The Boys from Santa Cruz

by Jonathan Nasaw

  “THE CONSENSUS IS, WE’D JUST AS SOON BRING HER OUT TONIGHT,” he shouted over the noise of the rotors. “YOU GUYS GET THE FINAL SAY, THOUGH. IF YOU THINK IT’S TOO DANGEROUS TO BRING HER UP IN THE DARK…”

  The consensus? Ajanian’s got to be the king of buck passing, thought Pender. Asking a search-and-rescue daredevil whether something was too dangerous was like asking a three-year-old whether candy was too sweet.

  The rescue operation commenced smoothly. While the pilot maneuvered them into position, Gabel attached a safety harness to the cable holding the body basket, basically a stretcher with side rails and straps, and when they were directly above the body, he lowered himself over the side, with Ajanian aiming the searchlight, Pender operating the electric winch, and Garner spotting his partner.

  “LOWER, LOWER,” Garner called to Pender, who was trying not to notice how close they were to the cliff. “SLOW IT DOWN…SLOWER! OKAY, A LITTLE LOWER…AAAND…STOP! STOP IT AND LOCK IT.”

  It took Gabel only a few minutes of midair ballet to free the body from the trees and strap it into the basket. But only is a relative concept when at any moment a capricious up-, down-, or cross-draft might have dashed the dangling deputy against the side of the cliff or sent the helicopter spiraling into the ravine.

  Working the winch again, Pender didn’t get a look at the dead girl until the other three had finished wrestling the basket into the chopper, which rose vertically to gain clearance the second the grisly cargo was aboard, then veered away from the mountainside.

  The supine corpse, Pender noted, was in full rigor, arched drastically, with the head and heels touching the stretcher and the pelvis upthrust in a ghastly parody of sexual ecstasy. The girl’s outspread arms were curved gracefully, as if she had been flash-frozen in the middle of a swan dive. Rather than risk further damage to the body by trying to work it free, Gabel had sawn off the branch upon which she’d been impaled, so the front of her T-shirt, stiff with dried blood, was poked up above her heart.

  Pender’s gaze traveled upward to the girl’s neck. With the upper surface of the body pale from postmortem lividity, the dark bruises on either side of the throat were clearly visible even in the dim light of the helicopter. As for her eyes, well, they were gone. One socket gaped raw red; the lid of the other had collapsed inward, giving the socket a shrunken appearance. Pender’s stomach churned; he tasted the bile rising in his throat, clamped his lips together, swallowed it back down. You’ve seen worse than this, he told himself. Get a goddamn grip.

  Ajanian, who wasn’t looking all that chipper himself, agreed with Pender that the degree of rigor mortis and the absence of blanching meant the girl had been dead at least twelve hours. He had noticed the bruised throat, too, but agreed that the amount of blood on the T-shirt meant she had to have been alive when she was impaled, which ruled out strangulation as the immediate cause of death.

  But whatever had ultimately killed the girl—presumably they’d know more after the autopsy—Ajanian was adamant that if nothing else, the presence of the bruises on her throat meant Luke Sweet would now have to be considered a danger to public safety. This would alter the character of the search considerably. No more all-volunteer or one-person search parties, to begin with. And the public would have to be alerted along with law enforcement.

  The sheriff was all but licking his mustache at the thought of a well-attended press conference, with TV lights blazing and microphones bristling, but he still wanted Pender’s help in covering his ass. “WE’RE IN AGREEMENT, RIGHT?” he shouted, as the lights of the ball field came into view.

  “YES AND NO.”

  Ajanian, incredulous: “EXCUSE ME?”

  “YES, HE COULD BE DANGEROUS. NO, I DON’T THINK YOU SHOULD ANNOUNCE IT.”

  On the ground, while the deputies and paramedics were transferring the now blanket-covered body from the basket to a gurney, Pender explained his reasoning to the sheriff. There were too many people with too many guns out there, he said—it would be like painting a bull’s-eye on the kid’s back. And since Pender also had the impression that the more threatened the boy felt, the more dangerous he’d become, declaring him a threat to the public would only increase the danger to both himself and the public.

  “So what am I supposed to tell them, then?” Ajanian said testily, adjusting his cap as the men and women with the cameras and microphones closed in on them.

  “As little as possible,” suggested Pender.

  “Thanks for nothing,” Ajanian whispered out of the side of his mouth as the flashbulbs started popping.

  “The Bureau is always happy to be of assistance to local law enforcement agencies,” replied Pender.

  4

  “Hi. You must be Luke.” Dark-haired Indian girl, around my age and height, soft-spoken, pretty cute.

  “If I must, I must.” I hadn’t seen Rudy since he’d left the kitchen twenty minutes ago.

  “I’m Shawnee. Uncle Rudy says you’re gonna be staying with us awhile, and I should find you a room.”

  “Okay by me,” I told her. But in that rambling old house by the river, “finding” a room had a double meaning. Because of the way it had been built and altered and added on to over the years, the place was like a three-dimensional maze, with forked, rambling corridors, secret rooms, and staircases that led up, down, sideways, and in some cases, to nowhere.

  So I followed Shawnee up, down, and sideways, to a room on the second-and-a-half floor. It wasn’t much bigger than a closet, with a low, slanting ceiling and barely enough space for a twin bed and a small chest of drawers. Even so, I was a lot better off than I’d have been being lost in the mountains, or dead, both of which had already loomed as strong possibilities that night.

  Lying in bed, through the tiny, open window I listened to the running river, which sounded like a hundred people whispering in a foreign language, and heard an owl hooting in the darkness. It must have been around midnight by then. Beat as I was, I thought for sure I’d fall asleep the second my head hit the pillow, but then I realized I had to take a piss.

  On the way up, Shawnee had showed me the bathroom I was supposed to use. I pulled on my jeans, opened the door, and climbed down the short, steep staircase, but when I reached the hallway, I couldn’t remember to save my life which way I’d come, from the left or the right.

  You probably should have left a trail of bread crumbs, I told myself. Then I eeny-meeny-miny-moed which way to go, and picked wrong. The door I chose opened on a rickety wooden staircase built along the side of the house. The outside of the house. But when you gotta go, you gotta go, and the great outdoors seemed like as good a place as any, so down the steep wooden stairs I went.

  The grass was damp under my bare feet. The river smelled fresh and new, and the night sky was amazing, with the stars scattered like diamonds across black velvet. I took a mighty whiz into the flower bed alongside the house. Just as I had finished and was shaking off, I heard a car or truck climbing the driveway and saw the beam from its headlights sweeping toward me across the lawn.

  I moved a few feet up from where I had pissed, flattened myself against the side of the house, and held my breath. The light kept coming and coming, stopping just short of my toes. It was so bright I could see the individual blades of grass casting shadows. Then it went out. Car doors slammed. I heard men’s voices. “Take him into the barn,” said one of them. I was pretty sure it was Rudy.

  From where I stood, I was staring straight at the barn in question, only fifteen or twenty yards across the lawn. I started edging my way around to the back of the house. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a cluster of dark figures crossing the lawn, and quickly crouched behind the nearest bush.

  A light went on in the barn. Rudy was standing under a swinging lamp hanging from the underside of the loft. The cluster of figures on the lawn resolved itself into two men half-dragging a third man by the arms. They hauled him into the barn and slung him onto the floor, and in the instant before Rudy slid the barn doors closed,
I recognized the fallen man by the white feathers in his headband. It was Buzzard John.

  I crossed the lawn quietly on my bare feet and peeked through the slit between the two sliding doors. “My…fucking…house,” Rudy was saying, accenting each word as he stood over Buzzard John, whose headband had slipped down over one bleeding eyebrow. The other eye was all puffy and purple, and his thin blade of a nose was mashed sideways. “You bring a stranger to my…fucking…house!”

  “It was a kid,” Buzzard John said through swollen lips. “He didn’t have nowhere else to go.”

  “Then you take him to your house, you call me on the telephone. But you don’t bring a stranger to my…fucking…house!”

  I swear to god, part of me wanted to bust in and rescue Buzzard John. After all, where would I have been if he hadn’t stopped for me, or brought me here? But Rudy definitely had a point. My dad would have agreed with him. Big Luke had an under-the-counter business, too, and I wasn’t even allowed to bring any friends home with me (not that there was anybody especially clamoring for the honor), much less strangers.

  Anyway, what could I have said that would have made a difference? It wasn’t like Rudy owed me any favors. No, all I was likely to accomplish by sticking my two cents in was to get myself beat up and kicked out. They were probably almost finished with him anyway, I told myself as I turned away from the barn and headed back across the lawn to the house.

  5

  Pender ducked out of Sheriff Ajanian’s press conference and caught a ride back to the lodge with a freelance photographer. The search-and-rescue effort had been suspended for the night, the lights were dimmed, and the sound of snoring emanated from the cots set up around the periphery of the main room.

  Pender’s intention had been to look for a motel in which to spend the night, but the Bu-car was blocked in by a fire truck. He decided he was too exhausted to drive, anyway, and wandered off in search of a spare cot to crash on. It was hard to believe that he’d gone swimming in the Kern River only that morning; the idyll with Amy already felt like ancient history.

  The beds and cots were all taken, but there was an unoccupied sofa in a darkened office on the second floor that looked like it would do in a pinch. Pender took off his shoes and curled up on his side, fully clothed, using the arm of the couch for a pillow. But as soon as he closed his eyes, the dead girl’s ravaged face appeared to him out of the darkness, eyeless and accusatory, and suddenly he was wide awake again.

  He swung his feet off the couch and sat up, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, wondering if there was anything he could have done differently last week. Maybe if he’d questioned the boy a little more skillfully that night in Santa Cruz, Little Luke would still be behind bars, and little Dusty would still have her eyes. “I had him,” he said aloud. “I had the little bastard in my goddamn hands and I let him get away.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” said a slurred male voice from across the room.

  Startled, Pender looked up and saw a man sitting in the dark, with a bottle on the desk in front of him. “Who’s that?”

  “Owen Oliver. Doctor Owen Oliver, not that it matters anymore.” The man switched on the gooseneck desk lamp, and Pender recognized the Mountain Project psychologist Sheriff Ajanian had pointed out earlier. Gone were the corduroy jacket and the tie; his shirtsleeves were unbuttoned and turned back loosely, and his hair was a wispy mess.

  “Sorry for busting in on you,” said Pender, climbing wearily to his feet. “I was looking for a place to sleep—I didn’t see you there.”

  “No, no, stay where you are.” Grandly, his shirtsleeves flapping, Dr. Oliver waved him back down. “Care for a nightcap?”

  “I’m not really supposed to…”

  “Me neither.” Oliver grabbed the bottle of Johnnie Walker Red by the neck, rose with difficulty, wobbled across the room, and perched unsteadily on the arm of the sofa. “Here. Hope you don’t mind drinking out of the bottle. I had a glass, but it broke. Story of my life.”

  Pender wiped the top of the bottle with his palm, took a slash, and handed it back. “Thanks. I needed that.”

  “Me, too.” Oliver took a slash in return, then wiped his mouth with his dangling sleeve. “He’s a psychopath, you know. A flat-out, textbook psychopath.”

  “Little Luke, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Little Luke.” A harsh laugh. “Antisocial personality disorder, we’re supposed to call it nowadays. DSM says the kid has to be at least eighteen for you to make a diagnosis, but I say, why wait? Act now and beat the crowd. Because it’s all there. In spades. Superficial charm, failure to conform to societal norms, deceit, aggression, pervasive disregard for the rights of others. And family history—did I mention family history?” He took another slug. “I knew it, too. By the second day. Should’ve sent him back then and there,” Oliver continued. “Know why I didn’t?”

  Pender shook his head.

  “Money.” Oliver made the universal sign, rubbing his thumb against the tips of his first two fingers. “Moola. The almighty dollar. See, the fifth kid’s the profit margin. Less than five, we’re scarcely breaking even.” He offered the bottle to Pender, who took another slash and handed it back. “Now that poor little girl is dead, the other boy’s in a coma, and the Mountain Project is history. Along with my reputation. And for what? A few thousand bucks? If I had the guts of a flea, I’d…” His voice trailed off; he looked down at Pender as if he’d just remembered he was there. “Say, I don’t suppose you have a gun on you?”

  “Can’t help you there,” said Pender, casually buttoning his sport jacket over his shoulder holster. “But you know what they say: in most cases, suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

  No reply from Oliver, who was starting to topple off the arm of the couch, still clutching the bottle. Reacting with an agility that belied his bulk, Pender caught the psychologist with one hand and snatched up Johnnie Walker with the other. The former he laid out on the sofa, on his side lest he vomit in his sleep; the latter he took with him as he set off in search of a place to lie down for the night.

  6

  Pender awoke at dawn on Thursday in an Adirondack chair on the back porch of the lodge, damp and chilled, with his right arm temporarily paralyzed from being leaned on. Feeling returned gradually to the arm, starting with agonizing pins and needles, but the shoulder remained sore all day.

  Although there had been no official announcement, it was obvious to Pender that a new paradigm had been established. Search parties were now deployed in groups of no less than three, with at least one of the three being an armed sheriff’s deputy. This had the effect of reducing by almost two thirds the area that could be covered in a day. The search parameters were further reduced later that morning when the California Department of Forestry pulled its helicopters in order to fight a catastrophic wildfire raging in the southern portion of the state.

  By then, however, the search for Luke Sweet was no longer Pender’s concern. When he called in to Liaison Support, Pool told him he’d been ordered back to Washington. First, though, he had to return the Bu-car to the field office in Sacramento, along with the detailed mileage log he was supposed to have been keeping all along.

  Oops.

  But a veteran agent like Pender was not without coping strategies. Stopping for lunch at a Denny’s near Sacramento, he filled in the blanks in dense black squiggles, with actual place names and legible numbers interspersed throughout, spilled black coffee on the little booklet while the ink was still wet, and dried it out under the hot-air blower in the men’s room.

  Booked to Dulles by way of Phoenix, Pender used the long layover to catch up on his expense report, concerning which he was more meticulous; the pockets of his clamorous sport coat were stuffed with crumpled receipts. On the night flight out of Phoenix, as sometimes happened when he showed his badge and Department of Justice photo ID in order to carry his weapon aboard, he was upgraded, this time to business class. The extra legroom was grea
tly appreciated, as were the cute little whiskey bottles given him on the sly by the cute little flight attendant.

  Losing another two hours to time zone changes, Pender arrived at Dulles a little after 2:00 A.M., eastern time. Pam wasn’t waiting at the gate for him, but then, he wasn’t really expecting her, though he had left a message on their machine before leaving Sacramento. The airport was mostly deserted except for the floor waxers, but there was one taxi waiting at the curbside stand. Pender woke the driver, who reminded him of little Billy Fish, from the movie version of The Man Who Would Be King.

  “Where can I take you, sah?”

  “You know where Potomac is?”

  “You are meaning the river?”

  “No, the town in Maryland. Across the river.”

  “Ah, yes, of course. Now I’ve got you.”

  They drove east on 267, then turned north on the nearly empty Beltway. Pender rolled down his window as they crossed the river into Maryland, and inhaled gratefully; swampy and miasmal as the air might have seemed to some, to Pender it smelled like home.

  At Bethesda, the cab left the Beltway, traveling northwest up River Road to the newly built subdivision halfway between Potomac and Seneca where Ed and Pam Pender had lived since early spring of that year. The lawns were so new you could still make out the sod lines, and there wasn’t a tree taller than Pender in the whole development, but the two- and three-bedroom Virginia Colonials were solidly built on rolling half-acre lots. According to the Realtor, they were all but guaranteed to appreciate in value as the Washington exurbs continued their northward creep.

  Pender paid Billy Fish, who rewarded his generous tip with a blank receipt for his expense report. As the headlights of the retreating taxi swept across the front of the house, Pender noticed that the living room curtains were drawn. No lights inside or out. The least she could have done was leave the porch light on, thought Pender, stumbling blindly up the walk leading from the driveway to the front door.