Jonathan Nasaw - The Boys from Santa Cruz

The agents exchanged grim smiles. It had been doubly hard on them, watching the victims suffering, knowing that the killers were beyond the reach of earthly justice. It felt as if Sweet and Swantzer were taunting them- look what we did, they seemed to be saying with every thrust and blow, look what we got away with-and you can’t…fucking…touch us!

So the discovery that the unspeakable pair had had an accomplice buoyed the agents’ spirits a little. Izzo jotted down the time on the VCR counter-fourteen minutes into the tape-and made a note to have somebody blow up and tweak the frames in question. Then they settled back to watch the rest of the horror show, which ended shortly after the victim’s death, with Luke Sweet delivering a chilling throwaway line-“You like apples? Well, how do you like them apples?”-as he climbed off the corpse.

The screen went dark. Over the hum of the air-conditioning, they heard the hackle-raising sound of a baying hound-the state police had brought in a cadaver-sniffing dog to search the property. “You look like you could use a drink,” Pender told Izzo, thirstily eyeing the nearly full bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the counter separating the living room from the kitchen area.

“Didn’t anybody tell you FBI agents aren’t supposed to drink alcohol, especially on the job?” Izzo asked him.

“Yeah, I think I heard something like that once,” said Pender as he rinsed out two water glasses. “Ice?”

“Sure.”

Pender was about to open the refrigerator door when one of the photographs affixed to it by magnet caught his eye. It was the former Unsub, standing in front of the trailer with his arm around a teenage boy. The boy was sporting a Mohawk hairdo and an adolescent scowl, and wearing a red 49ers jersey with the number 16 across the front. Pender took it down and turned it over-across the back of the snapshot, someone had written “Big Luke, Little Luke, Father’s Day,” with a felt-tipped pen.

“Oh jeez,” he said, wincing.

“Beg pardon?” called Izzo.

“That ‘accomplice’ we were looking for, the one with the camera? It’s Sweet’s son. Little Luke. Looks like he’s around fourteen, fifteen years old.”

Izzo winced. “Man oh Manischewitz,” he groaned. “Just when you think it can’t get any sicker.”

Not only had it been four years since I’d last been to Santa Cruz, but back then I’d been getting around on a bicycle. I didn’t exactly get lost, but I must have made a wrong turn, because I found myself driving past the Boardwalk.

I pulled over to watch the people hanging out on the steps near the carousel, thinking I might see some of my old friends. I didn’t, but I did see quite a few kids around my age, clusters of them laughing and acting goony, couples making out or strolling with their arms around each other’s waists. Some of the white kids were punked out like me. Part of me despised them, but another part of me could imagine a different world, where if you were alone and there was a group of kids your age and style, you could just hook up with them. Of course, if they’d known I had all that dope and money, it would have been them trying to hook up with me .

It was around ten o’clock when I rang my grandparents’ bell. Fred was already in his bathrobe and pajamas. Tall man, severe, always looked like he’d just finished shaving. I could tell by the look on his face that he knew what had happened.

“It’s him,” he called up the stairs to my grandmother. He didn’t say hello, but he didn’t slam the door in my face, either. A few seconds later Evelyn came bustling down the stairs in her nightgown and threw her arms around me. I was taller than she was, now. It was the first anybody had touched me since Teddy knocked me down this morning. For some reason I burst into tears. I didn’t even know I had any tears in me.

I slept in my old bed in my old room that night. Clean sheets, cool ocean breeze, a long hot shower, salve for my burns, then one of Teddy’s pain pills, and I was in dreamland. My dreams weren’t as gory as you’d have expected, though. I didn’t relive the events of the morning or anything like that. Instead, I dreamed that I’d driven Teddy’s car someplace, only now I couldn’t find it and I couldn’t remember how to get home.

Early evening. Plenty of light, but the afternoon heat had largely dissipated by the time Pender and Izzo made it up to the derelict school bus where the boy in the photograph had been living.

“What a way to raise a kid.” Izzo glanced around at the third-world squalor. Broken windows, bare, stained mattress, dirty clothes, empty Coke cans, potato chip bags, Twinkie wrappers, crumpled tissues. “You have to feel sorry for the little bastard. I wouldn’t be surprised if they forced him to work the camera for them-maybe even molested him.”

“That could explain why he shot Swantzer, first chance he got,” said Pender. The deputies who’d discovered the bus earlier had already found the boy’s thirty-ought-six hunting rifle and a box of cartridges identical to the ones found down by the clearing.

Pender and Izzo picked their way to the back of the bus, where the boy had carpeted the grimy, rust-pocked, ribbed metal floor with a fragment of Oriental rug, and fashioned a crude tent by hanging Indian bedspreads from the ceiling. A glass ashtray was filled with cigarette butts, and there was a well-worn copy of The Catcher in the Rye on the rug, next to a black plastic film canister and a pack of rolling papers. Pender opened the little film can, shook a manicured green bud onto his palm. “Sinsemilla,” he said. “No seeds. Ten times as strong as the old Mexican reefer-or so they say,” he added quickly.

Izzo brushed a cobweb from the shoulder of his jacket and sniffed the air disapprovingly. “C’mon, let’s get out of here before the smell starts to cling-I just had this suit dry-cleaned.”

Pender followed Izzo back up the aisle and down the rubber-matted steps, feeling more than a little creeped out and claustrophobic himself.

“Excuse me, are you done in there?” The deputy who’d lost his lunch and found Tape 4 was waiting outside the bus, along with an eleven-year-old female officer-that’s how old she looked to Pender, anyway. “The sheriff wants us to toss the bus as soon as you’re finished.”

“Toss away,” said Izzo.

“And while you’re searching,” added Pender, “if you turn up anything that might give us a hint as to where the kid’s heading, an address book, something like that, let me know right away.”

Meanwhile, out behind Big Luke’s trailer, the cadaver dog, a lugubrious-looking bloodhound named Beano, had planted himself on his haunches in the middle of the tomato patch and let out a bloodcurdling howl that echoed across the summer-gold hillside. By the time Pender and Izzo arrived, the deputies had pulled up the staked plants, roots and all, and begun to dig in earnest, their spades biting into the sun-baked earth with a meaty-sounding ch-chunk, ch-chunk.

From the pile of discarded plants, Pender selected a dusty, ripe-red, sun-warmed beefsteak tomato the size of a softball and was looking around for a hose or a spigot with which to rinse it off when one of the deputies’ spades struck something hard.

“I think I hit bone,” called the deputy, dropping to one knee and brushing away the loose dirt. “Yup, definitely hit…looks like…yup, it’s a skull, all right. Who’s got the camera, somebody got the camera?”

Pender’s tomato didn’t seem quite so appealing now. He reared back and tossed it as far as he could, heard it land far down the hill with a fat, wet splat.