The Boys from Santa Cruz (25 page)

“No way,” Skip protested. “I’m not going anywhere dressed like this.”

“Are you kidding?” said Pender. “You look great in periwinkle. It brings out your eyes.”

April 19

Dear Diary: Other than sleeping, smoking weed is the only thing that even comes close to fighting the pain in my leg. The worst part is the throbbing—it feels kind of like there’s a balloon in my ankle that somebody keeps blowing up to just short of bursting, then letting the air out, then blowing it up again.

When I’m stoned, though, it feels more like the pain is coming in waves, long, slow rollers an old Steamer Lane boogie boarder like myself can ride all the way in to shore.

The dope is doing wonders for Chuckles, too. His first few turns I had to hold the joint to his lips, but he got the hang of it pretty quickly, and it must really be helping him with his detox, because oh, man, is he ever grateful. I’ve never owned a dog myself, but when I first moved in with my father he had a chocolate Lab named Toots that absolutely doted on him, and the look Chuckles gives me when I roll a joint for him is the exact same look Toots used to give my dad when Big Luke tossed him a piece of bacon.

The downside is that now Chuckles wants to stay stoned all the time.
He keeps waking me up to ask me to roll him another doobie, as he calls them, doobie being one of the few words he can pronounce intelligibly. I finally got smart and prerolled half a dozen fatties for him, which ought to hold him long enough for me to get some uninterrupted shut-eye.

April 20

Well, I slept, dear Di. Not that it did me any good. When I woke up this morning I was so weak I could hardly get up on my crutches, and had to piss into an empty plastic water jug. My leg isn’t hurting quite as much as yesterday, but my left ankle is still swollen double its size, plus my left foot is now the color of a plum, and the toenails are blueish purple, which I’m pretty sure is not a good sign.

My mind is as sharp as ever, though, and focused in like a laser on the problem at hand, which is that while I’m lying in a crumbling barn in Marshall County, rotting from the bottom up, my grandparents are living happily ever after down in Santa Cruz.

THIS CANNOT STAND.

But neither can I.

April 21

At least I think it’s the 21st. It’s easy to lose track when you’re spending most of your time stoned or sleeping.

Whatever day it is, dire deary, my condition continues to deteriorate. The whole foot is now blueish purple, while the toenails are almost black. Chuckles, however, is doing much, much better. The drugs they gave him in the hospital seem to be wearing off. No more drooling, hardly any jerky movements, and as for his mental functioning, when I woke up this morning (I’m pretty sure it was this morning) he was sitting up cross-legged with his nose buried in the BMW owner’s manual, turning the pages rapidly and apparently reading with intense concentration.

“So how’d it come out?” I quipped, when he finally closed the booklet.

To my surprise, he shut his eyes for a few seconds. I saw his eyeballs tracking left to right behind the flickering eyelids, then he opened them again. “Windshield Wipers, 71, 159,” he said, clearly and intelligibly. “Wiper Blade Replacement, 159. Wipers, intermittent, 72.”

Which proved to be the last three entries on the last page of the booklet, word for word. Far fucking out, as Big Luke used to say. A few days ago the guy’s a babbling idiot, now he can recite a 200-page car manual by heart. That’s got to be a jump of at least a hundred IQ points, which means he must have been some kind of major genius before they started drugging him. Either that, or he’s one of those, what do they call them, idiot savants.

Still April 21?

It’s dark out, dear Di, so unless I just slept something like 36 hours, I’m assuming it’s still the same day. And since I can’t seem to get back to sleep, I might as well get you caught up on recent events.

To begin with, Chuckles, or rather Asmador, as he now prefers to be called, woke me up a little while ago, dragging his Wal-Mart sleeping bag over next to mine and asking me, with a haunted look in his deep-shadowed eyes, to roll him a doobie. By the hissing light of the Coleman I twisted up a bomber, and after we’d each had a couple tokes, I asked him what was bothering him.

I was lying on my side and he was sitting up in his sleeping bag. With the lantern throwing our flickering shadows across the sloping mountain of dirt that formed the back wall of the barn, it felt like we were a couple of old-time western outlaws holed up in a cave. “It’s the Council,” he said cautiously. “The Infernal Council.”

I gave him a knowing nod. “Oh, them.”

“Yes! Them!” He leaned forward earnestly, so relieved and grateful to be taken seriously that I almost felt guilty for putting him on like that.

“What about them?”

With his mind moving faster than his tongue, it took him a few tries
to explain it. The gist, I gathered, was that something called the Concilium Infernalis, or Infernal Council, which was basically hell’s board of directors, had some kind of task or mission he was supposed to complete in order to become a Council member, as opposed to (and here he’d shuddered so hard he shook the ash right off the joint), being consigned for all eternity to the ranks of the damned souls in hell. “I know I have to prove myself to them,” he repeated firmly. “But the thing is, they won’t tell me what they want me to do.” He toked up, passed the joint back to me. “They won’t even…(cough, choke)…give me a…(cough, choke)…hint.”

I took a prodigious toke, and suddenly it was like one of those astronomy or astrology deals where all the planets line up in a row. I saw clearly how our lives intersected, how our strengths and weaknesses, our needs and our abilities, meshed, and all at once I understood why fate had brought us together and led us out of Meadows Road, Asmador with his need for a mission, me with my need to have one carried out.

“Oh, but they will, my friend,” I assured him, the words streaming out of my mouth in a cloud of milky white smoke that curled upward through the stark light of the lantern like Aladdin’s genie trying to take shape. “I guarantee you, they will.”

Murphy’s farm was crawling with crime scene techs dusting for fingerprints, taking plaster tire impressions, probing the shallow grave from which they’d exhumed two decaying heads, and searching the grass at the bottom of the hill for ejected cartridges left by the warning shots Pender had fired to scare away the vultures yesterday.

Skip and Pender followed Laurel Baldinger, the sheriff’s crime scene analyst, out of the glaring daylight into the barn, where the dim light was pierced by glowing shafts of morning sunlight angling
in through pinholes in the roof. Having been blindfolded during his entire stay, Skip had never actually
seen
the inside of the barn, but it felt eerily familiar to him all the same, as if he’d seen it in a dream.

“Do you have any idea how long Sweet might have been holed up in here?” Pender asked the CSA.

“We found a receipt from a Seven-Eleven near Marshall City dated April seventeenth.”

“That was the day the hospital blew up. He must have come directly here.”

“You mean
they,
plural,” she corrected him. “Almost everywhere we’re dusting, we’re finding two distinct sets of latents.”

“Couldn’t the second set have been the other victim’s, the one Skip here was tied to?”

Baldinger shook her head. “Both sets of prints are all over the barn and the van, inside and out. So whoever it was obviously had free run of the entire place. To me, that says accomplice, not victim.”

Pender turned to Skip. “Looks like we need to have another chat with Dr. Gallagher,” he said, then turned back to the analyst. “I was told you’d found something you wanted me to take a look at.”

“Yes, sir.” She handed Pender a small black pocket diary. “The reason I called you is, we found your name in it.”

Pender read the cover aloud. “1995 Pocket Pal, courtesy of your Pfizer Sales Representative, Robert F. Peterson, 2500 Mission Street, Santa Cruz, California.” He opened the book, squinted exaggeratedly, brought it up to within an inch of his nose, then held it out at arm’s length before giving up. “If you can read this, your eyes are better than mine.”

“Oh, sorry. Here.” Baldinger handed him her own round, thick-lensed magnifying glass, which had a raised rectangular inset of even higher magnifying power. It took a little experimenting, but after a few tries, he was able to make out the first sentence.
“On the
morning my father telephoned from Marshall City to announce that the FBI was closing in, I was in the trailer watching Teddy, my stepmother, getting dressed.…”

Apr 22

It took me half the night, but when Asmador woke up this morning, he found my old Pocket Pal next to his sleeping bag, along with the little magnifying glass Rudy used to bring out in order to show his customers the THC crystals sparkling atop the sinsemilla buds.

The effort damn near killed
me,
but Asmador, whose condition has continued to improve almost hourly, was like a kid on Christmas morning. Obviously not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, he tore into the new reading material with the same intensity with which he’d devoured the BMW owner’s manual, sitting up cross-legged with the book in one hand and the magnifying glass and a joint in the other, not stopping to eat or piss, his head wreathed in a cloud of pot smoke.

When he got to the final entry, where I’d added a crucial postscript last night, his eyes widened and his mouth fell open, like he was a ham silent movie actor miming astonishment.

“What’s up?” I called over to him. “You look all excited.”

He looked up from the book and asked me if I could keep a secret.

“To the grave and beyond,” I told him.

“My mission from the Council,” he said, his brown eyes sparkling like a kid’s on Christmas morning. “I know what it is.”

“That’s terrific,” I told him. “If there’s anything I can do to help you, just say the word.”

“Okay, I will,” he said solemnly. Then he lowered his head to the book in his lap, turned back to the first page, and started all over again.

Apr 23

Asmador spent all day yesterday reading and rereading my Pocket Pal from cover to cover with the aid of the magnifying glass, then was up half the night flipping through the pages at random, the way born-again Christians page through their Bibles, looking for inspiration and guidance. I can tell he has it memorized already: when I awoke this morning, he raised his forefinger in the air like Abe Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address, and proclaimed, “He lives, he wakes—’tis Death is dead, not he!”

For a while there, I was worried that at some point he might get suspicious of my role in this whole affair. I certainly would have if I were him. But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him to question who I am or what I’m doing here. He’s never called me by my name. I don’t think he even knows I have a name, much less that it’s Luke. As for the possibility that I’m the guy featured in the Pocket Pal, I’m pretty sure that’s never crossed his mind.

Of course, it helps that he doesn’t seem to remember anything that happened in the real world while he was under the influence of chemical restraint. As far as Asmador is concerned, he was sent here by the Infernal Council to carry out his mission, and nothing else matters. And when you look at the situation from his point of view, it only makes sense that there’d be a guy here whose entire function in life (other than rolling doobies for him) was to help him with that mission. He probably thinks the Infernal Council sent me to him for precisely that reason, and I sure don’t plan to disabuse him on that score.

At least not intentionally. I did come close to screwing it up this afternoon, however, while I was explaining how to get to Fred and Evelyn’s house, and accidentally referred to them as “my” grandparents instead of the grandparents. Luckily, he didn’t seem to notice.

Apr 24

Asmador was like a new man this morning. He emptied my piss jug, made instant coffee, and even twisted up a sloppy but serviceable breakfast doobie
for us to share. Then he hunkered down next to me, glanced to his left, then to his right, and whispered, “Tonight’s the night.”

Turns out he’d visited the Council last night and received his marching orders. Me, I wasn’t all that convinced he was ready yet, but when we went through the plan for about the zillionth time, I had to admit he had it down cold.

Of course, that’s no guarantee he’ll be able to perform under pressure, or improvise successfully if things go wrong. But I can’t let myself worry about stuff like that. I’ll just have to be contented with knowing that I’ve done everything I can, and hope I live long enough to find out how it all comes out.

Apr 25

It’s not so bad, this dying. I thought it’d be scarier. Instead it’s kind of peaceful. My leg doesn’t even hurt anymore. Not because it’s better, but because it’s numb. I can’t feel anything below midcalf. Which is lucky, because my foot sure
looks
painful, all black and swollen and getting ready to split open like an overripe tomato. Plus there’s this sweetish-sour rotting smell hovering around my corner of the barn. Can you say
gangrene,
boys and girls?

Of course, I could probably still save my life (though probably not my foot) by hopping into the old Beemer when Asmador gets back and driving straight to the nearest emergency room. But then what? I get to spend the rest of my life either in prison (I imagine some people are still pretty pissed off about that whole blowing up Meadows Road deal) or in some state-run maximum-security nut farm. And I’ve already done enough time in Meadows Road to know that that’s not really living, it’s only slower dying.