The Boys from Santa Cruz (30 page)

“No, it’s not that. It’s just…” Skip picked up the photocopied pages and riffled idly through them. “I’ve been through this two or three times since yesterday, and I can’t help wondering—don’t laugh now—but I can’t help wondering, what if Little Luke was telling the truth?” He absentmindedly jogged the pages until the edges were lined up, then carefully put them back down on the table. “I mean, taken as a whole, his story kind of holds up in a way, doesn’t it? So what are the chances he was just some poor kid who had a shitload of hard luck, and got railroaded all the way to the funny farm? With our help, I might add.”

Pender blew a blubbery raspberry and blithely waved away the possibility with his free hand. “Remember how Hillovi said the kid racked up a thirty-nine on the Psychopathy Checklist when he was admitted?”

“Vaguely. Why?”

“The PCL scale only goes as high as forty. Charlie Manson barely made thirty-eight.”

“No shit?” said Skip, brightening visibly.

“Scout’s honor,” said Pender, who had of course pulled the Manson number out of his enormous ass. “And now that we’ve got that out of the way, do you think you can locate Dr. Oliver’s whereabouts for us? If not, I could try contacting a friend of mine at the CJIS, but I’m not sure—”

Skip cut him off. “Let me put it this way: if I can’t find him, neither can Asmador.”

Awakened early Sunday morning by the mournful bleat of a foghorn, Asmador throws back the quilted counterpane, rolls out of bed, and pads barefoot out onto the balcony of an overpriced hotel room in Fort Bragg, overlooking the mouth of the Noyo River, where a squat, weather-beaten fishing trawler is just putting out to sea.

The sky is ablaze to the east, casting a fiery glow over the estuary; bare-masted sailboats rock and creak in the tidal swell. Leaning out over the wooden railing of the balcony, Asmador is startled at first to see a grotesquely naked, hunchbacked, rat-tailed demon capering on the raised bridge of the trawler, cupping its misshapen genitals in one hand and gesturing lewdly toward the oblivious crewmen with the other. But along with the shock comes a strong sense of familiarity, even homecoming. This was how it had been
in the time before, when the Blasted Land resembled Santa Cruz, and demons danced on the Boardwalk and swung from the hands of the town clock.

After rolling a joint and brewing a cup of complimentary coffee in the little machine on the counter outside the bathroom, Asmador tries calling the number the librarian had given him. He reaches an answering machine, which refers him to a second number, where a second answering machine informs him that although the Oliver Institute will be closed through May 15 for its annual two-week residential training at Braxton Hot Springs, Dr. Oliver will be checking his messages from time to time. So if you’d care to leave a message…

Asmador does not care to leave a message. Instead he calls the front desk. “This is Mr. Daniel in room 230.” Peter Daniel was the name on the dead archer’s driver’s license and credit cards. “Do you know where Braxton Hot Springs is?”

“I believe it’s in Lake County. If you give me a few minutes, I could probably find out for sure.”

“Would you?” says Asmador, scratching absentmindedly at his pubic hair. “That would be terrif.”

Pender and Epstein reached Braxton Hot Springs, a New Age retreat center in the heart of Lake County, shortly after one o’clock on Sunday afternoon.
ABSOLUTELY NO MOTOR VEHICLES BEYOND THIS POINT
, declared the hand-painted wooden sign on the gate at the end of the winding, two-and-a-half-mile-long driveway. A half dozen vehicles, ranging from a handsome new Lexus to a rusted-out VW bus with a psychedelic paint job, were parked in a dirt lot by the side of the road.

ELDERS, DELIVERIES, DIFFERENTLY ABLED, USE FOR ASSISTANCE,
read a second, smaller sign nailed to the last telephone pole. Skip opened the rusty metal cabinet mounted beneath the sign, picked up the handset inside it, and clicked the hook with his forefinger like a character in an old-timey movie—Hello, Operator, give me Central!

Figuring that the chances of smoking being permitted beyond the gate were slim, Pender fired up a Marlboro while Skip talked to somebody at the other end. He only managed to sneak a few puffs before a lovely, fresh-faced, wet-haired young woman in a damp caftan arrived in a four-seater golf cart. “Are you here for the ceremony tonight?” she asked, looking them over dubiously.

“Could be,” said Pender, buttoning his tomato soup sport coat to hide the Smith & Wesson Model 10 in his shoulder holster.

“You never know,” added Skip—he was wearing a tan, zipper-front working man’s jacket long enough to cover the Beretta in his kidney holster.

The young woman dropped them off in front of the Center, a two-story, wood-and-glass building with a cantilevered roof. “O’s probably out on the deck,” she called over her shoulder, casually stripping off her caftan as she trotted up the dusty road in the direction of the hot springs.

“Welcome to California,” said Skip, smugly.

Pender rapped on the aluminum-framed screen door.

“Come on up!”

An open-treaded spiral staircase led to a carpeted, glass-enclosed room as sparsely furnished as a dance studio. Sliding glass doors opened onto a hardwood deck where an overweight, middle-aged man with a shaved head and a bushy, gray-blond beard was standing on one foot. The sole of his other foot was pressed flat against the inside of the opposite knee, and both hands were raised over his head, palms together like a football referee signaling a safety. “Can I help you?”

“I’m sorry,” called Pender, who remembered Dr. O as a slender,
beardless preppy with sandy hair. “We were looking for Dr. Oliver.”

“You found him.” Oliver, who was wearing a pair of white cotton meditation pajamas, abandoned his yoga posture. “What can I do for you?”

Obviously, Dr. O had failed to recognize Pender from their previous meeting, which meant Skip was free to launch into the cover story he and Pender had agreed to try first. They were, he told Oliver, two freelance writers working on a book about the evolution of the spiritual movement in the West from
Be Here Now
to, well,
now.
Skip apologized for not having contacted Dr. Oliver in advance, explaining that they had only heard about his institute a few days ago and had been trying to track him down since then.

Ten minutes later, seated at a trestle table in the rustic dining hall downstairs, sipping some surprisingly kick-ass chai in lieu of coffee, Dr. Oliver described the sequence of events that had transformed him from a jacket-and-tie psychologist to a pajama-wearing guru. It included a pilgrimage to the East (no mention of the Mountain Project debacle), a blinding flash of enlightenment, and subsequent years of study and meditation at the bare or sandaled feet of various spiritual teachers, the last of whom ordered him to return to the West to pass on the wisdom he had gained.

He then gave them a brief outline of the two-week training currently under way. The first week had consisted largely of breaking down the trainees’ baseline assumptions and ego structures. This evening’s ceremony marked the turning point, then the second week would be concerned with building up healthier, spiritually oriented human beings.

And no, he told them in response to their request, he would not give them permission to
observe
the ceremony tonight—dramatic pause—but he would be willing to let them
participate
in the ceremony, if they agreed to sign waivers and let him vet
anything they might write about himself or the institute or the training.

Skip jumped at the offer so eagerly that Pender was afraid he might have given them away. No real journalist would have even considered allowing a subject the equivalent of a filmmaker’s final cut.

But Oliver didn’t appear to have noticed anything amiss. He would have one of his assistants draw up an interim agreement and prepare the requisite waivers for them to sign before the ceremony, he told them. “Until then, feel free to explore our beautiful surroundings, have a soak in the world-famous hot springs. Myself, I’m going back to my cabin for my midafternoon ‘horizontal meditation,’” he added, winking broadly and bracketing the last two words with two-finger quotation marks, in case they hadn’t figured out that he was going down for a nap.

“Braxton is a little over a hundred miles southeast of here, in Lake County,” says the desk clerk. “I jotted down the directions for you. If you’d like a map, I could print you—Mr. Daniel? Is everything okay, Mr. Daniel?”

“What? Oh, everything’s just fine.” Except for the smirking, leathery-faced imp perched like a pet monkey on the clerk’s shoulder, making washing motions with its clever little paws. “You were saying?”

“Do you need me to print you out a map to Braxton Hot Springs?”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“Here you go, then. And if you could sign here?”

“Sure thing.” Asmador closes his eyes long enough to access
his eidetic recall, and visualizes the signature on the late Peter Daniel’s Mastercard before forging it on the receipt.

The route, all state highways save for a fifteen-mile stretch of U.S. 101, is straightforward enough; the driving is anything but. The hardest part isn’t so much staying on the road as it is ignoring the distractions—the blazing fields, the writhing trees, the mocking demons. For now that his system has managed to cleanse itself after three chemical restraint–free weeks, as Dr. Hillovi predicted, Asmador’s two worlds are beginning to merge at a disconcerting pace.

But Asmador perseveres. By tucking in behind another car and copying its movements, he learns to tell the difference between the things you have to brake for—cows, stop signs, and railroad crossings—and the things you don’t, the things the other cars drive through—capering demons, smoking geysers, and heaps of offal.

A few hours after leaving Fort Bragg, Asmador spots the turnoff for Braxton Springs Road. A blacktop driveway winds for another two and a half miles, to an unpaved lot with seven parked vehicles and no attendant. Asmador jockeys the dark green Cherokee into an empty space between an old hippie bus and a white…Hot damn! Could it be? Yes, it could. Out of all the vehicles in either of his worlds, Asmador has stumbled upon the same Buick he tailed and lost in San Francisco a few days ago. Epstein’s Buick.

Scarcely able to believe his eyes or his luck, Asmador has to get out and run his hands wonderingly over the smooth metal curves of the car to convince himself it’s real. But it is—and the hood is still warm.

Steve Stahl, Oliver’s dour, crew-cut factotum, entered the dining hall just as Pender and Epstein were leaving. Shirtless and shoeless, wearing a terry-cloth robe over a pair of baggy surfer shorts, he held the screen door open for them, then performed an exaggerated, head-swiveling double take behind their departing backs. “Who in the name of all that’s holy was that?”

“Writers. They’re doing a book on the movement. They want to observe the ceremony tonight.”

“You turned them down, right?” said Stahl, a retired Marine captain who also functioned as Oliver’s chief son of a bitch. (Every spiritual leader has one.)

“Partially—I told them that if they wanted to stick around, they’d have to participate like everyone else.”

“You’re kidding! Did you
look
at them, O—there’s a pair of walking buzzkills if I ever saw one.”

“I’m quite aware of that, Steven. But this could be a major opportunity for the institute—the big break that moves us from the backwaters to the forefront of the movement.”

Oliver lifted his cup of chai to his lips, discovered it was empty, and handed it wordlessly to Stahl, who refilled it from the gleaming stainless-steel urn on the table by the wall and brought it back to him. The guru, who preferred to be called a spiritual adviser, took a sip, nodded appreciatively, then closed his eyes. He inhaled slowly and deliberately through his nostrils, then exhaled a gentle stream of air from between his pursed lips. “So rather than send them away,” he continued after a few more calming breaths, “what we need to work on is how to maximize their experience tonight while minimizing the, ah, ‘buzzkill’ effect, as you put it.”

“How much do they actually know about the ceremony?”

“Very little.”

“The sacrament?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

“But you want them to take the sacrament, same as everybody else?”

The boss nodded ever so slightly. The icy blue eyes of the designated s.o.b. took on a hint of a sparkle. “Leave it to me, O.”

Oliver put down his cup. “That’s all I wanted to hear,” he told his aide. “But, Steven?”

“Sir?”

“Be sly. I have the distinct impression that neither of them is as stupid as he looks—particularly the stupid-looking one.”

“Understood,” said Stahl.

“Good man,” said Oliver.

After leaving the dining hall, Skip and Pender commandeered the golf cart for a tour of the grounds and soon discovered that Pender’s cell phone was useless even at the higher elevations. They also learned that there was no practical way of securing any of the buildings, much less the surrounding wilderness area. “Instead of flanking Oliver,” said Pender on their way back, “one of us’ll have to keep watch on the other two at all times, from concealment, if possible.”

“It should be me—I’m the better shot,” Skip pointed out.

“Only if there’s a good stationary vantage point—if not, it’ll have to be me.”

“Fair enough,” said Skip, casting a longing glance at the bathhouses coming up on their left.

Pender either caught Skip’s glance out of the corner of his eye or read his mind. “You want to take a dip while there’s still time? I can keep an eye on Oliver.”

“Why don’t we take turns?”

“I’m not that big on hot tubs or saunas,” Pender confessed. “They make me feel all watery in the knees. And to tell you the truth, I’ve never been all that comfortable taking my clothes off in mixed company.”

“What’s the matter, you afraid you’ll get a hard-on? That hardly ever happens.”