Chapter Text
“Shawn,” Gus hissed urgently, suddenly seizing Shawn’s arm and dragging him behind the toothpaste display isle header. “See that guy over there?” He nodded towards a tired-looking young man in his late-20s or early-30s who was stocking up on first aid supplies.
“Sweet coat.” Shawn took a moment to fantasize how ruggedly handsome he’d look in the battered leather jacket with the collar flipped up in the back, framing his face like a lion’s mane. He tried to imagine the look on Jules’ face when she saw him, but it was hard with Gus’s insistent poking.
“Dude, focus,” Gus snapped, sounding appalled, downright scandalized even. “That’s Dean Winchester, the psycho serial killer.”
Shawn turned back to where the man was pulling the packaging off of a bottle of some as yet un-purchased aspirin, actually looking at his face this time. Now that Gus mentioned it, the guy’s military-short hair, chiseled bone structure and extra-girly lips did look familiar. “Oh, right, from Lassie’s most wanted wall.” There was something wrong with that though. “Wait, didn’t he get blown up?” With his blood-shot eyes and slightly pained expression, Shawn thought the guy looked a lot more hung-over and a lot less blown to little smoking bits.
“Well, clearly not,” Gus pointed out. He frowned, considering. “Unless it’s not him.”
“Let’s call him Awesome-coat Dude ‘till we’re sure. And maybe even after,” Shawn said watching the newly christened Awesome-coat Dude pop a handful of aspirin into his mouth. He might be a hung-over shoplifter or he might be an undead psycho-killer, but there was only one way to find out. Shawn took a deep breath, girded his loins, figuratively anyway, and step out into the isle. Gus sputtered for a second and made a futile grab at Shawn’s arm before giving up and sliding into his usual place at Shawn’s side. “Excuse me,” Shawn called, waving cheerfully as they approached their suspect. “Hi there.”
Awesome-coat Dude hurriedly dry-swallowed his ill-gotten aspirin as they approached. “Hey, it’s cool,” he explained, holding out the opened bottle with a rueful expression. “I was gonna pay for anyway, but this friggin’ Muzak is killin’ me.”
Shawn felt himself smiling at that. The guy was sort of shoplifting and might very well be a homicidal maniac, but at least he had some taste in music. “I know, right? The Erie Canal Song? What were they thinking?” Awesome-coat Dude grinned and nodded at that and Shawn would have been happy enough to leave it there if Gus hadn’t elbowed him to remind him what they were there for. “Right, so, I’m Shawn Spencer, psychic detective, and this is my friend Butros-Butros Bengali. We’re taking a survey.”
Awesome-coat Dude looked a little thrown by the conversational shift, but recovered quickly. “Chocolate beats vanilla,” he supplied. “Brunettes before blonds, pie before cake and the best fruit is–”
“Pineapple,” Shawn interrupted. “The real questions is, are you now or have you ever been an un-dead psycho serial killer?”
There was an extended silence as Awesome-coat Dude looked from Shawn to Gus and back again. From his pained smile, Gus probably wanted the floor to swallow him, but Awesome-coat Dude’s carefully blank expression was harder to read. He could be trying to figure out how to back away slowly while avoiding the racks of pills behind him or he could be planning to whip out a gun and kill them all. “Dude, seriously? Pineapple?” He dead-panned.
He hadn’t actually answered the questioned, but Shawn found himself relaxing. Awesome-coat Dude wasn’t the driod they were looking for. The man was grubby, had dirt and some dark sludge encrusted on his pants and a faint odor of smoke, but something, maybe his fake psychic intuition, told Shawn that, whatever the guy did, it didn’t involve psycho serial killing. “Dude, I’m always serious about pineapples.”