The Boys from Santa Cruz (29 page)

“You were about to tell us the name of the substance that induced Charles Mesker’s psychotic disorder.”

“Yes, yes, of course. The substance was Asmador.”

A dark green 1994 Jeep Cherokee with New Jersey plates pulled into an isolated rest stop off Highway 101 North between Geyserville and Cloverdale around 10:00
P.M
. Saturday. Asmador, who’d nodded off in the driver’s seat of the BMW, was awakened by Sammael in time to see two humans climbing wearily out of the Cherokee, groaning and stretching. The male of the couple tweaked his crotch to relieve a wedgie, then they departed, bound for separate restrooms.

“You really think he looks like me?” Asmador said doubtfully.

“Near enough,” replied Sammael. “Nobody examines those driver’s license pictures closely anyway.”

“If you say so.”

“I just did.” Once again, the snarky Poison Angel got in the last word before vanishing.

Asmador climbed out of the BMW carrying the suitcase with the remainder of his cash and weed, leaving the Beemer unlocked behind him in the hope that someone would steal it. The male of the couple returned first and resumed his seat behind the wheel of the Cherokee. Asmador waited for the female to return and climb up into the passenger’s seat, then strode toward her with the suitcase
in his left hand. “Excuse me,” he called, in a generic foreign accent. “Could you answer for me a qvestion?”

As he’d hoped, the woman rolled down her window, whereupon he drew his gun from inside his denim jacket and jammed it against the side of her head. “Don’t try anything stupid,” he told her husband. “All I need is a ride.”

Asmador was never sure whether they believed him or not, but in the end it didn’t matter. They followed orders with alacrity and died together, kneeling and holding hands, in a dark redwood grove three hundred yards off the side of Highway 128, somewhere between Boonville and Philo.

“Asmador?” Pender and Epstein exchanged baffled glances.

“Asmador,” said Hillovi.

“But that’s what he calls himself.”

“Yes, that’s his alter ego whenever his delusions get the better of him—which is to say, when he’s not sedated to the point of near-catatonia. Originally, however, Dr. Shiffman’s Asmador was the commercial name for a popular over-the-counter asthma remedy. Its major active ingredient was belladonna. I don’t recall what else was in it, but I remember it came in a powdered form, and was intended to be burned in a smudge fire or smoked in a cigarette to alleviate severe asthma symptoms.

“There was a period of time, however, back in the late sixties and early seventies, when certain poor souls decided it would be a good idea to ingest the stuff. Those that vomited immediately survived with relatively minor damage. Those with stronger stomachs fared less well. They became highly delusional, were unable to differentiate between reality and hallucination, and exhibited
behavior patterns that ranged from unusual to downright bizarre.

“Some mistook human beings for objects and vice versa, another saw a solid floor as a piranha-infested lagoon, and still another passed most of his time watching Technicolor movies on his thumbnail. One patient died as a result of banging his head against a wall, trying to turn off a radio only he could hear. Another was run over by an automobile while trying to dig a hole in the middle of a busy street to free the people he believed were trapped beneath the pavement.”

“And how did this stuff affect Mesker?” Pender asked, kneeling next to Skip’s chair so Hillovi, lying on his side, could see him without having to raise his head from the pillow.

Profoundly, was Hillovi’s reply. Charles Mesker, he explained, had been seventeen years old, an insatiable reader possessed of a brilliant mind and an eidetic (more commonly known as a photographic) memory, but long-haired and rebellious, with a disturbingly intense interest in demonology. He was also already an inveterate and indiscriminate drug user by the summer of 1972, when Santa Cruz experienced a temporary drug drought.

No one seemed to have any pot for sale, and what few psychedelics were available were of poor quality, or heavily boosted with methedrine, so Charles and a friend decided to experiment with the friend’s grandmother’s asthma remedy. Someone had told them that eating the stuff, as opposed to smoking it, would result in an intense psychedelic experience, during which they would be able to contact their cosmic archetypes. Neither boy was sure exactly what that meant, but they each managed to choke down several teaspoonfuls of the noxious green powder.

Charles never saw the other boy again—whatever his friend’s archetype was, it was evidently airborne, because a few hours into the trip, the young man did a Linkletter off the roof. In some ways, he might have been the more fortunate of the two.

Charles’s trip, perhaps due to his interest in demonology, took
on a dark cast. Leaving his friend’s house, he found himself wandering through a hellish world in which features of the familiar Santa Cruz landscape were conflated with visions of what he would later come to call the Blasted Land.

Gargoyles cavorted on rooftops and swung from the hands of the Santa Cruz town clock. At the Boardwalk, where the shrieking of the damned souls all but deafened him, Charles saw hideous demons cavorting among the crowd. Some masqueraded as vendors, serving up scoops of steaming shit in ice cream cones and severed penises in hot dog buns.

As day gave way to night, the ocean turned into desert dunes and the beach into red-hot coals. Fleeing the Boardwalk, Charles trudged westward along the sand, castellated cliffs towering above him like battlements, blocking out the stars.

The next morning the authorities, alerted by alarmed beach-goers, found Charles dancing and waving atop the rock formation known as Natural Bridges, naked as the day he was born and completely out of touch with reality. Still, he cooperated wholeheartedly with the officers, referring to them as his loyal minions and graciously allowing himself to be led through the knee-high surf to a waiting ambulance.

Although they had never treated a case of Asmador ingestion before, staffers at the Dominican Hospital emergency room were not unfamiliar with handling psychedelic overdoses. Their basic approach was to administer Thorazine until the patient quieted down or fell asleep. Twelve to twenty-four hours later, most patients were generally as good as new.

But not Charles Mesker. As soon as the Thorazine wore off, Charles’s delusions and hallucinations—the Blasted Land, the demons, the Infernal Council, and so on—returned unabated. So the E.R. doctors knocked him out for another twenty-four hours, and once again, when consciousness returned, so did the effects of the Asmador.

After a short stay in the psych unit at Dominican Hospital,
Charles was transferred to the Meadows Road facility, where the most effective treatment they managed to come up with was to keep the boy so heavily tranquilized that he was unable to respond to his hallucinations or act upon his delusions. In other words, chemical restraint.

The side effects were predictably devastating, said Dr. Hillovi, who was by then exhausted and in growing pain. Charles suffered a loss of motor control, was wracked by tardive dyskinesia, and worst of all, from Charles’s point of view, he lost the ability to read, which had once been his chief consolation. So every few years, his doctors tried weaning Charles off his meds long enough to see if the effects of the Asmador might have worn off on their own.

But the hallucinations and delusions inevitably returned, said Hillovi—that is, up until their most recent attempt to withdraw Charles from chemical restraint, a little over four years ago. “To our delight and surprise, within two weeks Charles was giving every indication of having recovered from his disorder. He appeared to be cooperative, rational, and high-functioning on an intellectual and emotional level—he even began reading again.

“After three months without any sign of a relapse, Charles was deemed an appropriate candidate for supervised release into the care of his parents. For six months he slept in his own room, read everything he could get his hands on, and even applied for his driver’s license. Then one December night, he crept into his parents’ bedroom and cut his mother’s throat with a steak knife.”

Just then, the light on the front of the machine that timed the automatic release of morphine sulfate into Hillovi’s bloodstream switched from steady red to blinking green. He sighed gratefully and closed his eyes for a moment; when he opened them again, his pupils had already begun to contract. “When Charles was arrested, he gave his name as Asmador, and told the police that he’d cut the old lady’s throat on orders from the Infernal Council.

“Mrs. Mesker refused to press charges, of course, so Charles was returned to Meadows Road.” By now, Hillovi’s pupils were
mere pinpoints, and his affect disconcertingly jocular. “And so, my jolly green giant,” he told Pender with a crooked grin, “if you have any further questions, I suggest you ask them soon, or forever hold your peas.”

Pender, who had a million of ’em, winnowed them down to two with immediate and practical applications. “What do you think’s going to happen as the effects of the chemical restraint continue to wear off?”

“Based on past history, I’d expect Charles’s hallucinations to grow more vivid, yet also better integrated, as time passes. In other words, his two worlds should begin to merge again, and continue to merge until they become as one to him.”

“Last question: Do you have any suggestions as to the best way to handle Charles when he’s in that condition?”

“From a great distance, with a tranquilizer dart,” said Hillovi, with a stoned wink and a laugh that sounded more like the barking of a phthisic sea lion.

Returning alone to the Cherokee, Asmador took inventory of the luggage and gear under the tarpaulin in the cargo area. And a most unusual inventory it was: two hunting bows, two target bows, dozens of arrows, spare bowstrings, calibrated sights, scopes, binoculars, night-vision goggles, day and night camouflage outfits, backpacks with built-in quivers, archery gloves and leather wrist guards, face black, hunting and field-dressing knives, trail mix, freeze-dried rations.

Moving like a man in a trance, Asmador picked up the larger hunting bow and assumed a sideways stance with his left arm extended, the elbow locked, the wrist cocked, the hand wrapped
firmly around the leather-padded grip. Dazedly, he hooked the fingertips of his right hand around an imaginary string and drew it back until it was tucked in against his right cheek.

Suddenly he found himself transported by a combination of muscle-memory and sense-memory to a sunbaked field where stuffed targets were lined up on three-legged wooden stands, with straw bales stacked to provide a backstop. He smelled sweat and leather and straw, heard the
snap
of the bowstring, the sizzling sound of an arrow zipping past his ear, the solid
thunk
of the arrowhead striking home.

Obviously, this current humanoid incarnation was no stranger to the sport of archery, Asmador realized, snapping out of his trancelike state. And a lucky thing it was, too, he told himself—surely using a bow and arrow would be more satisfying and rewarding than firing a gun. So impersonal, guns. Of course, a knife would be even better, but you have to get really close to your victims to use a knife. Either that, or have them already hog-tied. But something told Asmador it might not be all that easy to sneak up on the traitor Epstein a second time. Nor was the FBI man, Pender, likely to let himself be taken without a fight. So if they did have to be ambushed from a distance, using a bow would be a most satisfactory compromise.

But you’re getting ahead of yourself again
, thought Asmador, tossing the bow back into the Cherokee and snapping the tarpaulin down to cover it. The first thing he needed to do was get a room for the night. Then tomorrow morning, he’d try to obtain an address to go along with the phone number that helpful, regrettably deceased librarian had given him this afternoon.

Pender dragged himself out of bed around eight o’clock on Sunday morning, still logy after only five hours of sleep. Donning the shapeless old corduroy bathrobe Skip had loaned him, he padded barefoot down the quiet, dawn gray hallway to the kitchen. Skip was sitting at the kitchen table in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, poring over the photocopied enlargements of Luke Sweet’s Pocket Pal and making notes on a legal pad.

Blessedly, there was fresh coffee on the stove. “What are you doing?” Pender carried a mug imprinted with a Far Side cartoon of the Boneless Chicken Ranch over to the table, where Skip was working by the yellow light of an overhead lamp with a stained-glass shade shaped like a mushroom.

“I’m compiling the late Mr. Sweet’s so-called fantasy revenge list, which I’m presuming Asmador is using as his guide.”

As much as he hated the ’suming words,
ass
and
pre,
Pender told Skip, he had to agree that sounded likely enough.

“He never actually
makes
the list,” Skip pointed out, “he just adds to it. But here’s what I’ve come up with.” He tilted the legal pad toward Pender. There were six names on it: F. Harris, E. Harris, Pender, Brobauer, Oliver, Epstein; Skip had drawn a line through the first two and the fourth. “From what I can tell, there was no particular order to the first three attacks. Or at least nothing obvious or chronological that would give us a hint as to who’s next.”

Pender took a thoughtful slurp of coffee. “I can think of a set of circumstances under which the question of who comes next is irrelevant, no ’suming required,” he announced. “Care to take a guess?”

Skip, an only child who unconsciously tended to assign older males the role of surrogate big brother, really wanted to get this one right. Stalling, he took a sip of the now lukewarm coffee in his mustard yellow mug. And another, and another, until it came to him: “If we’re all three in the same place at the same time!”

“Bingo!” Pender raised the Far Side cup in a mock toast to Skip, who gave him a strained smile. “You know, you don’t have to do this,” Pender told him. “You have no client—nobody’s going to think less of you if you decide to take a pass.”