It took walking across the parking lot from his car to the entrance of Central Coast for Gus to remember that he didn't need to be the jackal anymore, and he managed to enter through the glass doors with a smile as pleasantly starched as his coat, and without looking over his shoulder. This was both impressive, and due to the fact that he had arrived for work nearly an hour early and the likelihood of Shawn showing up anywhere before 9 in the morning was as incomprehensible as the stuff inside Stretch Armstrong.
This, of course, was perfect timing for Shawn to come popping out from behind the receptionist's desk, but auburn haired Marianne just nodded sullenly from over her computer screen. No one was supposed to be at work yet, but with the conference of bosses and the building full of coworkers in the throes of overambition, she had probably had to arrive early just to deal with the influx.
Gus continued to smile at her nod, because if he was going to be in the throes of overambition, he was going to look happy about it.
He greeted a few more people this way, nodding as he went past ("Guster." "Zenk."), and none of them met each other's eyes. It was a bizarre ritual in which no one truly acknowledged anyone else, though they certainly looked fakely happy to be doing it. Just in case the HO bosses who would be arriving in two hours times happened to see them and were impressed by their good attitudes and cheery work ethics.
Gus dropped the smile at the door to his office. He'd gotten over his initial fear of getting fired on the spot, mostly because he obviously hadn't been, and it had taken a portion of his route and a couple hours of sleep the night before to get over his fear of having Shawn come dropping down on his head. He opened the door to his office.
The mess surprised him, papers strewn across his floor, over his desk, smashed under the legs of several chairs and encroaching into Deb's area, but it all made absolute sense in the relative usage of the word when he found Shawn in the middle of it.
It took Gus a second to recognize him from the top of his hair, largely hidden by his computer monitor and distracted as he was by his newly papered office. The style was flattening out, brown hair sticking together in some random clumps of strands, but mostly stuck over and between sheets of paper, and falling between the cracks of his keyboard.
He was asleep.
Gus couldn't see his face from where he stood, but he could see the steady rise and fall of his back and hear the harsh sound of someone breathing from a partially closed windpipe with their mouth open. He was going to have a crick-in-the-neck from hell, and it was sadly not enough to placate Gus about the fact that he had arrived to work nearly an hour early and SHAWN WAS ALREADY HERE.
He didn't bother picking his way through the paper, just stamped, stamped, stamped his footprints smack through the new carpeting until he was standing at his desk, glaring down at the form drooling all over his keyboard. He was going to be creeped out everytime he had to type up a report now, thank you, Shawn.
Gus grabbed a handful of papers, shook them in the air for effect, and snapped out, "What do you think you're doing here?!"
Shawn started violently, sending papers, a mug full of "Central Coast. Have a Nice Day!" pens, and the keyboard to the floor. The mug survived, bouncing intact off one of the computer chair wheels with a porcelain-sounding plink, and he caught the keyboard in his lap.
Gus winced, then scowled, as Shawn rubbed the deep purpling under his eyes with one hand, and pulled the keyboard up by the cord with the other, clunking it back onto the desk.
"You're here early," he hazarded.
Gus shook the papers at him again, crunching them in his tight-knuckled grip. "What have you been doing? And why is it all over my office? You're--" here he finally released his grip enough to glance at what he was holding, and his eyes flared a little, like angry nostrils.
"This is illegal," he hissed, as though someone could hear him. "You are not supposed to have access to the financial accounts of Central Coast!"
Shawn yawned, speaking around his wide jawing. "Neither are you. And yet there you stand, holding them in your guilty, guilty hands."
Gus smacked them to the desk corner, as though that could uninfect him. "I didn't steal them!"
"Neither did I." Now that he wasn't talking around the yawn, Gus could hear his voice, rough with sleep. He watched the fake psychic try to swallow the rasp a few times before continuing on. "I borrowed these."
Gus's eyes narrowed. "Oh, that is so much better. When they arrest me for stealing company property, I'll bet that convinces them."
Shawn grinned. "No, seriously, how do you think I could break into the accountant's offices? Really?"
His hands clenched at his side, but his arms remained firmly straight. "With a bobby pin. I've seen you do it."
Shawn snorted then sniffled, looking contemplatively at the wall and vaguely please with himself. "Oh yeah. I forgot about that. But actually no, I got inadvertent access from Steve-O."
The pharmaceutical sales rep had to think about that, eyebrows drawn, this time in confusion. "Who?"
"The Big S."
Gus gave him a look.
Shawn nodded once, briskly. "Guster."
It took Gus a moment, but then his eyebrows shot up for a moment. "Zenk? Zenk makes conversation?"
"Yes," his best friend answered. "Apparently he likes cheese and small manufactured dolls."
Gus made a face. "That's..."
"TMI, dude, I know," Shawn answered the unspoken disgust. "Anyways, he said if he could help me with anything--what with having to stay up late and work overtime tonight, Jerry has an awful schedule--"
Gus remembered his ire quickly. "You told them you had to work overtime? I brought you home from work yesterday to recuperate!"
He was duly ignored. "--and so I helped myself to his keys. Apparently accountants have whole rings full of them. Oh, and I think he'll notice the footprints when he opens his filing cabinets next time around."
Gus looked down suddenly, to see that he was still standing on a pile of papers. He jumped, stepped on another sheet, and did a ballet-like move that had him straddling about a yard, his feet on bare patches.
"This is important financial information!" he snapped, looking back up at Shawn.
"Yes," Shawn said with a serious frown. "So please stop standing on them."
Gus scowled, but he was starting to think about the logistics of this, staring at the papers strewn across the room. "We need to clean this up before someone notices."
Shawn waved him off, swinging his converse tennis shoes up onto the desk top. "Oh, don't worry about that, these are all copies."
The sigh of relief was silent, because he didn't want Shawn to know that he'd gotten him in some way, but his anger was clearly visible as he settled back on his feet, adding more business shoe prints to the papers there. "That's illegal too."
"Yes," Shawn answered, holding up a document, absently studying it. His eyes looked a little bleary, and Gus couldn't imagine he was actually getting anything from it. "Oh and the copy machine on the third floor is out of ink. And remember, I did this for you, I already remember all of this."
"Nice," Gus scowled. "If we're caught with this...and what's wrong with the ones the police have?"
Shawn coughed. "Ah, cute version. Someone put it all together in pie charts for them, I wanted to see what it actually looked like."
"You don't even know finances!"
"But I know patterns." Gus's angry glare must have caught him, because he looked up again from he was wiping drool across the spacebar. "I think all of this was done by the same person."
There was a sound at the door, and Gus suddenly remembered that Deborah was due in a little less than half an hour, if she didn't come early, and he had illegally obtained copies of private, company financial information all over his half of their office, and slowly oozing over into hers.
"You've gotta go," he said, "before anyone else comes in here and thinks your Jerry or whatever, and I can shred this."
Shawn made a noise that could have been a cough, but was probably somewhere into the realm of affront. Gus stalked towards him, trying to pick him up by the arm.
"Do you even care about this?" he whined.
"No," Gus snapped, and Shawn let him haul him to his feet.
Shawn sighed. "Did you even hear the part about this being done by the same person? There's an evil mastermind at play here!"
"Yeah, whatever," he said, pushing Shawn towards the door like a misbehaving child, and like a misbehaving child he dragged his feet, which simply slipped through the paper.
"You're ruining my organization!" he cried.
"What organization?" Gus snapped without really asking. He opened the door and checked out in the hall, which was mercifully empty.
"Over there," Shawn said next to his ear, "On the desk, I'm pretty sure most of those people are going to be arrested for fraud."
Gus finally looked at him again, and was nearly startled by the dark smudges under his eyes, before he remembered that the idiot had spent all night here and wasn't likely to look good for it. "You don't know--"
Carl from Sales and Marketing put up a hand in greeting. "Morning Guster. Hey Jerry."
Jerry waved from behind Gus's head.
"--finances!" Gus snapped at him, trying to manuever his best friend out the door.
Shawn grabbed hold of the door frame, looking over his shoulder. "But I know patterns," he insisted. "And they look exactly like Bobble's did, and the other one that failed you in interview."
Gus drew himself up short for a second, then kept on pushing, his hand tight on Shawn's arm. "I did not fail that--"
He paused as a coworker, a weirded out look on his face, walked past, staring at them both. "Morning," he said, smiling pleasantly around Shawn's white knuckled grip on the door frame. He was gone with a final glance a moment later.
"--interview. You arrested her before--"
"--she could," Shawn filled in for him. "You're welcome for that by the way, I'm just looking out for you."
Gus finally managed to break his hold on the door, or Shawn possibly let it go, because they were moving down the hallway at a brisk pace, Gus striding for the entry door, just around the corner. Someone managed a "Jerry!" at them in the hall. He had this crazy hope that releasing Shawn out into the wild would somehow get rid of him.
"Anyways," he continued, "more than the fraud looking kind of the same, it's practically identical. It had to--hi Laurie," he said, smiling at a woman with a smile and a "morning, Shawn" "--be done by one person. That sort of thing doesn't happen by accident."
Gus had only one thing to say to that. "Do all these people think you work here?"
"Pretty much," Shawn replied. He waved at a "Hey, Jerry," and a "Here on overtime, Shawn?" simultaneously, quite cheerfully ignoring the suspicious looks the two coworkers each gave the other, as though one of them had the gaul to accidentally call him by the wrong name. "Also," he went on to Gus. "They're probably going to arrest more of your interviewers."
Gus couldn't decide what drew him up short, this proclamation, or the fact that in rounding the corner, he had come into sight of the lobby entrance and Tom, looking cheerful in a brown suit and greeting everyone who came in with a "Good morning!" that sounded like he meant it. Gus backtracked immediately, swinging Shawn back with him, the psychic still moving forward with the momentum. He crunched into Gus, who let out a big whoof of air before settling his back against the wall.
"Tom," he whispered in a horrified voice that suggested the apocolypse was coming. "What are we going to do?"
Shawn started to cough, almost explosively though he seemed to be trying to keep it in his chest, and Gus smacked him on the arm for the bad timing of a stupid joke.
"Stop it," he snapped. "We are in so much trouble."
"What for?" Tom asked.
Gus flipped his head from looking at Shawn to see Tom standing in front of him, looking like he honestly wanted to know. Realizing that he was still stiffly clinging to the wall with his hands, spine smashed straight and shoulders in the mug-shot position, Gus started to "eh-heh-heh" unconvincingly, relaxing into a normal standing position. He laughed like someone who thought cancer was funny. "Well, you know..."
Tom nodded as though he got it, reaching over a hand to smack Shawn, crouched forward slightly away from the wall and still trying to control his coughing, on the back.
"Geeze, Jerry, you should've stayed home," he said, crouching a little to try and meet Shawn's eyes, hand still on his shoulder. Shawn waved, and started to calm down.
Gus rolled his eyes over to Shawn when Tom looked away for a second, probably seeing someone else he could possibly bond with this fine morning, and he hissed, out of the corner of his mouth. "You could've told me that's what you were trying to warn me about!"
Gus didn't wait for a reply, or for any reply Shawn could throw at him, just clapped his own hand onto Shawn's back, with a sound that startled Tom into jerking his head back to both of them.
"We're going to get some water," Gus announced, drawing Shawn out from under Tom's reassuring grip.
Shawn smiled big and a little buck-toothed. "WATER," he mock-gasped, holding his throat like he'd just come back from the Sahara.
Tom clapped him one more time on the back, this time accepting the jest. "Oh, you kill me Jerry."
"With a chainsaw!" Shawn decided, laughing loudly and a little too long at his own joke.
"You both are funny," Gus acceded, without his neutral expression shifting. "Have a good time at work today, Tom."
Tom punched him like a comrade on the arm. "You know I will!"
They turned away again, Shawn a little ahead, distracted as he looked down the hall, and Tom grabbed Gus's arm, pulling him in conspiratorially.
"Jerry looks awful," he whispered, like Jerry wasn't standing a foot away.
Gus had no idea what he wanted from that. "Really bad," he finally agreed, and Tom nodded like they had come to an understanding.
"Okay," Shawn said decisively, clearing his throat once Tom was gone. "So you'll do the financial stuff, I've about had my fill of that, and I'll go talk to people."
"No," he snapped. But he could feel the sweat start to gather on his upper lip. "Do you realize how easily this house of cards could fall? Everyone here thinks you're someone else!"
"Hey, Maverick," blonde and beautiful Brianna said to Shawn, smiling like she knew something secret as she passed them on the way to the stairs.
Gus had to stop at that one. "Maverick?"
"I'm an international spy," Shawn answered, pulling with a suave move at his collar, which failed when he sniffled, and pretty much by the fact that he was still wearing that obnoxiously bright red undershirt and faded blue polo combo from the day before. "Once this is all over, that will pretty much explain everything away."
"Yeah, no one will notice," Gus said flatly, before stalking forward ahead. He didn't look back to make sure he was being followed. "We'll get to my office and you'll lay low. Maybe I'll even let you run the shredder."
Gus went around the corner, caught one last sight of Shawn staring somewhere down the hall with narrowed eyes, and then ran into Ogletree's chest.
"Guster!" Ogletree snapped. He sounded affronted, as though Gus liked and went out of his way to run into his chest. Can I feel your pudgy pecks? Can I please? "Watch where you're going!"
"You're standing in front of my office door," Gus pointed out peevishly. He glanced nervously behind him, thinking to be just in time for Shawn to round the corner and shoot all and sundry excuses to hell, but there was no best friend to follow his gaze. It made him feel relieved, and a little nervous.
"Yes I am," he sneered, like that explained everything. Gus sighed with an irritated sound that Ogletree was supposed to interpret for himself, and tried to push past.
"Don't think I don't know what you're up to," he assured Gus.
Gus tried to reach a hand to the doorknob and past Ogletree's hip, but the man wouldn't budge. "Haven't we been through this conversation already?"
Ogletree curled a lip at him. "I've been hearing about Shawn around here." He spoke Shawn's name like a dirty word, drawing it through his teeth "Shhhhhhhaawnn," and for the first time Gus could understand Ogletree on a level he didn't think possible.
"He comes and goes," Gus snapped.
"Fine." The pharmaceutical rep, with a slow raising of eyebrows that was probably supposed to indicate suspicion and mild distrust, peered down his nose at him. "Be that way."
He finally pushed himself off the door, arms still crossed. Gus was finally able to grab the handle, and he did so, though he couldn't quite make the decision to plunge into the gap between the door frame and Ogletree's exceptionally bony looking hip in order to push his way inside. He didn't think he was that desperate.
"Have you heard anything about this new employee?" the man asked, still peering at Gus. "Jerry?"
Gus's insides froze. Ogletree wasn't smart enough to put it together on his own, but he was most certainly determined enough to find the answer anyways.
"He isn't new," Gus said, trying not to widen his eyes anymore than they already were.
Ogletree narrowed his own eyes at him. "That's what Tom said."
He finally started to walk away and Gus watched him go, but he turned so that he was looking at him again, arms still crossed like he knew what was what.
"That's what Tom said," he repeated ominously.
He went around the corner backwards, still eyeing Gus, and it was the entirely fascinating bizarreness of the moment that wouldn't let Gus turn back to the office until Ogletree was gone, probably still backing away and watching the corner to see if Gus was going to follow him.
Gus entered the office, closed the door a little too hard because there was still an illegal mess to clean up, and cursed the circumstances that had led to him losing sight of Shawn. He leaned down to start to pick up the piles for shredding, shifted through a couple just out of curiosities sake, and realized why the copy machine was out of ink.
Shawn, his face obviously shoved against the copy machine glass, eyes squeezed shut, and in all its black and white photocopied glory, squinted up at him from between the monthly financial report on the cost benefits of dizapram and a pie chart for noxirin.
A count of ten and several run throughs of lamaze breathing did nothing to save the picture from ending up stomped to death by a pair of Oxfords.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The cool metal of the cabinet, puke green (and wasn't that just a great visual representation of the state of his stomach) with a matching partner in almighty orange next to it, felt like it was swallowing the heat from his forehead. When he finally got around to peeling his face off the drawer top, he'd probably look like a bull dog, the type with huge jowls and no discernible profile. Those things looked like they went around chasing parked cars.
He coughed suddenly, wishing with every chest-scraping bark that shot through the back of his skull, that he didn't sound like one too.
When he'd abandoned Gus to Ogletree's evil, if vaguely hilarious clutches, Shawn had thought it was because the contents of these cabinets might be interesting. He'd seen them in the reflection off the door in another hall awhile back in the lobby, and had gone back, after waving at auburn Marianne, who still wasn't smiling, and found one of the bigger offices. He knew it had to be for one of the bigger cheeses in the company because the actual office he was half-collapsed in was just for the secretary.
He was beginning to wonder just how many secretaries this place had.
But he was beginning to suspect he'd really gone in here, as heat washed from his face to the blessed relief of the metal, to see if the cabinets were really as cool to the touch as they looked. So maybe it was a little more selfishly-oriented than trying to solve a case. You know, if leaving your best friend to the evil if vaguely hilarious clutches of his work enemy just to check the contents of a possibly interesting puke green cabinet wasn't selfish.
Shawn groaned into the file case, the sound moaning and shivering off the metal.
"What are you doing in here?" demanded a voice behind him.
Shawn could have jerked then but he didn't, because if he was caught he was going to spend as long as he could with his head mashed into the cool temperature of a filing cabinet before he was hauled away by Joe the security guard.
"I'm checking for termites," he finally decided, rolling his head a little to smash his ear against the top. "Can't hear any so far."
The voice, female and possibly belonging to someone very hot or very evil (these things always seemed to work out that way, and her voice was husky enough to be either and/or both), funnily enough, didn't sound like she believed him. "In a metal filing cabinet?"
He didn't answer for a long second. "These things happen," he finally said.
"Not in my office," she answered. "I'm going to ask you to leave, and you're going to listen."
With a sigh, the breath fogging the puke green for a fleeting moment, he closed his eyes, peeled his skin off the metal, and straightened, opening his eyes and looking to the left.
Ice Cold Vanilla, and yes, it was actually a worse name than Racoon Barbie, watched him with cold blue eyes, her thin limbs framed and bony in the doorway. She was again sporting the horrible, horrible mascara job she'd had gracing her terrifying features the other day (or was that today? It didn't feel like it mattered anymore), but from this distance you could actually see her irises, which were like ice. Her black mascara accented nothing about her face but her pupils, which were small, round, and soulless.
"Hi," he said. "I just wanted to borrow your filing cabinet for awhile."
She seemed to sneer at him, but that might have been the natural curl of her thin lips. "And why is that? What could you possibly be looking for?"
Shawn couldn't think of any good excuse. His mind blanked, thrumming over the headache that skimmed right above his eye. "Motivation?" he finally tried. "Or maybe a paper trail. Or just a sign that says 'I did it. Here's how.'"
She watched him for a moment, like most people watch a television program they're not sure they like yet, or a bug they might consider studying before squashing. "Are you Shawn right now?" she asked. "Or Jerry? Psychic, or coworker?"
This should possibly have been disturbing, and on a visceral level it was, but he was too tired to really make a show of being shocked. "I knew you were following me the other day."
She folded her hands neatly against her pant legs, mannish shoulder pads bunching under her coat. "You think you're special because you've got charm and a bit of cleverness? I didn't need to follow you to discover the truth behind that particularly thin lie. Guster has the worst track record for showing up for all his hours, and the best record in getting sales. It's not hard to figure out that one doesn't add up to two without another one."
The math on that one sounded like it should make sense, but it really didn't. He dug his thumb into the upper corner of his right eye socket, sighed, and then tried to figure it out the old fashioned way. "What?"
Her eyes looked into the bit of skull he was grinding with his thumb, as though searching for what was hurting him. "Guster's the fourth grader that cried when he got a B on a test," she said. "And you're the fourth grader's best friend who made him get that B and thought it was funny."
Shawn let his hand drop, but the sharp movement forced the tickle out of his chest and into his mouth. He coughed, a hollow barking that echoed through his torso, leaning against the puke green cabinet. Now the metal was too cold, sending waves of it through his too thin undershirt, a temperature that seemed to eat and multiply the ache in his lungs.
Vanilla frowned at him. "You look atrocious."
"Thank you," he said, wheezing for breath. "Are you going to kick the poor, dying, sick man out of your office?"
She looked at him from around her black-circled eyes. She opened her mouth, thought about it for a second, and then practically nodded to herself. "Sit down."
"What?" he asked, frowning.
"I said: 'Sit down'," she stated, just as clearly.
Shawn looked down into her desk area. She had two desks of rather nice quality set up at right angles to each other, and from his position in front of the cabinets he was looking into the crook of the L. The computer chair was set in front of her monitor, which bounced with the Windows logo, on the desk that faced a couch, while the other desk was empty and faced the open door, which she was currently blocking. The door to whatever boss controlled this evil henchwoman was behind him and directly opposite from its sister door that led out into the lobby.
He had to decide if this was some sort of evil trap. Was it? Wasn't it? He thought for a moment. He wanted to get a look at her computer, but now that she wanted him to sit, he thought that maybe it wasn't such a good idea. Now he just wanted to get out of there. He felt cornered, because he hadn't seen her coming, and because he wasn't sure he could vault the L-shaped desk configuration with lungs that burned with the need to cough.
He hadn't even realized this was her usual secretarial post from where she had been during the first arrest. He couldn't believe he'd missed the fact that this was one of the main suspect's offices.
Shawn unconsciously pursed his lips, feeling the ache in his chest and the nausea roiling in his empty stomach, and tried to string together why that sort of bothered him.
"Are you going to sit?" she asked, and he realized that he was still standing, staring at her chair. "This is getting ridiculous."
"I can't think right now," he snapped. "Do you have any idea what that's like?"
He squeezed his eyes shut for a second on his headache, or possibly the fact that he had just lost his temper with a woman he barely knew, who had, as of yet, earned only a spot on "What Not to Wear," and not "World's Most Wanted." Time would tell if she was "World's Worst Dressed Criminal."
Her creepy eyes said she knew what he was thinking.
He decided to go for the chair. If she wanted to interrogate him, fine. Whatever. His legs were tired.
Shawn settled into the surprisingly comfortable chair, rolling it around to the empty desk that faced her, leaning onto his elbows. The computer tower hummed quietly near his knee, giving off comforting heat on his cold legs. The cough hit him suddenly, and he leaned into his arm to cover at, coughing full impact onto his sleeve. His breathing calmed slowly, as did the burning in his throat.
Ice Cold Vanilla continued to watch him for a second. "I'll be right back," she said, turning her body, man-shoulders and all, to leave.
Shawn had not expected opportunity to present itself so quickly.
"If you leave my office, that's certainly up to you," she added, pausing. "I was trying to get rid of you anyways, before I started feeling sorry for you."
He blinked. "What?" he asked, but she was gone.
The defensive reasoning behind his next actions were, logically, easy to follow. First, she wouldn't be back for at least five minutes. Probably. Second, he wanted to check her computer. He hadn't noticed any passwords written anywhere so far, and she didn't seem the type, but he could probably come up with something involving...something. He'd think about that in a second. Third, he didn't know how long he'd slept last night, but it had been on top of Gus's keyboard and sometime after the sun had started to warm the blinds on the windows. Fourth, this chair was really comfortable. He wondered if she'd had to kill a coworker for it, or possibly convince a boss that his chair wasn't good enough for him but would be good in her office. Really, though, surprisingly comfortable. Fifth...
He nodded into his hands, and finished reason number five when his head hit the desk and he was gone.
~~~~~~~~~~
The squeaky, squeaky, squeaky of a badly oiled chair wheel woke him.
He was disoriented, not precisely certain where he was, and drooling all along his jaw and onto desk number two for the day. He opened his eyes, feeling the numbness of the hands under his chin, and saw a cup of something next to his face.
Shawn lifted his head with an "awwgghh" for his badly cricked neck, grimacing at the closed door as though it had answers for him. The squeak of wheels suddenly struck again, somewhere back in his temples but not quite as painful, and he rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, wiping up the drool on his face with the sleeve on the other.
"You were out for a couple hours," Vanilla said, squeaking around in a chair that had seen better days. She swiveled away from the cabinet she was dropping files into and perused his face. "You still look terrible."
He coughed somewhere deep in his throat, feeling the squeeze of his sick, empty stomach. "I think I'm going to be sick."
"I think you're hungry," she replied. She stood up, reached over him and grabbed the styrafoam cup, swirling it around and watching the contents with icy eyes. "This was warmer when I first brought it. I'll be back."
He watched her disappear into the boss's office, leaving the door open, and he heard the clunk of a microwave opening, then the thrum of the machine. It was a contented noise, and soothed the headache still playing in his aching skull. It dinged! rather too cheerfully, but she reemerged with it moments later, the contents steaming up and into her pale face. There must have been a spoon in the office, because there was a plastic stem sticking out from the top.
"Enjoy," she said blandly, handing him the cup.
He let the steam clear his sinuses, which of course it didn't, though it seemed like it should have. It was possibly chicken soup, though the fake psychic couldn't smell it well enough to be sure. It certainly looked like it. The phone rang as Shawn breathed in too much, coughing till he tasted metal, before swallowing it back down.
"Central Coast," Vanilla said, very nearly pleasantly. "Please hold."
"What poor schmuck did you steal this from?" he asked, burning his tongue but slurping it up anyways as he watched her direct the call.
"Me," she answered, settling back into the squeaking chair with straight-backed force. She caught his look and raised her eyebrows. "We have vending machines here."
"You're...less evil than the impression you give off," Shawn decided.
Vanilla straightened slightly. "That was rude."
Shawn had to wait for his reply as the phone rang again and she picked it up. "Central Coast--yes, Mr. Kochev, I'll call him. Do you want him to ring you on your cell?"
She hung up a moment later, placing a long digit onto the cradle, then released and began dialing. She relayed the message in as few words as possible and hung up.
"Where is your boss? Should I feel embarrassed? Did he see me sleeping on your desk? I feel like a bad prom date," he finished, poofing his flattened hair.
"Mr. Kochev is busy with the conference," Vanilla told him succinctly. "He's not in most of the meetings, but he's a meeter and greeter. He'll spend most of the day out of the office, making his rounds."
"Sounds like Tom," Shawn smirked into his soup.
Ice Cold Vanilla fixed him with a look. "He is Tom."
Shawn choked on his soup, and had to swing his arm up and around to cover the explosive cough that followed. He swallowed the last few gasps. "You work for Tom?" He thought about that for a second. "No wait, that's not what really surprises me. Tom has a last name?"
She fixed him with another look, which was as equally ominous as the first.
Shawn smiled over the rising steam, with teeth that refused to look guilty. "I'm not usually this slow," he said.
Ice Cold Vanilla frowned. "I'm getting that."
"So," he said, taking a slurp. A couple of fat noodles escaped his mouth, splashing back into the broth. "You're less evil than you seem, and I'm less insightful than I believed. I'll have you know I'm having a bad day."
Vanilla turned back to her work, but she waved a couple of fingers at him to indicate that he should keep talking.
"How much influence does a secre--" he swallowed the words with a mouthful of soup, the broth sliding painfully along tender throat muscles, and then amended "--personal assistant have?"
For the first time the woman scoffed. "I'm a secretary. Don't bother calling it anything else. It doesn't change the job, or the influence."
Shawn grinned, showing his teeth. "So a lot of influence, then."
The secretary paused, lifting her head, the pale, severe bun of hair on the back of her head bobbing a little. "Not big things," she said. "But a lot of little things, and that ultimately--" the phone rang again and she put up a finger in the please-hold gesture, picking it up with a "Central Coast," followed by a few hmming noises as she pulled up a document on the computer and tacked a few things into it.
She hung up. "--becomes a very big thing."
"And you notice stuff," Shawn prompted. He coughed slightly, but the broth burning down his throat was somehow managing to sooth his aching chest. Even his nausea was disappearing with the hot liquid in his belly. "You know you're one of the few people to actually think I'm not faking my cough?"
"I don't really feel sorry for you," she said without preamble. "You probably hammed it up all week, and now that you finally feel it, people are tired of it."
"Cold," he told her. "So who did it?" he asked, moving on from his terrible emotional pain. "You'll notice I'm not accusing you anymore. Bribery is everything," he finished, lifting the cup of soup at her in salute.
Ice Cold Vanilla thought about that. "I couldn't say. There are too many factors here--the conferences, the extra personnel. I know everything that's going on, until you introduce something that I haven't had go through my fingers."
Shawn swirled the cup in his hand, hunger waning. "Fingers in every pie?"
"I get paid for it," she answered.
"Okay, fine," he said, "I concede your ultimate power. Can I track something like that?"
She raised an eyebrow at him.
"I mean if a secretary ordered a car rental and decided to accidentally drop a few days so that a boss would have to conveniently run away at just the right time, could you know who did it?"
Vanilla tacked away a couple of times on her keyboard, then stopped. "No. One secretary could have told another secretary. Or maybe a boss told one boss to do it who told a secretary to get it done."
Shawn huffed, coughed on the short gasp of breath, then pouted back in her comfortable chair. He put his feet firmly on the floor, then started to scoot around her chair on his borrowed one. She frowned when he bumped into her, but he kept going until he was around her and next to the cabinets.
"So..." he started. "Since you're the real boss behind everything that goes on here, I don't suppose you've got the files for all the extra people that have been passing through here in the past couple of days?" He glanced over at the filing cabinet.
Her eyes glinted at him from under her heavy lashes, which looked as though they should stick, top to bottom, everytime the blink of her lids brought them together. There was still no getting around the absolute horror of what could possibly have convinced her that was a good look for her. "Surprisingly, I'm not keen on the idea of losing my job."
Shawn sighed, looking depressed, which was generally easy to do when feeling ill.
"But," she continued, "if I stepped away from my desk for a moment, if I were you I might look in the bottom right drawer on my computer desk. They aren't private files, just files that aren't quite open as public information yet.
"I'm taking a break," she announced suddenly, standing abruptly and pushing the rolling chair back with her pant-clad legs.
He was digging into her drawer before she was gone.
"A little tact would be nice," she said.
"Hold on," he replied. "This will just take a second, and I might have questions."
"You've managed to completely miss the point," she said. "Congratulations."
The file was small, it was easy business to flip through it for anything interesting. There wasn't much, and he suspected that she was more discreet than he'd been hoping. These looked like they'd be filed soon on the computer, and probably made public, like the conference attendee numbers and who was interviewing who, as well as--
He grinned at the paper. "Hello," he said, pulling it out. It was a two weeks notice, from Sanchez's PA, and the most interesting thing was that the date it had been filed, a sloppy 17 of the month, written in the same hand that had written the rest of the document (probably Flet's handwriting, the poor mis-named kid), had been crossed out and replaced by a sharper hand, which had it recorded as the day before.
"This wouldn't be your handwriting, would it?" Shawn asked, ignoring the pinch of headache on his skull. Things had just gotten slightly more interesting again.
The phone rang and both ignored it.
"Yes, it would."
Shawn pursed his lips at it, but put it away a second later. "Why? Did you make a mistake?"
Vanilla bristled, and her eyes, which he had begun to think could actually be kind of pretty in the right lighting, reminded him that they were full of ice. The phone, as though in terror, stopped ringing. "My filing is perfect. I file it when I get it, and this kid isn't going to slip something past me, just because he thinks he can."
"Huhn," Shawn answered intelligently. "And today's the..." the days were jumbled, and he couldn't remember when one moment bled into the next. "The 20th," he decided.
The secretary raised both invisibly blonde eyebrows at him. "Today's the 18th, Rip Van Winkle."
"Ooh," Shawn said, "Saucy. I think I need to talk to our quitter."
"He'll be in the conference," Vanilla answered his unasked question. "2nd floor, in the big meeting room. Room 207."
Shawn's cough, which he had thought was beginning to ebb, bloomed again, but he was too interested again to remember that he felt terrible, and should be at home, sleeping. "How are you such a dear, and no one noticed?" he asked, once he'd finished hacking his coughed up guts out onto his arm. "And why to me?"
Vanilla stopped, honest-to-goodness stopped doing anything with her hands, her mouth still. She had walked back to the desk, seeing the blink of lights on hold, but her hand merely hovered over the phone.
"Because you give Frankjim hell," she finally decided.
Shawn grinned, barking with coughs and something kind of like laughter as he smoothly walked out her door.
~~~~~~~~~~
Gus studied the papers in his hands, sitting in his chair, the shredder next to his feet half full of illegal confetti. The door clicked open, and for a second he started, looking guilty and shoving the paper at the shredder, which was important and, fortunately, missed.
He frowned at Shawn. "Where have you been?" he demanded. "You left me with this mess."
"Yes..." Shawn said slowly, eyes skimming over the office. He absently held up his hand in a wave to the woman behind the office partition. "About four hours ago."
Gus, for the first time in about three hours, really looked at the office, and realize that it did, in fact, appear to have exploded into even more chaos than Shawn had managed. There were neater stacks on the floor around his desk, about a quarter of which had been pared down and was currently mourning its demise in his personal shredder, but the papers that had been threatening to endoplasmically ooze onto Deb's side of the room appeared to have taken it over.
"That's not my fault," Gus said, frowning at his coworker's half of the office. "She thought I was cleaning out my files," he explained, setting down the papers in his hand onto a stack next to his monitor. "So Deborah decided that her desk had better be clean too."
"You're not the only one who can impress the bosses this way!" Deb's voice called around the partition.
Gus rolled his eyes from the safety of his corner of the office.
"Oh! Shawn, have you heard the latest gossip?" she didn't wait for him to say yes or no, having obviously decided that she was going to tell him regardless. "They're saying the president of the company himself might be coming down. To help with the image of Central Pharmaceuticals in case the press gets wind of it. Or it gets worse."
"Gee how could it get worse?" Shawn asked in a Jerry-voice, smiling with his upper teeth over his lip at Deb. She snorted.
"Right," Gus said. He tried to fight off the nervousness from the thought that the super-boss might actually be coming here. "Anyways, you were right. The pattern is really similar in all the cases. Too similar."
Shawn put a hand to his chest, mock-gasped, and broke into a coughing fit that was fake in its severity. Gus waited for him to finish, letting him know he wasn't impressed.
"I'll have you know Vanilla gave me soup," Shawn told him.
Gus went back to the papers at hand. "I'll ignore that blatant lie. See this?" he handed a stack under his keyboard to a grinning Shawn, which made him stop for a second. "What?"
"You," Shawn smirked. "Mr. I-am-going-to-clean-up-this-mess-and-not-get-involved."
Gus scowled, but had nothing to say in his defense. Everything had seemed a lot more interesting when he was holding the actual financial accounts in his hands, comparing the discrepancies with one another and finding the puzzles in the bland rows of numbers.
"Right," Shawn said, finally looking down at the papers he had accepted from Gus. "I'll rub it in your face later."
Gus shook his head at his best friend, but got to his feet, going around the desk to point out what he had found. "There," he pointed. "If you'll go through these you'll see all these people are associated in someway with the sister branches. Central Coast, some of the smaller branches along the coast, but mostly here in Santa Barbara."
"All of them?" his best friend clarified, looking interested. He started directing him towards the door and Gus followed, barely noticing.
"But get this--see you Deb," he called absently, Shawn leaving with another one handed wave. He could see her out of the corner of his eye, gleefully shredding paper. They left his office. "The fraud is coming up fraud."
"That sounds about as fascinating as...financial fraud," Shawn answered, pushing the button to the elevator, somewhat nonsensically Gus thought, as this was incredibly interesting stuff. He appeared to contemplate that with his hands in his pockets, making little wheezy noises in the back of his throat that Gus found both disturbing and irritating. Gus couldn't help but take in the sight of his best friend, pale but smiling, and the state of his clothes.
His frown crept onto his face as he looked at Shawn's sleeves, at the snot smears on the material covering his wrists, and whatever it was he had managed to splatter on himself, staining bits of the dark blue polo across his bicep a splotchy black.
Not on his life would he touch that, but he stared at it pointedly. "Did a coffee maker explode?" he asked.
"Like Old Faithful," Shawn informed him. "Do have anything more than 'fraud as fraud,' or is that all the scintillating bits of information I'm privy to?"
They got into the elevator as Gus shuffled through the papers in his hands. "I've been having a hard time pinning down where it's coming from."
"So what you're saying is that one person is behind all this," Shawn clarified.
"Exactly!" Gus exclaimed.
Shawn sighed, disappointed. "You're about four hours behind the times, dude. I told you this at the start of the morning. And now it's almost lunch. See how little you've accomplished?" The elevator door dinged, revealing the second floor, and Shawn walked out still talking, Gus right behind him. "You haven't even asked what I accomplished."
"Soup with Ice Cold Vanilla," Gus snapped. "I heard." He suddenly realized they were on the second floor, standing in front of the door for the HO conference. He could hear the voices behind it, a soft rumble of noise that increased as Shawn started to open the door. He pushed his hand against it, but couldn't close it from his angle. "Hold on. What are we doing here?"
"Finding out what I accomplished," Shawn grinned, and pushed him into the room.
~~~~~~~~
The best part, of course, was the look on Gus's face.
On quick glance the room held about seventy men and women. Several of them were assistants, obviously so by the fact that they weren't sitting, but standing around holding official looking clipboards, or walking in long strides that said they had important business to attend to. The bosses themselves were from a variety of places, though a large portion appeared to be from the Midwest. They sat at tables of six, interspersed by what looked like region of origin, and each wearing a neatly printed nametag. Shawn got the feeling that was Tom's idea, to make them feel more comfortable and at home with each other. Tom would have probably ended up somewhere by himself if he was in the room, a nerd in a cafeteria full of pharmaceutical jocks, but he was, alas, missing, which would make this slightly less fun.
For some oddly made decision, the stage for the conference had been set up so that it was next to the door rather than on the opposite wall from it, so that Shawn and Gus became the center of attention the moment they entered. It was probably a deterrent for anyone hoping to escape the meetings early and explore the Santa Barbara beach, but it was the best kind of encouragement to someone who could easily forget his own woes once he had an audience large enough.
"And...here he is at last!" the man on the podium announced, his words suddenly swelling with the assurance that he had just been relieved from entertainment duty. "The stage is yours, Dr. Gruber."
Shawn turned to Gus, mouthed the word "Gruber" without having to cough, but his best friend was still wallowing in mortification, and hadn't managed to remember his own name yet. "I didn't invent the Baby food, did I?" he asked the man coming off the stage.
The business man, in the midst of straightening his eyebrows with his fingers, paused on the stairs. "You're Dr. Gruber?" His eyes glanced towards Gus.
Shawn looked down at his clothes, then looked over at Gus, in his quietly classy pin-striped suit with his Italian icecream colored silk shirt underneath. Shawn remembered the snot on his sleeves.
"Right," he said to the man. "I am Dr. Gruber. My associate tries to make up for my attempts to put people at their ease."
Gus made a squeaky sound of protest, but Shawn managed to push him onto the stage with little resistance. The loudest protester, in fact, were his lungs, which ached and gasped like they couldn't get quite enough air. Eyebrow-straightener watched them both with trepidation, until Shawn winked at him, muffling the sound of his raspy breath by keeping his mouth closed, and making the announcer uncomfortable enough to stop staring.
Shawn left Gus with his mouth gaping open just far enough to suggest either terror or utter disgrace, and grabbed both sides of the podium. He leaned into the mic.
"Ah, yes," he began. "My fellow Americans." He paused.
There was really nowhere good to go after that but down. Shawn considered his words carefully, his gaze sweeping the room for Flet, Sanchez's PA. Nowhere in sight. "Right," he said.
A PA, a bleached blonde girl with short, sassy hair, pointed to a projector connected to a laptop in her lap, and mouthed "The slideshow."
"Yes!" Shawn exclaimed. He coughed suddenly, turning his face into his sleeve until the wild animal braying was done. He pulled his face away from his shirt, smiled, and suddenly barked one last time. Several tables closest to the speakers on either side of the stage jumped. "The slideshow. We shall begin!"
Someone shut off the lights around the stage, leaving enough light from the back of the room to allow people to see. Shawn continued to watch, but there was no sign of the PA kid they needed as Blondie, with a flick of her wrist, pulled the lens cap off the projector. He glanced behind him at the screen.
"This..." Shawn looked at it for another long second. There appeared to be a cell, eating another cell. "Is what happens when you go to McDonalds, one too many times."
Gus finally remembered who he was, or at least that he was a big, enormous nerd, who studied way too much for a job that wasn't nearly as much fun as his other one. "That's endocytosis in endothelial cells," he hissed over on Shawn's left.
"Also known as endocytosis in endothelial cells," Shawn added. "Next slide please."
He glanced behind himself, and saw that the picture had changed to the same exact picture as before, only with components in neon pink.
"And this is when we let Craig get a hold of that highlighter," Shawn chuckled to himself. The chuckles faded into a pathetic attempt to cough no deeper than the top of his throat. 'That Craig, always was a kidder. Next slide."
Gus made a sound like someone was killing him.
"Ah! But I've forgotten to introduce my colleague," he pulled Gus over to the podium, and they both ended up standing in the brilliant light of the projector. Someone, a PA probably, with too much gumption, turned on the upper lights again, so that this new associate could be thrown into stark relief. It faded the picture quality of the sarcoma-associated herpesvirus that rippled across their faces as they moved, disguising the sweat beginning to bead on Shawn's forehead.
Shawn smiled like a game show host, or like he was selling a car, wiping a sleeve across his forehead. The lights were unpleasantly bright, boring through his eyes and straight through to his skull. "This, ladies and gentlemen," here he winked at a woman in the front row who looked old enough to be his mother, "is Burton 'Bad Luck' Guster."
There was a ripple of shock, and Gus turned a fish-like gape on Shawn that swiftly swallowed his face with rage.
"Also known as 'Bad Luck Burton' in the rougher parts of town," Shawn conceded to a man about halfway down the isle.
"I am not--!" Gus tried.
Shawn put a placating arm on his arm, and turned back to the room. "We at the Gruber Baby Food industries have been studying this phenomenon. I'm very sorry to say that we have no cure as of yet, and the next person who interviews this man will probably end up in jail.
Over in the back corner, a woman put her hand to her mouth, horrified and badly consoled by a man with a meaty hand, who patted her on the shoulder blade while shaking his head.
"While we mean to--"
A side door, probably connected to the next room over in the hall, opened silently on the side, and Shawn finally received sight of Flet, who glanced towards the stage, started, but continued on with a professional amount of calm. He leaned down to speak to one of the bosses in the crowd, faltering only slightly when Shawn waved a hand towards him.
"Here we are at last, ladies and gentlemen!" he announced. As one, the group turned to see what he was pointing at, chairs creaking, pant legs rubbing loudly on table cloth and against chairs, and Flet suddenly found himself the center of attention.
"I hate you," Gus whispered, which, unfortunately for him, carried over the microphone at the podium. He got a room full of sharp glances, and the desperate desire to either die or disappear suddenly.
"Yes," Shawn continued, waving forward. "Come on up to the front. You're vital to this investigation into 'Bad Luck' Burton's twisted fate."
The PA could do nothing but as he was told, but to his credit he managed to look as though he wanted to end up on the stage, rather than slinking his way there. He gave a few people pleasant smiles, nodding briskly but with enough sincerity to acknowledge that he was okay with this, and ended up on stage to a huge round of applause that Shawn had started as he began to ascend the stairs. Shawn cut off the applause with a quick cut-off signal with his hands.
"So, Flet," he said, leaning into the mic. "I've recently discovered that you gave your two weeks notice. What influenced your decision to quit Central Pharmaceuticals?"
The room full of bosses fell very, very silent, and for the first time Flet looked flustered.
"I prefer Mr. Johnson."
"Of course, Mr. Flet Johnson," Shawn said. There was no way he was going to miss out on the opportunity to actually call someone by that bad of a first name. "I think it's important to understand--" he coughed for a moment suddenly, into his shirt, then went on "--the reason why you quit, in order to trace back our problem to the source."
Flet's eyes, a warm but slightly darker brown than the freckles on his face, said that he was resigned to answering this question. It was too late now to retract the statement of fact, and the only thing he could do was answer it on his terms.
He still looked embarrassed. "I don't want to be associated with this."
Shawn leaned into the podium. "Into the mic, Mr. Flet Johnson, they want to hear you in the back."
The PA's face started to blush a dull red. "Uh..." he leaned into the mic. "Sorry, but I don't want to be associated with this. It doesn't look particularly good."
There were some understanding nods from the crowd, but the majority seemed to take affront to this.
"And the fact that you quit the day the first arrest happened, what of that?" Shawn asked. "Why so soon?"
"Because--"
"Into the mic, Flet," Shawn smiled encouragingly, feeling the heat from the lights on his face. His cheeks felt oddly hot.
The young man obligingly leaned in. "It's a game of risks," he said, looking out at the crowd. "And it makes more sense for me to get out before this possibly looks even worse."
Shawn nodded, feeling his head continue to pound. He felt like there was more he needed to ask, but it was lost in the ache of being sick. He was starting to feel nauseous again.
"And you don't want to be associated with this?" he asked again. The utter insipidness of the question struck him a moment too late, but he went with it, still smiling and not showing how stupid he felt on his face.
Flet looked at him, expression questioning. "Yes," he said into the mic, without needing to be told.
"Well," Shawn concluded, looking into the crowd. "That is, in fact, a good idea." He quickly scoped the boss's nametags again, eye skimming across what he should have already remembered. He quickly matched the names from the sheets he had glanced over last night to the white tags. "Especially since you, you, you, you, and you," he pointed to each as he found them in the crowd, "are going to be arrested for fraud as the numbers now stand."
There was a general outcry, as people began to talk, babbling loudly over each other. "Also, you with the hair," Shawn spoke loudly over the throng. He had to hold his breath for a second, but he stopped the cough. "That's also a crime. But you won't be arrested for it."
Shawn caught sight of Gus, trying to slink down the stairs without being seen, which was very nearly impossible having been labeled the source of all their troubles. Few honestly believed it, but even fewer could pass up a good scapegoat when he stood around on stages, waiting for them to brand him.
It took Shawn strategically running into Gus (and if it was because of a little dizzy spell, it worked out fine, so what does it really matter?) to push them through the babbling crowd, growing slightly hysterical as they spoke louder and louder to be heard over each other. Gus, once he was free, stormed free from the crowd, banging through the door with all his might, Shawn close at his heels.
Shawn couldn't even find the time to say something funny and/or insulting, before Gus was on him. It was the hurt, not the anger, in his expression that stopped Shawn.
"What was that?!" Gus demanded. "I've been helping you!"
It was the hurt that made him react defensively, and every single ache that every single person he really cared about had ignored. "I've been trying to help you!"
"No you haven't!" Gus cried. His eyes were sharply angry and dry, but his eyebrows, furrowed above his brow, looked a little like they wanted to cry in frustration. "You come in here, you ruin nearly every opportunity I have, and you expect me to what, be happy about that?"
Shawn faltered, headache pounding up a notch, making the right words impossible to find. "I'm not trying to ruin your life. I just...I want to know what's going on."
Gus flung his hands once, as though ridding them of some stench or feeling, before clutching again at the sleeves of his suit coat. "Listen to yourself! You want to know what's going on? Is that really for my benefit? Really, Shawn? Because it sounds pretty much like it's for your benefit!"
The pounding behind Shawn's eye increased, and he cursed shortly, feeling stupid and slow and like he'd missed something here incredibly important. "My head hurts," he muttered, forcing his thumb into the corner of his socket.
"Don't even," Gus snapped. "I am so tired of that. You forget to keep it up after awhile, but as soon as someone else becomes the center of it, you need to make us all remember who's really at the center of the universe."
It hit Shawn in the stomach, the unfairness of it, and the fear that Gus was, in at least some small, or maybe even large, part, right. Where had this come from? He hadn't made Gus this angry in forever. He couldn't even think properly, he felt like he kept forgetting everything, and missing obvious things. The unfairness of it all climbed from his stomach and up the base of his throat, until he wasn't sure if he was going to emotionally choke on it, or simply, literally, throw up.
Someone interrupted them before the silence could grow too obvious. Shawn felt a little empty, like his words, which made up so much of him.
"Oh good," Flet said, looking vaguely relieved, turned a little more towards Gus's direction. "I hoped I'd catch you, Mr. Guster. I've been looking for you. You're needed over at the room next door. They started the interviews again awhile ago, we've just been trying to locate all the participants."
"Hey, Flet, we're buddies, right?" Shawn wheedled. "Tell Gus he'll be just fi--"
"Don't," the PA said, putting his hands up a little. He didn't look quite like he was in a stick-up, instead more like he couldn't be touched right now and deal with it. "You just...that was really hard, and not the way I like to go about things. It's not respectful to anyone," he finished. Flet too looked hurt, and a little righteously angry, his face impossibly young under his hipster haircut.
"I'm going to go," he said. "Just make sure you get there in a couple minutes, Mr. Guster."
Gus and Shawn were quiet. Shawn could maybe find words, but he was currently feeling a cough raging at the base of his chest, and he got the feeling coughing right now could actually make things worse than they were.
Seriously. He wasn't allowed to cough. How unfair was that?
Gus cleared his throat, which made Shawn ache to do the same. "I'm going to go," he said quietly, and with a squeak of Oxfords on hard floor, started after Flet. Shawn watched him go, cleared his throat just enough to swallow a little of the need for him to cough, and felt the pound of everything ache in his head.
He realized he was at a dead end, for a lot of things. And what do you do when there's nowhere to go but down?
Shawn sighed. You go to see your dad.
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