But there had been a handful of cases when they had had gone up against ghosts, dinosaurs, and mummies, and those were the ones that still kept Gus up at night. Even though they all turned out to be fakes, the idea of fighting slavering supernatural beasts from beyond hell was simply something Gus preferred to leave to others.
There was only one thing he dreaded more than the idea of going up against monsters.
And that was working for one.
Chapter Three
Ellen Svaco didn’t have dripping fangs, her hair wasn’t a nest of hissing vipers. Her arms weren’t pus-filled tentacles.
But the instant she walked through the doors of the beach bungalow that housed Psych’s offices, Gus knew she was a monster. And not just any monster, but the worst kind.
Ellen Svaco was the sort of monster who would call a second-grader up to the blackboard and make him stand there until he correctly spelled the fiendishly difficult name of California’s state capital no matter how many times he had already failed and no matter how many of the other students were laughing at him and no matter that the lunch bell had already rung. Gus had met one such ogre before, and the encounter had scarred him so badly it took many years before he could bring himself to say the word “Sacramento” without a shudder and a stutter.
Like that other creature, Ellen wore her graying hair tied back so tightly it stretched every centimeter of her skin across the contours of her skull. Her shapeless shift looked like it came from the sale rack at the Mormon Fundamentalists’ thrift shop. She could have been forty or four hundred or anywhere in between.