Jonathan Nasaw - The Boys from Santa Cruz

They arrived just in time to see the sheriff’s deputies pulling a tarpaulin off a bulky object in the middle of a clearing, unveiling a charred human body jackknifed over the side of a scorched metal steamer trunk. The upper half of the corpse was inside the trunk, which was filled with sooty, oily-black water. Chunks of flesh had been torn from the lower half, presumably by turkey vultures, two of which lay dead within a few yards of the trunk.

“And me without my spoon,” Pender muttered, as the flashbulbs began to pop.

Once the body had been photographed in situ from every imaginable angle, the deputies struggled in vain to remove it from the trunk. It wasn’t until after they’d drained off the water that they realized the head was firmly encased in eight to ten inches of melted, rehardened plastic.

Yet another surprise was in order for the deputy who’d been assigned to free the body by chipping away at the plastic. Up close and personal, he announced, the corpse appeared to be female from the waist up and male from the waist down.

One more important discovery was made by one of the weaker-stomached deputies. After getting a good look at the star attraction, the man had staggered off into the bushes to launch his lunch and returned with a videocassette he’d found lying in the dirt. He handed it to Izzo, who showed it to Pender, who winced when he saw the label: Principals of Accounting, Tape 4.

“C’mon, there’s bound to be a VCR in the trailer,” Izzo said eagerly.

“Let me know how it comes out,” said Pender.

Izzo thought Pender was kidding at first. He started toward the trailer, then turned back-Pender hadn’t moved. “What’s the problem, Ed?”

Pender shrugged. “I’ve been chasing serial killers going on ten years now. I’ve seen shit that’d turn Jack the Ripper’s stomach. Half-eaten corpses, skulls stacked like cannonballs on the courthouse lawn, you name it. But up until three weeks ago, I’ve never actually had to watch the victims suffering before they died. Now it seems like everybody and their brother’s got a camcorder. Mapes and Nguyen, Sweet and Swantzer, it’s like a fad or something, and lemme tell you, podner: it’s getting real old, real fast.”

Izzo, who’d taken a sudden interest in studying the dirt at his feet, waited a few seconds, then asked Pender if he’d finished venting.

Pender nodded-a short, sharp nod, like a bull rider signaling for the chute to be opened.

“Good,” said Izzo. “Because I’m at least as sick of this shit as you are, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to watch this thing by myself.”

Once I’d decided where I was going, my next problem was figuring out how to get there. After weighing all the options, I decided to take Teddy’s Olds. It seemed like it would be more fun than taking the bus and less risky than hitchhiking with a backpack full of dope. And if I did get pulled over, not having a driver’s license was going to be the least of my problems.

The car was a ’77 Delta 88 with air-conditioning, a tape deck, and a V-8 engine that pressed you back against the bench seat when you floored the accelerator. I had all the weed I could smoke and enough money to buy all the fast food I could eat, so in spite of all the harsh things that had happened to me that day, once I got the hang of driving, I was almost happy.

The closest I came to getting arrested wasn’t while I was driving, it was when I pulled in for gas at an ARCO mini-mart near Davis. By the time I saw the highway patrol car parked outside, I was already committed. I figured driving away without buying anything would have looked even more suspicious, so I pulled up to the pumps, got out of the car, went inside, gave the guy a twenty against a fill-up, went back out to the pump, pushed the button for the 87 octane, lifted the nozzle casually, turned around, and discovered there was no place to put it-the gas tank was not on that side of the car.

I was sure the cop was checking me out. The scorched Mohawk alone would have caught his attention. Not to mention my WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LOOKING AT? T-shirt. Be cool, I ordered myself. Gas tank must be around the other side. Fortunately, the hose reached. Unfortunately, the tank wasn’t on that side, either. I nearly pissed my pants. Where’s the fucking gas cap? Is the cop getting suspicious? Don’t look at him, don’t look at him. But if he sees I don’t know how to fill up the car, he’s going to think I stole it. To cover myself, I knelt down and pretended to check the right rear tire. Think, dude, think! It’s got to be someplace!

So now I was walking around the stupid car, tugging the hose as far as it would stretch, pretending to check all the tires and the lights and shit. The cop’s eyes were boring holes in me, and I was trying to act casual, but I was sweating bullets and my mind was racing a million miles a second by the time I noticed that the rear license plate was mounted on a spring. Suddenly it all came back to me. In the Olds, the rear license plate flipped down and the gas cap was hidden behind it. I must have seen Teddy do it a dozen times. End of crisis.

The rest of the ride was a piece of cake. It was dark by the time I reached my old hometown of Santa Cruz, where the palm trees meet the pines. I have to admit I got a little lump in my throat when the candy-colored lights of the Boardwalk came into view. We’d had some good times in this town, me and my mom. I used to have a season pass for the rides. Once I rode the Giant Dipper sixty-seven times in a row. I even had a little gang of friends. We were eleven, we had bicycles and boogie boards, and we owned that town from the university heights to the beachfront flats.

Then my mother died and I went to live with my grandparents, Fred and Evelyn Harris. That lasted about six months, until my grandfather slapped me for calling my grandmother a bitch (which I didn’t, I only said she was acting like a bitch, which she was). Anyway, I punched him in his droopy nuts, and they sent me to live with my father.

But now my father was dead, too. I knew that for sure by this time: I’d heard it on the car radio. They said he’d shot himself to avoid being taken into custody, but they never said why he was being taken into custody in the first place.

I didn’t know if Fred and Evelyn had also heard the news. They probably had, I thought, but since they hated my father more than they hated me, I hoped that would work in my favor. If they were willing to let bygones be bygones, I figured, so was I.

“Stop it there,” said Izzo. He and Pender were sitting side by side on the narrow, scratchy sofa bed in the living room of the trailer, watching Principals of Accounting, Tape 4 with the lights dimmed and the blinds drawn.

Pender hit the Pause button. The background rattle and hum of the air-conditioning swelled to fill the silence. “What?”

“You missed it. Run it back-there was a reflection in the window over the bed.”

Pender reversed the tape, then ran it forward in slow motion, freezing the image when a figure wearing a backward-facing baseball cap and a San Francisco 49ers jersey appeared briefly in the dark glass of the horizontal window over the bed, peering into the viewfinder of the camcorder balanced on his shoulder. They couldn’t quite make out the face behind the viewfinder. All they knew for sure was that it couldn’t have been Luke Sweet or Theodora Swantzer, Sweet’s transgendered, ex-con partner, because those two were both clearly visible on the bed. Butt-naked save for their Lone Ranger masks and Swantzer’s genital-concealing panties, they were taking turns smacking around a skinny, teenage runaway who looked as if she were just beginning to realize how much trouble she was in.