The Boys from Santa Cruz

3

Although he’d been an agent since 1972, Pender had no idea how the Bureau was going to react to his having gone AWOL for six days-four if you didn’t count the weekend. The range of possible responses ran from a slap on the wrist to dismissal, with the classic punitive stint running background employment checks as a likely median.

He knew better than to offer a mea culpa, though. The best way to handle this sort of trouble was to brazen it out and hope that the prevailing confusion and inefficiency of the Bureaucracy would work in his favor. So instead of returning the Bu-car to the FBI field office in Sacramento, he drove to the Calaveras County Sheriff’s Department and waltzed confidently into the office where the interagency task force working the Mapes-Nguyen investigation had been housed.

It was empty. Cleaned out-not even a desk or chair left. Pender tracked down one of the detectives he’d been working with and learned that Leonard Nguyen had been captured last Thursday morning after a shoplifting bust/shoot-out up in Canada. With both suspects now accounted for (it was Charles Mapes’s suicide by cyanide, also after a shoplifting arrest, that had triggered the investigation in the first place), and Nguyen currently spilling his guts to the Mounties in hope of avoiding extradition, the task force had been disbanded.

“Nobody told me,” said Pender, disingenuously. Not that he wasn’t delighted to learn that Nguyen had been captured-serial killers rarely retired voluntarily. But at the moment, job one for Pender was finessing his career out of the hole he’d dug for it. He checked his watch: 5:00 P.M. California time meant 8:00P.M. back east. An excellent hour for reporting in to the home office without actually having to talk to anybody. He found a pay phone in the lobby, used his phone card to call the Liaison Support Unit.

“This is Pender,” he told the answering machine. “I just finished tying up a few loose ends out here in-”

“Ed? Hold on, let me turn this thing off.” It was the LSU’s formidable Miss Pool, one of a cabal of senior clerks who secretly ran the FBI. “Where on earth are you, Ed? I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours.”

For hours! Not, all week, or even all day, but for hours: two little words that meant Pender had almost certainly fallen through the cracks and landed on his feet. “Sorry, I guess the battery on that goddamn beeper thing must have run down. I’m still in Calaveras County, home of the world-famous jumping frog. We just finished closing down the task force here. Now all I have to do is return the Bu-car to Sacramento, and with any luck I’ll be on the next flight home.”

“Not exactly,” said Pool.

The good news was, he got to keep the Bu-car again.