    “Okay, fine,” Gus said. “Let’s have it.”
    Shawn started to speak, then turned around and reached toward the backseat.
    “What are you looking for?” Gus said.
    “A couple slabs of granite,” Shawn said. “Marble, if you’ve got it. It just seems like the kind of thing that would sound better if it was carved on stone tablets. Although if you don’t have any stone, I guess we could use aspirin tablets, as long as one of us can write really small.”
    “Shawn . . .” Gus said, hoping that a good set of ellipses would convey all the words he was too tired to use.
    “Okay, fine,” Shawn said. “Here’s the most important rule: When one of our clients flips out and takes Lassie hostage with a knife because he believes that there’s a global conspiracy out to frame him for murder to keep him from discovering the truth of their evil cabal, even though he’s incapable of explaining what they want or why they want it—”
    “I get it, Shawn,” Gus said. “I was stupid to take Professor Kitteredge seriously. You don’t have to make a big deal about it.”
    Shawn held up a finger to stop him. Gus briefly considered yanking it off his hand and throwing it out the window, but that seemed like far too much effort.
    “Anyway,” Shawn continued, “back to that rule. When all that stuff happens that I just laid out and don’t feel like going through again, then it is our obligation to find that client and solve the murder before the police get him.”
    It took a moment before Gus could make sense of the words. He’d so completely expected to hear Shawn say the exact opposite that at first his brain simply wouldn’t process the new information.
    “Find him?” Gus said finally. “You mean Professor Kitteredge?”
    “Unless you’ve got another client who took Lassie hostage and you haven’t told me about him,” Shawn said. “In which case, this would probably be a good time to bring it up, so we can prioritize.”
    “But you said he was