The Boys from Santa Cruz

3

At forty, Pender discovered, he could no longer pull an all-nighter with impunity. His eyelids started closing on him a few hours into the drive back from Santa Cruz on Wednesday morning. He pulled over at a rest stop near Manteca and tilted the driver’s seat of the Bu-car as far back as it would go-when you’re six-four, you can forget about lying down in the backseat of anything smaller than a Greyhound bus. Then he tipped his tweed hat over his eyes and managed to catch an hour or two of fitful z’s.

Pender reached the Marshall County sheriff’s station, a low, adobe-style building attached by a covered walkway to the county jail, around two in the afternoon. He found Izzo packing up to fly back to New York. With Sweet and Swantzer both dead, Izzo told him, the Bureau had decided to pull the plug on this end of the operation.

“Marshall County gets jurisdiction over the snuff tape and the bodies in the tomato patch, so Little Luke’s on his way back from Santa Cruz even as we speak.”

“What about the Swantzer killing?”

“Looks like we were wrong on that one. Autopsy found a twenty-two slug in her head and a twenty-two pistol at the bottom of the trunk.”

“So maybe the kid shot her with the twenty-two?”

Izzo shook his head. “The M.E. says it’s a self-inflicted GSW.”

“But-”

“Let it go, Ed.”

“Let it go? How can you even say that? You saw that video he shot, what they did to that girl.”

“He’s only a kid. They probably forced him to hold the camera.”

“I don’t believe that for a second. I met him, Iz, I looked into his eyes, and lemme tell you, the hair on my arms stood up.”

“I repeat: he’s only a kid, Ed.”

“So were Kemper, Mullin, and Frazier-they were all kids once,” said Pender. Edmund Kemper, Herbert Mullin, and John Linley Frazier were the infamous trio of serial murderers who’d stalked Santa Cruz independently of each other in the early 1970s.

“So now he’s a serial killer? I just finished telling you, he didn’t even kill his step…his step-whatever. But don’t worry,” Izzo added, reluctantly. “It looks like the Marshall County DA agrees with you about the snuff tape. He says absent any evidence of coercion, he’s going to try to get Little Luke tried as an adult.”

Pender grinned. “I guess my work here is done, then, Nell,” he announced, in a strangled Dudley Do-Right voice, then asked Izzo if he could catch a ride to the airport with him.

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.”