“Check the photo,” Shawn said.

Gus peered down at the tiny article. There was nothing but type. “There is no photo.”

“Exactly!”

Lost, Gus dropped the paper and stared at Shawn’s beaming face. Tara beamed beside him. “I don’t get it,” he said.

“No, he didn’t get it and we did,” Shawn said. “That jerk Dallas Steele comes swaggering back into town-”

“I don’t remember him being a jerk.”

“That’s the brain damage talking,” Shawn said.

“You said there was no brain da-”

“He was the biggest phony at Santa Barbara High,” Shawn said. “With his perfect hair and perfect GPA and perfect football season and perfect girlfriend.”

Tara looked confused. “He doesn’t sound phony to me. He sounds like the real thing.”

“That’s the worst kind of phony. The genuine kind.”

“You’re right,” Tara said. “No wonder you hated him.”

“He was always nice to me,” Gus said. “I mean, when you tried to rent me to the football team as a tackling dummy, he talked me out of it.”

“Depriving you of badly needed income, to say nothing of extra PE credit,” Shawn said. “And all so he could say he’d helped out some geeky loser.”

“He never called me a loser.”

“Everyone called you a loser, Gus,” Shawn said. “It was the parachute pants. Anyway, there’s only one loser now, and that’s international phony Dallas Steele.”

“It says here he’s a multibillionaire.”

“And he’s still not happy,” Shawn said. “He’s got to come back to Santa Barbara and lord it over us all. And that might have worked, if it wasn’t for us meddling kids. We knocked him right off the front page. He’s probably sitting in some palatial estate right now, leafing forlornly through today’s paper, wondering exactly how his high school nemeses Shawn Spenser and Burton Guster bested him.”

Shawn held up his hand for a high five. Gus tried to reach up for it, but his arm wouldn’t rise above his rib cage. He didn’t really understand why he was supposed to be fiving, anyway. Dallas Steele was a billionaire investor, and Gus had spent the last day in a near-vegetative state because he couldn’t scrape up the cash to ransom his company car.