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Shawn Spencer really hated it when the bad guys grew a sense of humor. That was his territory, after all, and he didn’t appreciate a bunch of deep sea fishing drug dealers encroaching on his turf. Much like they hadn’t appreciated him snooping around on their turf. And by turf , he meant, of course, their deep sea fishing vessel.
This case had started out simple, and to make matters worse, it had been one for his dad. Well, one of his dad’s fishing buddies, but his dad had been the one to badger him into accepting the job. Normally, Shawn wasn’t one to allow himself to be badgered (or weaseled or martined or skunked) into anything, but he’d needed the money, and he was 85% sure that Martin Wilcox was going to pay him in cash, not tuna, and so he’d gone on the prowl for a grown man’s 1000 pound dead fish.
To make matters worse, Gus had noped out of the case as soon as Shawn accepted it, because he had a "very important, career make or break presentation at work that I told you about two months ago, Shawn." Shawn remembered no such thing, but before he could protest, Gus had hopped on a plane and was halfway across the country. Lassie and Jules were no help either; they had been in court all week and had no time for his “shenanigans, tomfoolery, or sexy, perfectly gelled coif” (more or less an exact quote). And Henry – ha! – Shawn’s dad had looked him dead in the eye, sipped his almost-certainly spiked lemonade, and winked, “Have fun, kid.”
So Shawn went investigating alone, and he hated every second of it. Especially the part where he traced the missing tuna to a deep sea fishing vessel called The Barbie Girl – really? – and went for an innocent snoop on said vessel when he thought it was empty but apparently was not , then had his aha! moment completely ruined by turning around to see a steel fishing reel hurtling toward his head.
When he woke up, the world was swinging back and forth, and it was upside down. Shawn refused to believe, even as he blinked painfully into awareness, that it was the other way around, that he was the one upside down, swinging back and forth, instead of the rest of the world.
Shawn was very good at denying reality.
At least, he thought blearily, he’d done a Thing before he’d snuck on board The Barbie Girl . It wasn’t the kind of thing he did often, and, if anyone accused him of doing it to his face, he’d adamantly deny it. He’d done a responsible thing. He’d sent a quick text to Jules before sneaking on the boat. Nothing fancy. Hi Jules. U smell nice. I like ur shoes. Food l8r? Oh, checking out Barbie Girl at the marina. The boat not a real girl. Don’t b jealous. If I don’t come back, buy a hamster & feed it for me. Hkhk (Shawn refused to use xoxo in the place of hugs and kisses. Everyone knew that X was that elusive number in algebra that everyone was always looking for, and O was a tasty breakfast cereal.)
She hadn’t responded by the time Shawn found himself at the mercy of a metal fishing reel, so he couldn’t be sure she’d even seen it, but at least there was a chance, he thought, no matter how small, that someone might come looking for him.
As he came to, the first thing Shawn noticed was the wind – crisp, cold, briny. Shawn knew this breeze, and when the fog cleared from his vision, his awful suspicions were confirmed. All he could see in either direction as he sloooowly, sickeningly swayed back and forth was ocean and sky meeting in a dizzying, upside down kind of way. Nausea boiled in Shawn’s gut and bile crept up his throat and he swallowed heavily, determined not to puke while hanging upside down from – he strained his neck, peering up, the headrush nearly making him pass out again – one of those pulley things on fishing boats that raised and lowered nets. And yes, that was the technical term.
Alas, he finally had to admit that it was he who was upside down. The tingling pain in his ankles and building pressure in his head and chest were pretty hard to ignore at this point. There were three bad guys on deck; Shawn caught glimpses of them as the salty breeze buffeted him back and forth. From his position, blood rushing to his head and eyes blurred from pressure and pain and the cold sea air, Shawn couldn’t make out their details, but he knew in his heart of hearts that they were all ugly and stinky and had a horrible fashion sense.
So here he was: Dangling by his ankles from a rope in the middle of the ocean, tied hand and foot and concussed to high heaven (or low heaven, he supposed, because that’s how being upside down worked), surrounded by bad guys, not knowing if anyone knew where he was or was coming for him, all alone, abandoned by Gus and Jules and Lassie and his dad. It couldn’t get worse.
Except that it did. One of the bad guys decided to be funny .
“Nice of you to hang out with us today.” The pun was amateur, weak stuff, and the guy had no ear for delivery. Far too monotone, with a voice too gravelly to pull off the kind of lighthearted humor he’d aimed for. And yet, all of his companions chuckled.
Though it was hard to breathe and his gut was twisted into a million knots and his head hurt, Shawn managed to croak out, “C’mon, guys, don’t encourage him.”
One of the bad guys stepped forward, and though the world hadn’t stopped swaying, Shawn was able to get a semi-good look at him. Tall, taller than Lassie, maybe, with greasy, slicked back blonde hair, a scraggly-ass beard, and a God-awful Hawaiian shirt that Shawn’s dad would’ve drawn the line at. Probably. “I really don’t think that you are in a position to critique our sense of humor,” he growled. He may have looked like an ugly, stinky, blonde Magnum, P.I . cosplayer, but he had the rough, scary drug-dealer voice down to a T. Shawn’s heart beat so fast that he was half convinced it was going to leap out of his chest and splat onto the fiberglass deck of the fishing boat.
He shoved his fear – and his flailing heart – down deep inside of him and pretended to be unfazed by this ridiculously terrifying situation, and responded with the only way he knew how to respond to fear: humor. “Of course I’m in a position to critique you,” he pointed out sagely. “As you can see, I’m above all of you, and quite literally, looking down on you.” This wasn’t strictly true; though he was hanging, he wasn’t quite over them, about eye level. But his feet were far above their feet, so as far as he was concerned, he was above them.
Magnum P.U. snorted, though it sounded more like derision than humor. Shawn supposed he would take what he could get. Especially if it meant stalling his kidnappers until Jules got his message and tracked him down. But, unfortunately, this guy wasn’t as lighthearted as his fellows. He got straight down to business.
“I want you to think about your situation for a second,” he said, almost conversationally, except Shawn was sure that any conversation with this dude would probably end in death.
“Oh, trust me,” Shawn assured him. “That’s all I’ve been doing since I woke up playing the part of Worm on a String.”
“They’re called Squirmles,” one of the other guys, only visible as a blur of bright colors in Shawn’s peripheral, supplied helpfully.
The third guy, somewhere to Shawn’s right, spat, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Y’know, those neon fuzzy worms that some people use as bait. Squirmles.”
“I thought they were called Snoots,” the other guy shot back.
“If it helps,” Shawn called down, squeezing his eyes shut in an attempt to alleviate some of the pressure from the blood pooling in his head (it didn’t work), “I believe all three terms are acceptable.”
“Shut up!” Magnum P.U. ordered, casting a glare at his captive and his crew. “All of you.” He turned on Shawn once more. “So you’re a funny guy,” he said, disdain dripping off of every word. Even so, Shawn chose to take it as a compliment.
“Thanks for noticing.”
Something dark flashed in the guy’s eyes, and Shawn had half a second to regret his big mouth before Magnum P.U.’s fist shot out and slammed him right in the mouth. Shawn swung back wildly with the punch, his joints, already the epicenter in this awful tug of war between the ropes around his ankles and gravity itself, screamed. Shawn cried out, his stomach reeling, blood pooling in his mouth from his split lip, or maybe from biting his tongue. Probably both.
Magnum P.U. didn’t waste time waiting for Shawn to stop swinging on his own. He grabbed the front of his prisoner’s shirt when Shawn swung close and dragged Shawn to a stop. Their noses, mirror images flipped upside down, almost touched. For once, Shawn didn’t make an obscure reference or stupid joke. He told himself it was because of how much his mouth hurt after that hit. Himself didn’t believe a word of it – though he refused to admit it, he was scared. Maybe even too scared to crack a joke.
Perhaps recognizing this fear in Shawn’s eyes, his tormentor grinned, and Shawn counted four gold teeth. “Now maybe we can see eye to eye.” Shawn praised himself for nicknaming the guy accurately. He really was stinky. His breath smelled like fishy caramel.
Shawn drew on every ounce of bravado left in him and tried to make himself look as tough as possible by channeling his inner Lassie. Then he cringed, because he didn’t want an inner Lassie. Or an outer Lassie. “What do you want, you golden-toothed fiend?” He cringed again. Was that the best he could do?
His new buddy sneered. “I want to know who you are. I want to know what the hell you are doing on our boat. I want to know who sent you, and I want to know what you know. I want to know if anyone knows you’re here, and I want to know their names.”
Shawn blinked. “You want to know a lot . Have you tried Google?”
The hand on his shirt moved to his hair, and Shawn’s panic spiked to unreal levels as the rough hand meshed in his perfect, if rumpled, mane. “You’re going to tell me what I want to know. Or…”
Shawn didn’t rise to the bait. He certainly didn’t want to know what this guy had planned for him.
A beat, then a frustrated, fishy huff, right into his face. Yuck. “Aren’t you going to ask, ‘or what’?”
“I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Damn, you’re an annoying little shit,” Magnum P.U. observed, letting go of Shawn’s hair with a shove and sending his topsy-turvy prisoner swinging again. Shawn almost blacked out from the combination of vertigo and pressure. “Viggo, open the hatch.”
As Shawn’s vision cleared, he heard a soft grinding sound and realized that the floor beneath him was unfurling, with dark, brackish seawater swaying beneath. Shawn squinted in confusion. “There’s a hole in your boat,” he said wisely.
“It’s a hatch. For fishing.”
“Couldn’t you just fish over the side?”
“Why would we, when we have the hatch?”
“How does your boat stay afloat?”
A pause. “I… don’t actually know.”
“That’s only mildly concerning.”
“Enough,” his interrogator hissed. “Tell me what I want to know. Starting with your name.”
“Hephzibah Scuttlebutt,” Shawn answered promptly.
“Okay,” Magnum P.U. said amicably. “You want to find out the ‘or’ the hard way. Works for me, Scuttlebutt .” He gestured to someone out of Shawn’s line of sight. “Jerry, lower’em down.”
And that’s when everything clicked together. Hell, Shawn should have figured it out sooner, but it was so much harder to divine when he was hanging upside down with a concussion. But now the rope holding his ankles was lowering, slowly, inch by inch, taking Shawn with it, closer and closer to the briny deep.
They were going to drown him into answering.
Shawn made up his mind as he felt the tips of his hair dip into the water. He wasn’t some action hero. He wasn’t Richard Dean Anderson or Tom Selleck or Bruce Willis. He wasn’t even Val Kilmer. He wasn’t made for torture, or for drowning. And surely Jules would have gotten his text by now. She could be on her way to save him right now . He could answer their questions, stall them, bide his time. And then he wouldn’t have to get wet. Or dead.
“Okay, okay!” he called out, tugging at his ropes as he tried to bring his hands out in surrender. “My name isn’t Hephzibah Scuttlebutt. It’s Shawn Spencer.” He thought about giving them Gus’s name, but Shawn didn’t feel his phone or wallet in his pocket anymore. For all he knew, they’d taken it and knew exactly who he was.
“Okay, Shawn,” Magnum P.U. drawled. “Thanks for your honesty.”
The rope kept lowering. Shawn’s hair was fully immersed now, and he felt the ice cold water creeping up his scalp and onto his forehead. “Uh… I answered your question.”
“Too little, too late,” Magnum P.U. shrugged.
The last thing Shawn saw before his eyes went under was the sick grin on his torturer’s face. The water encroached on his nose – Shawn gulped in the biggest breath he could muster through his mouth – and then he was completely submerged.
Shawn didn’t think his heart had ever beaten this fast. Terror surrounded him, infiltrated him, pulled him under, suffocated him. It was like the water was made of fear. They still want answers, Shawn reminded himself firmly. They won’t kill me .
That didn’t alleviate any of his fear, though, and it certainly didn’t help him breathe underwater. He felt it pressing all around him, colder than anything he’d ever felt, searching for a way in his ears, his mouth, his nose. Shawn’s chest screamed for air, without his consent, a stream of bubbles escaped his mouth and he clamped his lips tighter. His eyes were closed but white spots danced in front of his eyes and oh God, they were going to drown him.
And then pain in his ankles, the pressure increasing on his joints, but it was the most wonderful sensation he’d ever felt, because he was being pulled up. Seconds later, his head crested the water and he sucked in lungful after lungful of air. Water streamed off of his hair and his shoulders. They hadn’t dunked him any deeper than that, but it hardly mattered. They didn’t pull him up as high as he had been this time – they left him dangling with the tips of his gorgeous, sopping hair inches above the water.
As Shawn gasped for air, Magnum P.U. squatted in front of him. “Now, Mr. Spencer, have we come to an understanding?”
A smartass retort didn’t seem even remotely appealing right now, so Shawn just nodded, or tried to. His head was so heavy he could barely move. And what was with his chest? Even above water, where he could breathe, it was much too tight. He wondered how long it would take until just being upside down killed him. He couldn’t imagine his lungs appreciated being squashed by all of his other organs.
“Now, Mr. Spencer,” Magnum P.U. said, “tell me. What are you doing on our boat? Who sent you? What do you know about us? And who knows you’re here?”
Shawn’s head spun from a hearty combination of pain, breathlessness, panic, upside down-ness (upside downitude?), and a barrage of questions. “Uh,” he stuttered, trying to force his brain to cooperate. “I’m a psychic detective. My client is a fish.”
Dammit. He hadn’t meant for his words to come out so addled. He was cold and scared and so fuzzy from being upside down and frozen that his words tumbled out all wrong. Apparently, his captors thought he was being a wise-ass again, and the pulley jerked to life. “Wait!” Shawn had time to call before he was plunged under again, and this time, he hadn’t been able to take a deep breath.
Within seconds, Shawn’s already flattened lungs protested. Panic consumed him and he struggled, wriggling like a fish on a hook, but it only wasted his already dwindling supply of air and sapped what little energy he had. Shawn barely noticed the cold this time, so intent keeping his mouth shut. But the water was persistent, and he couldn’t breathe, and he knew it wasn’t air out there, but he couldn’t… he couldn’t…
White spots flickered in front of his eyelids again, and this time, he couldn’t stop the compulsion to inhale. It didn’t matter if it wasn’t air out there, it was something and he couldn’t breathe –
The pain of water flooding his lungs hit him like he’d been branded on the inside of his chest. He couldn’t even scream as water rushed in. Raw, animal fear mingled with encroaching unconsciousness, and Shawn was so consumed by his pain that he didn’t even notice when they pulled him up.
It took well over ten minutes for Shawn to hack all the water out of his lungs. No one stepped in to help, not even with an unfriendly slap on the back. Gravity made it a bit easier, he supposed, but Shawn found the process of un-drowning nearly as unpleasant as drowning had been. After this latest torture, Shawn’s mind became so fuzzy that he could barely process the questions, and he was so consumed with the remnants of the pain of drowning – water flooding into his lungs, suffocating him, burning like fire and freezing like ice – he barely felt the kicks to his gut or slaps to the face.
Jules, Lassie… where the hell are you?
He answered the questions the best he could. He was a detective. He’d been hired to find a missing tuna, which had led him to their boat. He’d discovered that these upstanding guys had been using their deep sea fishing operation to smuggle drugs inside of the fish, except these lazy assholes weren’t even deep sea fishermen. They stole other people’s catches and smuggled drugs in those fish. They’d found a way to do their dirty work while still doing the least amount of work possible. Shawn might have admired their dedication to the art of laziness had they not caught him and strung him up like a damn catfish.
He promised them that he’d come alone, that no one knew where he was. They hadn’t liked that, and they’d put him under for another bout of torture. Maybe two minutes this time? Shawn hadn’t lasted more than a minute, and he’d been mostly unconscious when they’d pulled him up. He’d woken up retching up about a ton of seawater, hands slamming into his back.
He’d maintained that no one knew he was here. He prayed they hadn’t been able to get into his phone or read his messages.
“Look…” Shawn panted, all traces of humor gone. He closed his eyes, because his vision had become so dark and blurry it hardly mattered. “I… am a rogue agent. A… lone… wolf. I was an idiot … and I didn’t…” He felt a tear leak from his eye and mingle with the water dripping down his forehead. “I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. And I… I should have.” Against this will, a raw, breathless, desperate sob escaped him as he realized he was going to die here. He’d almost drowned twice now, and the thought of going back in that water made him want to squirm and fight and kick and scream , but he was too weak. He couldn’t even twitch his fingers anymore. He could barely breathe, he couldn’t see, he couldn’t feel anything but pain…
Apparently, the tear was enough to convince his torturer that he was telling the truth. Shawn peered out at him as the man sat back on his heels, still crouching, and regarded Shawn thoughtfully. “I believe you,” he said.
“Yay,” Shawn replied weakly, and let his eyes fall shut again.
He knew what happened now. He’d tried to stall as long as he could, but it hadn’t been enough. Jules wasn’t coming, and Shawn didn’t have the energy to stall any longer. He was tapped out, half dead, about to be all dead. Shawn didn’t want to die, that was the thing. Hell, he’d even settle for only mostly dead.
“Well, Shawn,” Magnum P.U. said. “I can honestly say I’ve hated every moment we’ve spent together. Have fun swimming.” Shawn heard the man stand, his footsteps move away.
Shawn went under, and this time, he knew he wasn’t coming back up.
Even knowing he was about to die and that he couldn’t escape, Shawn resisted the water as long as he could. He held out until his brain was so hazy from lack of oxygen that he let the water in willingly, almost gratefully, because he knew that his lungs would not be empty for much longer. Maybe then the pain would stop.
The pain got worse. The water poured into his nose, his mouth, down his throat and into his lungs and his mouth gaped silently in agony. The world started to fade in earnest, and with it, the pain, and Shawn would have wept in relief if he hadn’t already been swimming in freezing, salty tears.
From a long way away, like from another life, a sound, muffled by the water and his fading consciousness. A whirring, humming, thumping sound. And then bursts of fire, like gunshots, harsh, loud, even with his head underwater. As the life drained out of him, and everything went black, Shawn imagined that he felt a tug on his ankles, pulling him up.
When Shawn woke up, everything hurt. He lay on a bed surrounded by white curtains. Monitors flanked him, their wires and tubes snaking into his arms and nose. His chest hurt the most – not only did it feel like someone had taken his lungs and turned them inside out, roasted them on a spit, then jammed them back into his chest, but it also felt like someone had mistaken his chest for a snare drum and decided to do an emotional rendition of Toto’s “Africa” on his ribs. His head hurt, too, and his joints – especially his ankles.
He groaned.
“Shawn?”
Shawn peeped an eye open to see Jules leaning over him, her blue eyes swimming with tears. For some reason, the thought of swimming sent bolts of terror through his entire pain-ridden body. Shawn shifted his head so that he could see her better, and even that tiny movement made him feel like he’d just run a marathon. Or how he imagined running a marathon would feel like.
When he tried to speak, his voice came out as an awful, ragged croak that brought tears to his eyes. Or maybe it was the pain that flared in his throat as he tried to speak that did that.
“Shhh,” Juliet hushed, and she turned away briefly, only to hold a small spoon to his lips. “Ice chip?”
Shawn’s heart constricted. Cold water was the last thing he wanted to partake in right now. And with that realization, everything slammed into him with the force of a… well, the force of one really big thing pummeling into a really small, weak thing. Shawn’s almost inhuman gift for metaphors had momentarily fled him, it seemed, but considering he’d almost drowned, well, he wasn’t going to beat himself up over it.
For one of the first times in his life, Shawn did what he was told and kept quiet, though he shook his head firmly as Juliet tried to offer the ice chip again. Finally, she gave up with a heavy sigh, then sat down in an ugly orange chair next to him and took his hand. She didn’t speak for a moment, and Shawn just looked at her, taking in her beauty, the soft curl of her hair, damp from a shower, maybe – don’t think about water, don’t think about water. Her blue eyes, the color of a pristine pool of – dammit! Stop thinking about water!
Shawn had questions. A lot of them, the most pressing being how many Tony the Tigers were killed to make that chair? The second most pressing of which was what the hell happened? But he was too weak, too tired, and his throat hurt far too much to talk. So he just put every single one of his questions in his eyes and thought really, really hard at Juliet.
Juliet knew him so well, perhaps better than anyone, and she picked up on his question. Well, not the first one, but hey, she wasn’t psychic. Voice wavering, she explained, “I saw your text when the court was in recess. When I realized what you’d stumbled into – The Barbie Girl has been on our watch list for a while – we went straight to the chief. Thankfully, we were able to track you by air pretty quickly once a fisherman at the marina told us he’d seen which direction the ship had sailed off in.”
By air . Shawn vaguely remembered hearing a whirring, thrumming sound from beneath his watery grave. A helicopter.
“We had a medic with us, thank God , because by the time we overpowered the perps and pulled you up…” She trailed off, and a tear tracked down her cheek. She swiped it away with her fingertips almost angrily. “You weren’t breathing. I breathed for you, and Lassiter and the medic took turns doing compressions. It took so long that I was sure…”
Shawn took a brief moment to relish in his relief that Lassie had not been the one to lock lips with him. No wonder his chest hurt. He wouldn’t be surprised if Lassie had broken a rib or two. Still, it was better than being dead. Wouldn’t stop Shawn from ribbing Lassie about it later, though. Now that was funny.
Juliet took a deep breath and continued. “Your dad’s here, by the way. He had to step out to grab a coffee. It’s the first time he’s left your side since he got here.”
Shawn couldn’t help the tired smile that tugged at his lips, even as exhaustion tugged at his eyelids. I bet he feels so guilty for getting me into this mess…
“He said if you woke up while he was gone to tell you that you’re a moron and that if you ever go off on your own without backup again, he’ll kill you himself.” The hard expression in Juliet’s eyes told Shawn that his girlfriend felt much the same way.
I bet he’s guilty, deep down.
Juliet squeezed his hand again, her eyes softening. “We will talk about this later.” Shawn bit back a groan; in this case, he knew that “talk” was synonymous with Jules, Dad, and probably Gus, fresh back from his work trip and ready to rip Shawn a new one for almost dying without him, cornering and lecturing him to death. “But for now, you need to rest, and you need to heal.”
Shawn wanted to protest, but even as shook his head, he felt his eyes close and Juliet’s warm, soft lips on his forehead. He heard a door open, a grunt. “He wake up?”
“Only for a minute.”
Warm, rough fingers tousled his hair, and if Shawn hadn’t been mostly unconscious, he would have protested. But as he drifted off, even he had to admit that it almost felt kind of nice.
“God, kid,” came his father’s voice from a long way away.
Shawn’s lips curved up in the tiniest smile.
There was the guilt. And maybe even a little bit of worry, too.
He slipped into blackness, and even though he knew nightmares would follow him for a long time and that he would almost certainly never take a bath or do a handstand again, right now, Shawn slept, knowing he was safe.