Chapter Text
Shawn’s shoulder hurt, but that hadn’t been the question.
“How long did you think you could get away with stealing my shirts, Shawn?” Gus asked him again. His arms wrapped around Shawn tightly, before pulling back to release him. Gus’ hands still gripped his good shoulder. Shawn slouched backwards against the hood of Lassie’s car, and Gus leaned with him.
Shawn was having trouble focusing on his friend’s face—a lot of the adrenaline had gone out of him, post-jumping on the hood of Lassie’s car--but he could see the crease between Gus’ eyebrows that indicated how worried his friend was.
“It hurts,” he told Gus. He let his eyes slip shut.
Suddenly, Shawn felt his balance give out. There was a thud as Shawn’s back hit the side of Lassiter’s front tire, his body slowly sliding to the ground, though Shawn’s vision kept blanking out on him, so he couldn’t quite figure out what angle he was sitting at.
“Shawn!” Gus barked, his panic-filled voice cutting through some of Shawn’s fogginess.
It was a different sort of panic than usual, though; it was not the Shawn you’re making me break the law in order to investigate this crime scene panic, nor was it someone’s about to find out the truth about you not being psychic panic. It definitely wasn’t you Tivo’d over the last episode of American Duos to watch Gremlins again and now I won’t know if the Britney Spears and Noel Gallagher impersonators made it through this round panic. It was a don’t actually make me worry about losing my life partner panic. Shawn didn’t think he’d heard that panic in Gus’ voice since Shawn had broken his arm the third time, when he’d jumped off his dad’s roof when they were six.
“It’s okay, Gus,” Shawn slurred, though he squeezed his eyes shut, trying to will away his dizziness. He was having trouble figuring out which way the world was supposed to tilt, as everything kept leaning slightly to the left, and he was pretty sure that that wasn’t right (now that he was thinking about it, he wasn’t sure the world was supposed to tilt in any direction, though Gus would probably tell him that the Earth was tilted at some angle towards the sun, but Shawn didn’t bother with all that space nonsense).
“Stop playing, Shawn,” Gus said, his voice closer and even more panic-filled than before.
He sucked in a breath sharply at the sudden pressure of Gus’ hands on his bullet wound. “Sorry. Just keep breathing, Shawn. Lamaze-style. In through the nose, out through the mouth.”
Shawn knew there was a that’s what she said joke buried in Gus’ breathing advice somewhere, but at the moment, he was too tired to try and work it out. It seemed easier to simply try and breathe in tandem with his friend.
A few moments later, Gus spoke again, but his voice sounded farther away, not intended for Shawn. “Mr. Spencer?”
Shawn heard his father’s voice respond with another question. “Detective O’Hara?”
“Rocky!” Shawn mumbled, letting his head lean back against the tire behind him (at least, he was pretty sure the tire was behind him; it was possible the tire was now floating above him).
As soon as the back of Shawn’s head met the tire, his head exploded with pain. He lurched forward, hissing.
“Ouch!” His hand shot immediately to the back of his head, his eyes creaking open automatically. The light nearly blinded him.
Immediately, Shawn felt Gus’ hands at the back of his head, as well, his friend sympathy-hissing with him. There was a lot of dialogue all at once.
“God, Shawn, your head’s bleeding! What happened?”
“Detective O’Hara, where is that ambulance?”
“I called them in back at the gas station, they should’ve been right behind us—”
“Well, Detective, they better get here within the next ten minutes, because if my son bleeds out in the middle of this godforsaken highway—”
“O’Hara, I’m going to book this goon. You might as well call the bus to check on it’s—”
“What do you think I’m doing with my phone, Carlton? Yes, hello, this is Detective O’Hara. I called in a bus about twenty minutes ago to trail us going south on the 100, and we have—”
“Shawn, can you open your eyes? Like, all the way, none of this Boo-Radley-going-outside-for-the-first-time business?”
Shawn focused on the panicked voice closest to him, and let the other panicked voices sort out their own problems.
With what Shawn considered a gargantuan feat of strength, he blinked his eyes open, absorbing the close proximity of his best friend’s face looming in front of him. Behind his friend’s kneeling form, he could make out the creased pants-legged form of his father, standing above him ominously, adult-in-Charlie-Brown style.
Gus’ eyes were wide. “Shawn, you okay?”
Shawn wanted to close his eyes again, but fought the urge, if only because he feared it would panic his friend further. “Right as rain.”
“What happened to your head?”
Shawn’s eyebrows cinched together. “I dunno. Rollins clocked me with something back at the gas station. So that, probably?”
Gus’ brow furrowed, mirroring Shawn’s own. “‘Probably?’” He echoed.
Gus looked up and away from him then, up to Shawn’s father. “I think he’s concussed, Mr. Spencer, he says he doesn’t remember what happened.”
Shawn felt a surge of annoyance, even through his fatigue. “Hey, I didn’t say that.”
He blinked slowly, and flinched when he opened his eyes again to find another face beside Gus’.
“You okay, Shawn?” Juliet asked slowly, her jaw clenching.
The last words Shawn had said to Juliet during their phone call returned to him like a sucker punch to the gut—or, more appropriately, like a gunshot to the shoulder. “Jules, uh—”
“You don’t remember a lot of what happened?” she asked, her voice rising with anxiety, though Shawn’s exhausted mind couldn’t parse out whether she was anxious because she was also thinking about his accidental confession of love, or if she was just worried about him, period.
“Well—” Shawn began. He blinked again, even more slowly this time.
Distantly, Shawn heard sirens.
“Tired,” he said. He let his eyes close, and surrendered to his exhaustion.
“Shawn? Shawn!” Gus yelled, shaking his unconscious friend’s shoulder. Shawn’s head flopped to his shoulder. “Oh my God, he died. He’s dead. My best friend is dead and we never even got to be Indy and Shortround for Halloween.” Gus sniffled. “Shawn, if you un-die, I’ll be Shortround, I promise.”
“Shawn’s not dead, Gus,” Juliet corrected, laying an affectionate hand on top of Shawn’s head for a brief moment before standing to help her partner arrest Rollins. Henry Spencer immediately took her place beside his son, laying his own hand on Shawn’s wounded shoulder, a task Gus had forgotten in his panic at Shawn’s loss of consciousness. “He’s just exhausted. He’ll be just fine.”
She stepped forward next to her partner, who had moved the handcuffed would-be thief into the backseat of his Crown Vic, the passenger-side rear door open so that Lassiter could better keep an eye on him until backup arrived. Lassiter hovered closely above the criminal, one hand on his shoulder, though Juliet noticed that her partner’s gaze was primarily occupied by Gus and Mr. Spencer’s tending to the unconscious Shawn on the other side of the vehicle.
Lassiter’s head tilted slightly towards her as she approached, his focus shifting back to the kidnapper before him, his jaw set determinedly. Juliet stepped next to him, looking over her shoulder at the approaching--still far on the horizon, at the moment, but would reach them in a few minutes, in Juliet’s estimation—ambulance and black-and-whites, red and blue sirens blinding in the late afternoon sun.
“He okay?” Lassiter muttered gruffly, his eyes darting briefly sideways to the front of the car, where Shawn was slumped.
“We’ll know in a few minutes,” she responded, her voice tight with worry (worry: raw, plain and simple, for her friend who was hurt. That was what she was telling herself.).
“I should’ve killed him when I had the chance,” Rollins croaked, his head snapping up, surprising Juliet. The genuine hatred in the criminal’s eyes surprised her even more. “This would’ve gone off without a hitch if not for that mouthy little asshole, and no, it don’t matter that what I say can be used against me in the court of law. It’s fucking true.”
“I would advise you to shut the hell up, Rollins,” Lassiter said, slamming the door shut in Rollin’s face without warning. He turned abruptly to Juliet. “I want this pinhead in the interrogation room as fast as possible. I want his confession, clear as day, and then I want him in a cell in Lompoc for the rest of his miserable little life.”
Juliet blinked at her partner’s show of emotion, at the unspoken ending to that sentence that she had heard—his desire to see Rollins in a cell and away from Shawn.
“It’s nice to know you care, Carlton,” she said.
There was a flash of something—concern, anger, disgust—across Lassiter’s normally inscrutable face, before it was gone again. “Here’s that damned bus,” he muttered in response. He began to stride forward towards the arriving ambulance—already screeching to a stop, and a lanky EMT running to Shawn’s collapsed form—before suddenly stopping.
“You’ve got an eye on him?” He asked her.
She nodded, glancing at the sullen Rollins through the car window.
That was enough confirmation for her partner, and he continued on his warpath, berating the EMTs and a harried-looking McNab (who, puppy-like as ever, kept drifting over to where the semi-conscious Shawn was now being loaded onto a gurney) for their delayed arrival.
“Don’t make me ask you again, Rollins,” Lassiter demanded, his voice tight with impatience. “We know it was your gun that killed your partner. We just don’t understand when and why. I promise you, this will all go a lot smoother the faster you answer our questions.”
“I keep trying to tell you, Detective,” Rollins drawled, his fingers drumming a beat on the interrogation table with a disturbing level of calm. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I wasn’t even there. Ask your psychic boy wonder. He might have an idea.”
Lassiter felt a brief explosion of anger, slamming his hand on the table harder than intended. “If you’re trying to insinuate that Spencer killed Longmore, then that’s going to be a hard sell. His grade-II concussion and gunshot wound to the shoulder would make this sort of point-blank shot fairly difficult.”
Rollins snorted, looking up at Lassiter from beneath the fringe of his hair. “He seemed pretty capable of shooting out the engine of my truck after all that, though, didn’t he?”
Lassiter subconsciously glanced at the two-way mirror, where he knew his partner and the Chief were watching the interrogation. It wasn’t a problem, per se, for Rollins to mention Spencer’s impressive shooting ability—but Rollins was right in that it made charging Rollins with Longmore’s murder less cut-and-dry. And that was what they all wanted from this case—for it to be cut-and-dry, over-and-done-with, simple-as-that. Lassiter didn’t like the idea of having to deal with any self-defense charges for Spencer, if it came to that—it would traumatize a jury, for one, to have to deal that much with Spencer’s raging ego. And he didn’t think it would do any favors for Spencer, either.
Without bothering to open the case file in front of him, Lassiter looked back at Rollins, raising an eyebrow. “See if that holds up in court once the jury find out that you told two officers of the law that ‘you should’ve killed Spencer when you had that chance.’”
Rollins was grinning, now. “Sure, I said that. But if someone killed your partner, you’d want them dead, too, wouldn’t you?”
Lassiter stared hard at the man across from him, narrowing his eyes. “You know that if you successfully pin this on Spencer, he’ll get off on self-defense. You think you’ll only go away for five-to-ten.” He leaned forward. “That’s not going to happen.”
Rollins' grin grew wider. “I just want that kid to get what’s coming to him. And he will. I know he will.”
Lassiter stood abruptly. “This interrogation’s over.”
“Bye-bye, now. Tell your psychic ‘good luck’ for me. He’s gunna need it!” Rollins shouted after him as Lassiter exited the interrogation room.
His partner and the chief met him outside the room mere moments later, both grim-faced.
“I hate this guy,” Lassiter growled.
Vick raised her eyebrows in amusement at his effusement, though her mouth was set in a firm, displeased line. “I can’t say I like him much, either.”
Juliet said nothing, still staring through the one-way glass at Rollins. Lassiter watched her stony-faced reflection for a moment, knowing from past interrogations that her posture indicated that she was piecing something together about the criminal. After another moment, she turned to face him, already speaking quickly.
“He has a plan,” she said. “His lawyer coached him through how to implicate Shawn, that’s obvious. But there’s something else going on. You were right, what you said in there—he knows that Shawn’ll most likely get off with self defense if he gets charged with Longmore’s murder—it’s clear that Shawn was in a life-threatening situation. Any half-decent lawyer would push that angle. But I don’t like how he talks about Shawn. He’s so—I don’t know, angry. Vindictive. Thirsty for—”
“Revenge?” Lassiter suggested.
Juliet nodded before continuing, her eyes now darting between Lassiter and Vick, including their boss in the conversation—an indication to Lassiter that she was confident in her instinct that Rollins was up to something—or maybe concern for Spencer was motivating her, Carlton couldn’t be sure.
“He’s not just looking to shave off his sentence. I think he’s mad enough to have something else in mind for Shawn.”
Vick jumped in, folding her arms across her chest. “You’re being a bit more generous to Rollins than I think he deserves, Detective—I don’t think we have another Yang on our hands. Rollins doesn’t strike me as the evil genius type. What could he have cooked up in his two days in holding?” Vick paused, looking between the two detectives in front of her. Lassiter and Juliet exchanged glances and shrugged. “Well, emotions have been running high lately, so I can understand where these concerns are coming from, but I don’t think we have to worry about these speculations yet. Rollins will be serving time for quite a while, whether this murder charge sticks or not.” She sighed primly, sending a last glance through the one-way mirror. “But detectives?”
“Yes, chief?” Juliet answered for the both of them, though Lassiter straightened to attention.
Vick raised an eyebrow. “Make it stick.”
They had managed to postpone getting Spencer’s statement two full days, which was the exact duration of Spencer’s stay at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. But now he was out, his left arm in a sling to prevent unnecessarily aggravating his bullet wound and sitting at the same interrogation table where his kidnapper had sat merely hours before, and Lassiter was wondering if he was going to have to handle this delicately or not (delicately, for him, wasn’t too different from his normal interrogative style, aside from it being considerably more awkward for all parties involved).
Spencer seemed fairly normal, if a bit nervous, though Lassiter figured he could chalk that up to the psychic’s typically erratic behavior. He was still pale, his eyes sunken, and a bruise bloomed purple on his left cheek, and he was tapping his fingers in rapid succession on the interrogation table, his gaze bouncing between Lassiter and the one-way mirror behind him, as if trying to meet O’Hara’s gaze through the glass (not that Lassiter knew for sure that his partner was back there, but he felt fairly certain that she would be hovering about during this whole event).
“So, you popped the trunk, ran into the woods…” Lassiter prompted.
“Yeah, yeah, Lassie, I ran into the woods, got to the gas station, Rollins clocked me with a phone when I asked him for help,” Spencer said in a rush. “When I woke up, I convinced Longmore to let me call Jules. Rollins came in at the end of the call, shot Longmore, threw me in the back of the truck. You know the rest. Listen, did Rollins really make bail at the arraignment this afternoon?”
Lassiter frowned. Spencer’s story matched the timeline that he and O’Hara had pieced together on their own, but when it came down to it, at the moment, it was still Shawn’s word against Rollins.’ They needed more evidence, more detailed testimony from Spencer, which Lassiter certainly didn’t want to pry into, not when he got the uncomfortable sense that Spencer didn’t actually seem to want to talk about the event. And anyways, how had he heard about the arraignment hearing?
“How could you possibly know about the arraignment?” Lassiter asked aloud. “Rollins made bail about five minutes before you walked in here. You wouldn’t have had the time to find out about that.”
Spencer merely smirked, wiggling his fingers at the side of his forehead in an imitation of his typical “psychic” posturing.
“You still doubt my abilities, after all this, Lassie? I’m offended,” Spencer said, though his tone lacked its typical humor. “But in any case, the dude gets to just walk off into the sunset, just like that?”
Lassiter raised an eyebrow and stared at Spencer, noting his taut posture and furrowed brows. “He makes you nervous,” Lassiter said matter-of-factly.
He knew it was true; he never saw Spencer like this after a confrontation with a criminal, all rough-edged and screwed up tightly, ready to explode like a high schooler’s poorly constructed cuckoo clock in shop class. It was unusual, and it was raw emotion—two things that made Lassiter both very uncomfortable, and also—dare he say it—even more worried than before, with this case.
Spencer sat up immediately, drawing into himself, reassembling his face into a less vulnerable expression, into the smirking, punchable face that Lassiter was more accustomed to. “Of course not, Lassie. The man was hardly a threat, except for when he killed a man in front of me, and all the times he threatened to murder and dismember me. You do that all the time. If those kinds of threats really bothered me, I would have quit Psych and finally gotten into hosting professional dog shows a long, long time ago.” He winced. “Though I’ve heard the coworkers there can be total bitches.”
Lassiter resisted the urge to slap Spencer across the face, didn’t rise to the bait as he typically would have. “What did Rollins do? Did he say something to you? A threat, about what would happen to you if he got caught? If he said something, that could help us nail him. You know that.”
An unidentifiable expression flashed across Spencer’s face. “You and Jules don’t think you can prove Rollins killed Longmore, huh? Why—it was obviously his gun that went off, and there weren’t any other suspects around, except—” Spencer cut himself off, his facial expression shifting once more into something resembling solemnity. “Oh. He’s saying it was me, wasn’t he?”
He paused again. “C’mon, Lassie, you know it wasn’t me. I would never have done something like that. Especially not to Longmore. He was a puppy dog. A sharpshooting puppy dog, sure, but a puppy dog all the same. And Rollins is terrifying. I genuinely think there was a 50/50 chance at whether he killed me or Longmore that day, and I still think he’d like to see my head in one place and my body in another, a la Robespierre and his little guillotine, if you catch my meaning.” Spencer purposefully flubbed the French pronunciation of guillotine—another attempt to deflect away the gravity of the situation, revealing to Lassiter how seriously Spencer took the allegation. The warped logic of Shawn’s behavior gave Lassiter a pounding headache if he thought about it too long.
He leaned forward, glancing briefly up at the one-way glass before meeting eyes with Spencer. “Nobody thinks you did this, Spencer. But it’s your word against his—”
“He gave me a concussion and tied me up in the back of a truck bed, how in the hell could anyone believe—”
“You shot out the car engine, Spencer,” Lassiter said flatly. “With a bullet wound to the shoulder. With a concussion. On top of a car moving sixty miles an hour. As a civilian. You shouldn’t have been able to make the shot.”
That was the heart of the matter, wasn’t it—the one bizarre instance that the defense lawyer would latch onto, no doubt in Lassiter’s mind. And Lassiter couldn’t deny his own strange feelings about that aspect of the rescue—the conflicting respect and alienation he felt towards Spencer, injured and on top of a speeding car, being able to perfectly shoot out the engine of a car. That was the expert shot of a seasoned detective, not of a kidnapped thirty-year-old-fake-psychic. He couldn’t place it in what he knew about Spencer, couldn’t jive it with his understanding of the immature man in front of him—and it unsettled him. He supposed that Henry Spencer must’ve taught his son to shoot that well, but still—it was strange.
If Spencer hadn’t looked entirely solemn before, he certainly did now. “It was a lucky shot.”
“You’re going to have to convince a jury of that, if we can’t come up with some evidence that proves it wasn’t you who shot Longmore.”
Spencer blinked once, then again at Lassiter, and he had a brief moment during which he worried that Spencer was going to have some strange burst of emotion, but then Spencer spoke. “Well, it’s a good thing my powers of conviction are vast and unknowable, then. So, did you have more questions? About the shooting?”
Lassiter stared at Spencer for a moment, trying to puzzle out what Spencer’s behavior might mean. Though he’d spent four years trying to figure out how to prove that Spencer wasn’t actually psychic, he’d learned surprisingly little about the man’s life. He didn’t like to think that Shawn could surprise him. But wasn’t that what always frustrated him about Spencer?
Lassiter shifted the papers in the folder in front of him and clicked on his ballpoint pen. “Let’s go back to when you first ran up to Rollins at the gas station,” he began.