The Boys from Santa Cruz (4 page)

“I think I hit bone,” called the deputy, dropping to one knee and brushing away the loose dirt. “Yup, definitely hit…looks
like…yup, it’s a skull, all right. Who’s got the camera, somebody got the camera?”

Pender’s tomato didn’t seem quite so appealing now. He reared back and tossed it as far as he could, heard it land far down the hill with a fat, wet
splat.

“Good arm.” A girlish voice behind him.

Pender turned—it was the little female deputy. “I think I pulled something,” he said, gingerly rotating his shoulder. “What’s up?”

She handed him a small address book, faux-leather cover, two inches wide, three inches high. On the first page, under “If found, please return to,” the name Luke Sweet was written in a childish hand, with one Santa Cruz address crossed out and another penciled in. Pender flipped through the pages. The first entry was under
D,
for Dad. No phone number, just “Dad,” a long, cryptic number, and an address that explained the cryptic number: San Quentin Prison, Marin County, CA.

Another half dozen entries—presumably Luke’s buddies—were alphabetized by their first names—Joe, Kent, Larry, Michael, Micky—but on the
G
page was an entry for Grandpa Fred & Grandma Evelyn, with the same address as the one penciled in on the first page. At some point, obviously, Little Luke had moved in with his grandparents.

Which didn’t mean that was where he’d gone now, but it was the closest thing to a lead they’d had since they learned of the boy’s existence. Pender thanked the deputy, pocketed the book, and wandered off in search of a telephone.

It was still dark out when old Fred woke me up. “Get dressed, there’s somebody downstairs who wants to talk with you.”

I was pretty groggy. It took me a few seconds to remember why I was in my old room at my grandparents’ house. Then everything snapped into place. Big Luke and Teddy were dead, and more than likely, the somebody downstairs who wanted to talk with me was wearing a badge and carrying a gun.

Climbing out the window was a tighter squeeze than it had been when I was eleven, but the drop to the lawn was easier now that I was taller. I lowered myself from the redwood gutter by my fingertips, dropped the last few feet, landed softly on my toes, and toppled over backward from the weight of my pack.

“Give you a hand there, son?” It was a huge fat guy wearing a loud sport coat and one of those stupid little checked hats with feathers in the brim. He had a cigarette in his mouth. When he reached down to help me up, his coat fell open and I saw the gun in his shoulder holster. I had the feeling he wanted me to see it, so I wouldn’t try to run. I took his hand, which was the size of a first baseman’s mitt, and he hauled me onto my feet easier than I could have lifted my backpack alone. “I’m guessing you’re Luke.”

“Who are you?” Through the open bedroom window, I could hear my grandfather pounding on the door and calling for me to hurry up.

“Pender. FBI. I was supposed to wait out here while you talked to your lawyer. Thought I might as well have a cigarette. You smoke?”

He shook a Marlboro out of the hard pack and gave me a light, but I only got a couple of puffs before I heard the bedroom door crashing open. Grandpa leaned out the dormer window calling my name. Pender stepped under the eaves with me, out of my grandfather’s line of sight, and held a finger to his lips.

“We don’t have much time,” he whispered. “I’ll make you a deal. You tell your lawyer you’ll be happy to cooperate with the nice FBI man, and then you tell me everything you know about your father and Teddy.”

“What’s the deal part?” I whispered back.

“The deal part is, I don’t search your pack.”

I don’t know if there’s a word for what I experienced at that precise moment in time. Outside my head, everything seemed to stop. Even the smoke from our cigarettes seemed to hang in the air. But inside my head it was like a boatload of rats and the boat was sinking. Thoughts tearing around, scrambling up the walls, looking for a way out. I didn’t even know I
had
a lawyer. I did know I was carrying a felony weight of weed. But could Pender do that anyway, just search my pack? And what did I know that he wanted to know? Big Luke’s business? Who he bought from and sold to? Yeah, right, like
I’m gonna rat out the Indians my father bought his pot from. They’d cut my balls off and serve them to me for an appetizer.

But what choice did I have? I shrugged off the pack and stowed it behind a bush just as a guy in a light-colored suit and glasses came flying around the side of the house, his city slicker shoes skidding on the grass as he rounded the corner. “Did you see—” he started to call to Pender. Then he caught sight of me in the shadows. “It’s okay, he’s out here,” he called up to my grandfather.

It was the lawyer I didn’t know I had. He looked kind of young even to me, but he wasn’t intimidated by Pender. “Shame on you,” he told him. “You know better than that.”

Pender looked around as though the lawyer must have been talking to somebody else, then spread his hands apart, palms up, and shrugged. “I’m minding my own business, enjoying a peaceful smoke, next thing I know your client almost lands on top of me.”

I was just thinking about making a run for it when Pender edged over a couple of steps and put his hand on my shoulder, like he’d read my mind. His hand weighed a ton. “What do you say, son? You lawyering up?” Just in case I’d forgotten, he looked over my shoulder to where I’d stashed my backpack.

“I don’t mind talking to him,” I told the lawyer. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Famous last words.

My grandparents were waiting for us inside. Neither of them could look me in the eye, which pretty much told me what I wanted to know. But just to be sure, when the lawyer drew my grandparents over to the side of the room to confer with them, I asked Pender if it was Fred and Evelyn who’d ratted me out. “In a heartbeat, son,” he said with a friendly wink. “In a goddamn heartbeat.”

Although I’m mostly self-taught, I’m far from stupid. I’m also my father’s son, so I should have known better than to trust a cop. But I was new at this and I was up against an expert.

In hindsight, I think Pender’s talent wasn’t so much getting you to like him as it was getting you to believe that he liked you. He told me he needed me to help him make some sense out of a few things, starting with the most bizarre crime scene he’d ever stumbled on. The way he said it almost made me feel honored to have been a part of it.

So I explained about Teddy and the phone call and the trunk and the explosion and how she tried to kill me. When I got to the part about shooting the vultures, the lawyer tried to stop me. I laughed at him. “Turkey vultures aren’t exactly an endangered species,” I told him.

“Besides, he needs the vultures,” added Pender. He was sitting catty-corner to me, on my left, in Fred’s master-of-the-house armchair. I’m on the sofa and my lawyer’s sitting across from me on the other sofa, to Pender’s left.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked Pender. “What would I need the vultures for?”

“To explain away the gunshot residue I’m sure we’ll find on you.” He still had that pleasant half smile, but there was a greedy glitter in his close-set, piggy little eyes as he lowered the boom. It reminded me of the expression that used to come over Teddy’s face just before she fired up her first hit of the day. “Come on now, son, you don’t really expect anybody to buy that ridiculous story, do you? For no particular reason, your stepmother decides to kill you. Then for no particular reason she changes her mind and decides to kill
herself.
Only instead of simply blowing her brains out like anybody else would, she decides first she’s going to walk into the middle of a blazing fire, then she’s going to kneel down and stick her head into a burning trunk, and
then
she’s going to blow her brains out.”

“That’s not what I said. I said she shot herself
first,
then she—”

“Shut up,” the lawyer said quietly but firmly. I shut up. “Agent Pender, this interview is over.”

Pender ignored him. He leaned forward and put his huge hand on my knee. It made my skin crawl. “Son, I want to help you, but you have to give me something to work with. I don’t care if you killed Teddy. Teddy was a monster, and believe me, I know, I’ve seen her rap sheet. So tell me you pulled the trigger in self-defense, I’ll buy it. It’s the victims I need to know about, so we can bring their families some peace.”

“Victims? What victims?”

“The ones on those videos you and Teddy burned before you shot her.”

“I told you, I
didn’t
shoot Teddy, she shot herself.” Scared, confused, close to tears, I turned to my lawyer. “You have to listen to me, he’s making this stuff up, I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

He tried to come to my rescue. “This is starting to sound like a fishing expedition, Agent Pender. Do you have any evidence to back up these charges?”

Pender turned to him. “So far, only the tape that survived the fire, and the two female bodies we found in the tomato patch,” he said cheerfully. “But they were still digging when I left.”

It was close to daylight by the time the Santa Cruz cops arrived to take me into custody. Pender had one more surprise for me: he called one of them into the backyard, and when they returned, the cop was carrying my backpack. Pender told me he was sorry, that the cop found it on his own, but I didn’t believe him on account of his grin. By now it was practically splitting his big bald head in two. The man was just so
pleased
with himself he was starting to look like a Muppet.

I put up a hell of a fight trying to get to him. I wanted to tear that grin right off his face, just dig my fingers under his skin and rip, but I only made it about halfway across the room before the cops got me into a choke hold. Pender’s laughter is the last thing I remember hearing before I lost consciousness.

I was only out a few seconds. Everybody was still there when I came to, but I had never felt so alone in my life. And I don’t mean just friendless or nobody-loves-me alone. I was used to that. This was a different kind of alone, this was one of those science fiction deals where the hero finds himself in some other reality, in some other dimension or on some other planet, where everything looks the same as it did before but nothing is, and nobody seems to know it but him.

As for Fred and Evelyn, they acted like I had some kind of infectious disease, drawing themselves up against the wall so as not to have me brush against them while the cops were hustling me out of the house in handcuffs.

I spent the rest of that day in holding cells, courtrooms, and the backseats of cop cars. After I was arraigned for the dope
in Santa Cruz (the kid lawyer pled me not guilty), they handed me over to a sheriff’s deputy who’d driven all the way down from Marshall County to pick me up. Not looking real thrilled about his assignment, the deputy shoved me handcuffed into the back of his cruiser, where I sat or lay for the entire drive. Didn’t talk to me except to bark orders, didn’t give me anything to eat or drink, though he stopped once to feed his own face, and the only reason he let me get out to take a leak was because I warned him that otherwise I was going to piss all over the backseat.

We arrived in Marshall City early that evening. The courthouse had already shut down, so I was brought to the Marshall County Juvenile Facility for what they called processing, like I was lunch meat or something.

Thinking about lunch meat reminded me that I hadn’t eaten anything all day except for a bologna sandwich in the holding cell in Santa Cruz while I was waiting to be arraigned. When I complained, the deputy who was conducting my second strip search of the day told me I had missed dinner, but said they would be serving cookies and milk before lights-out.

I spent the night in a tiny room with a bare cot, one blanket, no pillow. One-piece metal sink-toilet. Never saw any other kids, because they’d stuck me in something they called a segregation unit, where they put kids who break their rules, or are considered too dangerous to house with the other juveniles.

Me, I was so not dangerous, all I could think about was the cookies and milk. I constructed and reconstructed that snack over and over in my mind. What kind of cookies would there be? Would I get a choice? I was hoping for chocolate chip, but I was so hungry I’d have settled for oatmeal. And how many cookies would there be? If they said
cookies,
plural, that would imply more than one, wouldn’t it? And what about the milk? I kept picturing a big frosty glass, but even I knew that was unrealistic. It would probably be one of those little waxy half-pint cartons like in a school cafeteria.

Pitiful, huh? Part of me aches for that poor naïve kid, but mostly I’m just embarrassed for him. That deputy was yanking your chain, I want to go back and tell him. No cookies and milk for you. Just heartbreak and betrayal. So the best thing you can do is toughen the fuck up as soon as possible, because as bad as things are in your life, they’re about to get worse.

At forty, Pender discovered, he could no longer pull an all-nighter with impunity. His eyelids started closing on him a few hours into the drive back from Santa Cruz on Wednesday morning. He pulled
over at a rest stop near Manteca and tilted the driver’s seat of the Bu-car as far back as it would go—when you’re six-four, you can forget about lying down in the backseat of anything smaller than a Greyhound bus. Then he tipped his tweed hat over his eyes and managed to catch an hour or two of fitful z’s.

Pender reached the Marshall County sheriff’s station, a low, adobe-style building attached by a covered walkway to the county jail, around two in the afternoon. He found Izzo packing up to fly back to New York. With Sweet and Swantzer both dead, Izzo told him, the Bureau had decided to pull the plug on this end of the operation.

“Marshall County gets jurisdiction over the snuff tape and the bodies in the tomato patch, so Little Luke’s on his way back from Santa Cruz even as we speak.”

“What about the Swantzer killing?”