Jonathan Nasaw - The Boys from Santa Cruz

Izzo gave him a pitying look. “You want the good news first, or the bad news?”

“I always like to get the bad news out of the way.”

“Your presence is requested back in Calaveras County. Somebody dug up another cache of videotapes buried out at Mapes and Nguyen’s place, and they want you to take a look at them.”

“What’s the good news?” Pender asked warily.

“You get to keep the Bu-car.”

After dropping Izzo off at the Sacramento airport, an exhausted Pender returned to the motel outside Marshall City where he’d been living for a week, fell asleep with his clothes on, and awoke a few hours later, still groggy, with his mind replaying the real-life horror videos he’d seen that summer.

Gallows humor helped a little. Thanks to Izzo, Pender’s “And me without my spoon” remark the previous afternoon would eventually become part of Bureau folklore. What helped even more was the battered old pewter flask full of Jim Beam he always carried on road trips. He splashed a few inches of whiskey into a motel water glass from which he had removed the fluted paper colonial milkmaid’s hat placed there for his sanitary protection, and tossed it back-no sipping tonight.

Then he took a long, hot shower, flouting the water conservation signs mounted all over the bathroom, with an explanatory card in the bedroom in case you’d forgotten since you left the bathroom. After patting himself dry, using every towel in the room, Pender donned a pair of beige slacks, a chocolate brown Hawaiian shirt with parrot green palm trees, and just to brighten things up a little, a pair of red socks under his brown Hush Puppies.

Behind the FBI’s official ban on alcohol was a more reasonable de facto position: don’t embarrass the Bureau. Get busted for drunk driving even once and you’d find yourself doing federal employment background checks in Bumfuck, Keokuk, or Cucamonga until you were old and gray-or in Pender’s case, just old. So Pender’s next move, after slipping off his wedding ring, was to call a taxi.

Following a free and frank discussion of local entertainment venues with the cabdriver, Pender wound up in a roadhouse called the Nugget, where a live band was playing Amazing Rhythm Aces covers to a surprisingly large and lively crowd, for a Wednesday night in the boondocks. He found a vacant stool at the bar, ordered a Jim Beam on the rocks, and sang along with the closing song of the set, “Third Rate Romance,” in a pure, sweet tenor voice that sounded like it belonged to someone else, someone who looked more like Vic Damone than Killer Kowalski.

“I see you know all the words,” said the woman on the next stool, in a husky voice steeped in cigarettes and Southern Comfort. Freckled redhead, roughly his age. Snug jeans and a faded denim jacket. Nice figure, as best he could tell without being too obvious about it. And he liked her eyes, he decided, especially the way they crinkled up when she laughed.

“It’s a hobby.”

“Third-rate romances?”

Pender laughed. “Song lyrics. Go ahead, try me-oldies are my specialty.”

“Okay. How about ‘What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?’”

“Jimmy Ruffin, 1966.” He closed his eyes and ran through the first verse and the chorus, stretching out the concluding baaaabeeee while throwing in just a shimmer of tremolo. When he opened his eyes, he saw that she’d closed hers, and was swaying lightly on her stool. Golden Tonsils strikes again, thought Pender-the greatest tribute to his singing, he knew, was that, on a good night, it had been known to cause women to forget his looks. Of course, it also helped if they’d had a few drinks.

He could dance a little, too, for a white guy. But slow dancing was his specialty. Let’s be honest, a gal’s cheek is resting against your chest, she’s not looking at your face. So while the band was on break, he fed a quarter into the jukebox and punched in “Sexual Healing,” then led her out onto the dance floor.

By the time they returned to the bar, Pender had had ample opportunity to check out her figure, and concluded that while the rest of her might have been forty, the ass in those jeans couldn’t have been a day over twenty-five. He’d also learned her name: it was Amy. As in the song by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. Not that he’d had to ask: everybody in the place seemed to know her: the bartender, the band, the waitress, half the dancers. “Hey, Ameeey!” “How’s it going, Amy?” “Freshen that up for you, Amy?”

That and another mystery-why the bartender wouldn’t let him pay for their drinks-were cleared up during the inevitable what-do-you-do-for-a-living? conversation. “I work for the government,” said Pender. “And you?”

She looked surprised. “I thought you knew.”

Oh, fuck, he thought, she’s a pro. Not that that would have changed his mind about leaving with her-but it would have taken a lot of the fun out of it. “What?”

“This is my place, the Nugget-I own it. Me and the bank, that is.”

“I guess that seals the deal.” Pender took her hand in both of his. “Congratulations, Amy: you are now officially the woman of my dreams.”

Not only weren’t there any cookies or milk at lights-out in the segregation unit Wednesday night, it turned out there wasn’t even any lights-out. They dimmed them a little, I dozed a little, and the only way I knew the long night was over was that somebody brought me breakfast. Powdered scrambled eggs, burned toast, gristly mystery-meat sausage patty, box of juice, and finally, too late to matter, that long-promised carton of milk. No coffee: this was kiddie jail, after all. Don’t want to corrupt the youth of Marshall County with caffeine.

At least I didn’t have to wear a jumpsuit. In Marshall Juvie, they give you jeans with an elastic waistband so you can’t hang yourself with your belt, a T-shirt, and a denim shirt stenciled D.O.C. Department Of Corrections. Rubber flip-flops so you can’t hang yourself with your shoelaces.

After breakfast, my new lawyer came to see me. The kid yesterday, I learned, was like a junior junior associate of Wengert amp; Brobauer, the distinguished law firm where my grandfather was a major client. The new guy, though, wasn’t even a member of the firm, but a hotshot defense attorney from Sacramento whom Wengert amp; Brobauer had recommended. Arnold Hobby, Esq. Short guy. Million-dollar suit, slicked-back hair, rimless glasses. He told me I was being accused of helping Big Luke and Teddy videotape themselves raping and killing some girl. What they call a snuff video.

Wow. You could have knocked me over with a toy balloon. I could hardly believe my ears, at least when it came to my dad being involved in something like that. Teddy, yeah: Who knows what weird shit went on inside that twisted brain? And of course there was that trunkful of cassettes she had been in such a hurry to torch. But Big Luke? Sure, he was an ex-con, but he’d done his time for peddling dope. And sure, he’d smack me around from time to time when he was tweaking, but he usually pulled his punches.

As for me being involved, that was ridiculous. Can you imagine a father getting his only son involved in something like that? So I started to tell Hobby the cops had probably made some kind of mistake about my dad, and that they were definitely wrong about me, but he raised his soft pink hand and stopped me. All he wanted to know, he said, looking hard into my eyes, was had I ever owned a red 49ers jersey with the number 16 on it?

“Sure,” I told him, looking him right back in the eye. “But I haven’t seen it in a long time. I think maybe my dad might have loaned it to somebody.”

We were eyeball to eyeball for a couple seconds, then Hobby smiled. “Good lad,” he said. “Now come watch me pull a rabbit out of my ass.”