The Boys from Santa Cruz (8 page)

When Monday finally rolled around, Pender still wasn’t ready to face the music. Instead he went camping with Amy and the crew down by the Kern River and found himself living through a two-day beer commercial. Daylight was for grilling burgers and franks over an open fire, drinking Bud out of the can, playing wiffle ball, and taking turns swinging out over the old swimming hole on a truck tire hanging by a thick rope from an overhanging tree branch. Evening was for sitting around the campfire toasting marshmallows, drinking Jim Beam out of his beat-up old pewter flask, and singing Merle Haggard songs. Nighttime was for making love under the stars, on a mattress in the back of Amy’s pickup.

And whenever the stuff he wasn’t thinking about showed signs of surfacing, he told himself a couple more days wouldn’t make much difference in the long run. It was like hitting the snooze button on an alarm clock: it’s not so much the extra ten minutes of sleep you’re buying, it’s the illusion of control.

But sooner or later the buzzer always goes off. Wednesday dawned clear and hot. One last pot of hobo coffee, one last plunge into the river, then they packed up, buried their garbage, and struck camp. It was in the cab of Amy’s F-150, formerly white, now beige with Kern County dust, that Pender finally unburdened himself. He thought she’d be angry; instead she chuckled. “You? An FBI agent?” she said in her Southern Comfort–steeped voice, her eyes hidden behind mirrored glasses and a cigarette dangling from her lips. “Honey, you have
got
to be shitting me.”

“I shitteth you not,” said Pender, lighting up his first Marlboro of the day with his trusty Zippo. A legacy from his father, it had the letters
USMC
engraved on one side and the Marine Corps anchor on the other; the chrome finish was worn down to the brass. “The thing is”—he took a deep drag, blew it out the window into the slipstream—“I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t think I can do it any more. Matter of fact…”

He took a sidewise glance toward Amy, who drove like a man, leaning back casually, one hand on the wheel, one elbow out the window. Unable to read her expression behind the shades, he blundered on. “I’ve been seriously thinking about eighty-sixing the whole goddamn enchilada, the Bureau, my fucked-up marriage…just giving it all up…” He paused again, to give her a chance to cut in, make this a little easier one way or the other; no such luck. “…and maybe moving out here for keeps.”

He turned toward her, the seat belt tightening across his chest. The only sign that she’d heard him was that she’d gone perfectly still, except for her steering hand. Finally she blew a puff of smoke out of the side of her mouth and turned to face him. “You do what
you got to do, honey,” she told him, her cigarette bobbing. “Just don’t do it for me.”

They drove on through the August heat. Pender took a sudden interest in the landscape, the golden, rolling hills, the dusty green live oaks, a turkey vulture wheeling in the sky, a glowering, hunch-shouldered hawk perched atop a telephone pole. “I’m not sure what that means,” he said eventually.

“It means, believe it or not, that I haven’t been waiting around all those years for you, or anybody, to come along and rescue me. Not that I don’t like you a lot, and not that it hasn’t been fun.”

When they got back to the farmhouse, Pender went inside to pack, while Amy hosed down her truck barefooted, in a T-shirt and a pair of denim cutoffs. A few minutes later he came out carrying his suitcase and wearing his seersucker jacket, the houndstooth tweed hat with the little feathers in the brim, and a pasted-on grin.

“Have you made up your mind what you’re going to do yet?” she asked him.

“Not precisely.”

“That offer still holds good, you know.” A weekend bouncer’s job and the use of the vacant flat above the Nugget until he got himself settled.

“I’ll keep it in mind,” said Pender as he tossed the suitcase into the trunk of the Bu-car. But they both knew he didn’t mean it. With the romantic future he’d been constructing in his mind unmasked as a daydream—and a rather immature, escapist daydream at that—Pender was having a hard time remembering why he’d decided to drop out in the first place. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten about the videos—it was the depth of feeling, the utter despair, that he was unable to resurrect.
Hell, maybe a little R & R
was
all I needed,
he decided, slamming the trunk lid closed.

Amy turned the hose off at the nozzle and intercepted him as he opened the driver’s door. She threw her arms around his neck and gave him a hug he wouldn’t soon forget. Nor would he forget
the last glimpse he caught of her in the rearview mirror, waving good-bye in a wet T-shirt and a pair of skintight Daisy Duke shorts.

Dusty dead. No food, scarcely any water. Only a vague idea where I was, and not a clue about where to go. I thought the shit was as deep as it could possibly be. Then the vulture showed up.

I couldn’t yell or scream, in case the counselors were nearby, so I waved my arms, shook a stick, and chunked rocks at it to drive it away. But somehow the damn bird seemed to realize that I didn’t pose any threat to it. So I had to stand there and watch as the vulture began to circle in deepening spirals, each pass bringing him closer to Dusty, spread-eagled and speared like a cocktail weiner in the top of the tree.

I decided there was no point sticking around to watch. I told Dusty I was sorry, turned my back, and walked away. It was early morning. Dew on the leaves, the western slope of the mountains still in blue-green shadow. For some reason I remembered a joke Big Luke used to tell, about what to do in the event you were attacked by a grizzly bear. Get to the center of the nearest large city as quickly as possible, was the punch line.

It sounded like a good idea to me, especially as staying put was not an option. I decided to head west, using the sun to orient myself until I struck the highway. But the same sun I had counted on to lead me out nearly did me in. After an hour or two, the heat was worse than anything I’d ever experienced in Marshall County. Or seemed worse, because at least at home there was water. Pepsi. Mountain Dew. Sprite. Cold beer when I could sneak one out of the trailer.

I did have a few sips of tepid water left in my canteen, but by midday even that was gone, and within a few hours I’d sweated myself dry. Everything was buzzing, my head, my eyeballs, the high blue sky, the heat waves shimmering off the rocks, the bleached white sunlight and the purple-edged shadows, and especially the insects, the gnats, blackflies, horseflies, bluebottles, mosquitoes, and god knows what else.

When I stopped and covered my ears, the buzzing only grew louder. I was on the verge of heatstroke, but I refused to quit. Scratched and scraped, mosquito-bit, sore-shouldered and leg-weary, I pushed myself until my legs started to cramp. The pain was excruciating. I managed to crawl off the trail and under the shade of a shale overhang, my thigh muscles twitching and jumping under the skin.

I massaged my legs until the cramps went away, then set off again. I found I could walk okay on the level, but uphill hurt like a bastard, and downhill the weakness in my thighs made my knees buckle. Which was a problem, because due west, the direction I needed to go, was all downhill, and getting steeper with every step.

What I needed was a decent walking staff. Just off the side of the trail I found a good straight stick, and had just finished stripping off the leaves and side branches when I heard somebody coming. I ducked down behind a bush and held my breath as Brent sauntered around the bend, sweating like a pig in a sauna. He had a blue bandanna tied around his forehead with three white feathers stuck into it, a walkie-talkie in a holster, and a canteen dangling from his belt. His nose was so buried in the map he was reading that he would have walked right by me if I hadn’t stopped him.

“Dude,” I whispered, still crouched behind the bush. I wasn’t sure if he was alone, or how long it might be before somebody else came along.

Brent looked around. “Luke? Dat you?”

“Up here. Dude, am I glad to see you. I ran out of food and water hours ago.”

He didn’t have anything to eat, Brent said, but he unsnapped his canteen and handed it over. I took a healthy slug. Brent asked me where Dusty was. I told him we’d gotten separated. Which was true enough, as far as it went. But I knew if I told Brent what really happened, it was bound to hurt my chances of getting what I wanted out of him, namely his canteen, his map, and a head start.

When I asked him, though, Brent said no way. “This is a major deal, muhfuh,” he said in his wiggah accent. “Dere’s search parties all over da place, dey’re bringin’ in dogs and choppers. If dey find out I hepped you ’scape, Im’a be as fucked as you.”

But I could tell from the way he said it that Brent wasn’t all that eager to turn me in. Finally he agreed to give me the canteen and the map, but only if we made it look like I had somehow surprised and overpowered him.

If it had been up to me, I’d have given him a token tap. It was Brent who insisted I had to hit him at least hard enough to leave a mark in order to make it look good. He was also the one who pointed out that I should probably hit him from behind, because nobody would believe I could take him in a fair fight.

I didn’t know about that. Though Brent was twice my size, he was also fat and slow. But I didn’t want to argue the point. I told him okay, turn your back, then I let him have it with my new walking stick. Maybe a little too hard. He groaned and toppled over sideways in a seated position, like he was one of those G.I. Joe action figures that stays in the same position until you rearrange its limbs.

“Sorry,” I told him. No answer. “You okay?” No answer. I rolled him over onto his back. The bandanna with the feathers had fallen off. One of his eyes was closed, the other was all pupil, and there was blood trickling out his ear. It occurred to me that Brent was going to be really pissed off when he came to. So just to make
sure he wouldn’t turn me in out of spite, I heaved the walkie-talkie halfway down the mountain.

Along with the map and the canteen, I also found a very cool compass and a big stash of trail mix and protein bars in Brent’s day pack. Served the fat bastard right for holding out on me, I thought, wolfing down a Tiger’s Milk bar while I consulted the compass and the map. It didn’t take me long to get my bearings. Gary had thoughtfully taught us how to read topo maps earlier in the week, and Brent’s search grid was clearly marked. As it turned out, I had come a lot closer to disaster than I could have known. Continuing due west would have led me down a deep ravine within a couple hours, and without food or water I might not have had the strength to climb up the other side.

No, west-northwest along the ridge I was on, though no picnic, was a much better route. I used the bandanna to tie Brent’s feathers to the end of my walking staff, slung the canteen around my neck, and with map and compass in hand, off I went.

Hiking at a steady pace, stopping only when I absolutely had to rest my legs, I was off the mountain before sunset. Nightfall found me standing by the side of a dark two-lane road with my thumb out for a ride.

Although he’d been an agent since 1972, Pender had no idea how the Bureau was going to react to his having gone AWOL for six days—four if you didn’t count the weekend. The range of possible responses ran from a slap on the wrist to dismissal, with the classic punitive stint running background employment checks as a likely median.

He knew better than to offer a mea culpa, though. The best
way to handle this sort of trouble was to brazen it out and hope that the prevailing confusion and inefficiency of the Bureaucracy would work in his favor. So instead of returning the Bu-car to the FBI field office in Sacramento, he drove to the Calaveras
County Sheriff’s Department and waltzed confidently into the office where the interagency task force working the Mapes-Nguyen investigation had been housed.

It was empty. Cleaned out—not even a desk or chair left. Pender tracked down one of the detectives he’d been working with and learned that Leonard Nguyen had been captured last Thursday morning after a shoplifting bust/shoot-out up in Canada. With both suspects now accounted for (it was Charles Mapes’s suicide by cyanide, also after a shoplifting arrest, that had triggered the investigation in the first place), and Nguyen currently spilling his guts to the Mounties in hope of avoiding extradition, the task force had been disbanded.

“Nobody told
me,
” said Pender, disingenuously. Not that he wasn’t delighted to learn that Nguyen had been captured—serial killers rarely retired voluntarily. But at the moment, job one for Pender was finessing his career out of the hole he’d dug for it. He checked his watch: 5:00
P.M
. California time meant 8:00
P.M
. back east. An excellent hour for reporting in to the home office without actually having to talk to anybody. He found a pay phone in the lobby, used his phone card to call the Liaison Support Unit.

“This is Pender,” he told the answering machine. “I just finished tying up a few loose ends out here in—”

“Ed? Hold on, let me turn this thing off.” It was the LSU’s formidable Miss Pool, one of a cabal of senior clerks who secretly ran the FBI. “Where on earth are you, Ed? I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours.”

For hours!
Not,
all week,
or even
all day,
but
for hours
: two little words that meant Pender had almost certainly fallen through the cracks and landed on his feet. “Sorry, I guess the battery on that goddamn beeper thing must have run down. I’m still in Calaveras County, home of the world-famous jumping frog. We just finished closing down the task force here. Now all I have to do is return the Bu-car to Sacramento, and with any luck I’ll be on the next flight home.”

“Not exactly,” said Pool.

The good news was, he got to keep the Bu-car again.

By the time the Buzzard-mobile showed up, I’d been standing by the side of that dark country road for what felt like hours. I hadn’t seen but three cars, all of which passed me by like I wasn’t even there. I was tired, hungry, and sick at heart. I missed my bus, my music, my whole life before that one phone call from my dad busted it into a million little pieces. I also couldn’t stop thinking about Dusty, and wondering if maybe I wasn’t some kind of jinx. Seemed like everybody I’d ever loved died on me, starting with my mother.