The Boys from Santa Cruz

CHAPTER THREE
1

It was still dark out when old Fred woke me up. “Get dressed, there’s somebody downstairs who wants to talk with you.”

I was pretty groggy. It took me a few seconds to remember why I was in my old room at my grandparents’ house. Then everything snapped into place. Big Luke and Teddy were dead, and more than likely, the somebody downstairs who wanted to talk with me was wearing a badge and carrying a gun.

Climbing out the window was a tighter squeeze than it had been when I was eleven, but the drop to the lawn was easier now that I was taller. I lowered myself from the redwood gutter by my fingertips, dropped the last few feet, landed softly on my toes, and toppled over backward from the weight of my pack.

“Give you a hand there, son?” It was a huge fat guy wearing a loud sport coat and one of those stupid little checked hats with feathers in the brim. He had a cigarette in his mouth. When he reached down to help me up, his coat fell open and I saw the gun in his shoulder holster. I had the feeling he wanted me to see it, so I wouldn’t try to run. I took his hand, which was the size of a first baseman’s mitt, and he hauled me onto my feet easier than I could have lifted my backpack alone. “I’m guessing you’re Luke.”

“Who are you?” Through the open bedroom window, I could hear my grandfather pounding on the door and calling for me to hurry up.

“Pender. FBI. I was supposed to wait out here while you talked to your lawyer. Thought I might as well have a cigarette. You smoke?”

He shook a Marlboro out of the hard pack and gave me a light, but I only got a couple of puffs before I heard the bedroom door crashing open. Grandpa leaned out the dormer window calling my name. Pender stepped under the eaves with me, out of my grandfather’s line of sight, and held a finger to his lips.

“We don’t have much time,” he whispered. “I’ll make you a deal. You tell your lawyer you’ll be happy to cooperate with the nice FBI man, and then you tell me everything you know about your father and Teddy.”

“What’s the deal part?” I whispered back.

“The deal part is, I don’t search your pack.”

I don’t know if there’s a word for what I experienced at that precise moment in time. Outside my head, everything seemed to stop. Even the smoke from our cigarettes seemed to hang in the air. But inside my head it was like a boatload of rats and the boat was sinking. Thoughts tearing around, scrambling up the walls, looking for a way out. I didn’t even know I had a lawyer. I did know I was carrying a felony weight of weed. But could Pender do that anyway, just search my pack? And what did I know that he wanted to know? Big Luke’s business? Who he bought from and sold to? Yeah, right, like I’m gonna rat out the Indians my father bought his pot from. They’d cut my balls off and serve them to me for an appetizer.

But what choice did I have? I shrugged off the pack and stowed it behind a bush just as a guy in a light-colored suit and glasses came flying around the side of the house, his city slicker shoes skidding on the grass as he rounded the corner. “Did you see-” he started to call to Pender. Then he caught sight of me in the shadows. “It’s okay, he’s out here,” he called up to my grandfather.

It was the lawyer I didn’t know I had. He looked kind of young even to me, but he wasn’t intimidated by Pender. “Shame on you,” he told him. “You know better than that.”

Pender looked around as though the lawyer must have been talking to somebody else, then spread his hands apart, palms up, and shrugged. “I’m minding my own business, enjoying a peaceful smoke, next thing I know your client almost lands on top of me.”

I was just thinking about making a run for it when Pender edged over a couple of steps and put his hand on my shoulder, like he’d read my mind. His hand weighed a ton. “What do you say, son? You lawyering up?” Just in case I’d forgotten, he looked over my shoulder to where I’d stashed my backpack.

“I don’t mind talking to him,” I told the lawyer. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Famous last words.

My grandparents were waiting for us inside. Neither of them could look me in the eye, which pretty much told me what I wanted to know. But just to be sure, when the lawyer drew my grandparents over to the side of the room to confer with them, I asked Pender if it was Fred and Evelyn who’d ratted me out. “In a heartbeat, son,” he said with a friendly wink. “In a goddamn heartbeat.”

Although I’m mostly self-taught, I’m far from stupid. I’m also my father’s son, so I should have known better than to trust a cop. But I was new at this and I was up against an expert.

In hindsight, I think Pender’s talent wasn’t so much getting you to like him as it was getting you to believe that he liked you. He told me he needed me to help him make some sense out of a few things, starting with the most bizarre crime scene he’d ever stumbled on. The way he said it almost made me feel honored to have been a part of it.

So I explained about Teddy and the phone call and the trunk and the explosion and how she tried to kill me. When I got to the part about shooting the vultures, the lawyer tried to stop me. I laughed at him. “Turkey vultures aren’t exactly an endangered species,” I told him.

“Besides, he needs the vultures,” added Pender. He was sitting catty-corner to me, on my left, in Fred’s master-of-the-house armchair. I’m on the sofa and my lawyer’s sitting across from me on the other sofa, to Pender’s left.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked Pender. “What would I need the vultures for?”

“To explain away the gunshot residue I’m sure we’ll find on you.” He still had that pleasant half smile, but there was a greedy glitter in his close-set, piggy little eyes as he lowered the boom. It reminded me of the expression that used to come over Teddy’s face just before she fired up her first hit of the day. “Come on now, son, you don’t really expect anybody to buy that ridiculous story, do you? For no particular reason, your stepmother decides to kill you. Then for no particular reason she changes her mind and decides to kill herself. Only instead of simply blowing her brains out like anybody else would, she decides first she’s going to walk into the middle of a blazing fire, then she’s going to kneel down and stick her head into a burning trunk, and then she’s going to blow her brains out.”

“That’s not what I said. I said she shot herself first, then she-”

“Shut up,” the lawyer said quietly but firmly. I shut up. “Agent Pender, this interview is over.”

Pender ignored him. He leaned forward and put his huge hand on my knee. It made my skin crawl. “Son, I want to help you, but you have to give me something to work with. I don’t care if you killed Teddy. Teddy was a monster, and believe me, I know, I’ve seen her rap sheet. So tell me you pulled the trigger in self-defense, I’ll buy it. It’s the victims I need to know about, so we can bring their families some peace.”

“Victims? What victims?”

“The ones on those videos you and Teddy burned before you shot her.”

“I told you, I didn’t shoot Teddy, she shot herself.” Scared, confused, close to tears, I turned to my lawyer. “You have to listen to me, he’s making this stuff up, I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

He tried to come to my rescue. “This is starting to sound like a fishing expedition, Agent Pender. Do you have any evidence to back up these charges?”

Pender turned to him. “So far, only the tape that survived the fire, and the two female bodies we found in the tomato patch,” he said cheerfully. “But they were still digging when I left.”