The Boys from Santa Cruz

2

The old man’s golf game was a zigzag journey of short increments; a diagram of his progress from tee to green would have resembled a map of a honeybee’s pollen dance. His putting was nothing to write home about, either, but he dressed a good game, from his fawn-colored Ben Hogan cap to his tasseled FootJoys, and never cheated, never improved a lie or took a mulligan even when he was playing alone.

Early morning was the old man’s favorite time of day. The tattered wisps of fog scudding across the emerald fairways, the smell of the dew-damp grass, the hoarse barking of the sea lions conspired to awaken even his age-dimmed senses. “It doesn’t get much better than this, does it, Willis?” he said to his favorite caddy, as the two stood alone on the fourth tee, waiting for a doe and her white-spotted, wobbly-legged fawn to cross the misty fairway.

“Lord, no,” said Willis Jones, who’d had to drag himself out of a warm bed while it was still dark out, then ride two buses and a company shuttle. As he knelt to tee up the rich old white man’s ball for him, he spied a shiny green golf cart bucketing along at top speed down the cart path, heading toward them from the fourth green, with the driver leaning out the side, steering with one hand and waving with the other.

“Now what does that fool think he’s doin’?” the caddy muttered when the cart left the path to cut diagonally across the fairway toward them, tracing dark stripes against the grain.

“Stop, stop,” called the old man, waving his arms over his head. “Wait there, I’ll come to you.”

His caddy followed him, leaving the old man’s bag behind but carrying the three-wood he’d been about to hand him.

“Mr. Brobauer?” Dressed in a worn denim jacket and jeans with the cuffs turned up, the man climbing down from the cart was of medium height, round-shouldered, and barrel-chested, with close-cropped hair and an almost simian brow.

“Yes, I’m Judge Brobauer.” Although it had been many years since he’d served as a Superior Court justice, the old man had retained the customary honorific.

“You have to come with me right away. There was an accident.” The words came out flat and underinflected, like an over-rehearsed speech in an elementary school play.

“To whom?” asked the old man, a widower with two grown children and no grandchildren.

“I…don’t know. But you have to come with me right away.”

Willis Jones shook his head firmly. “Somp’ns not right, Judge,” he said, interposing himself between the other two, with his back to the newcomer. “I don’t know this fella from Adam, I never even seen him around here before. So how ’bout you let me give you a lift back to the clubhouse, just to-”

Brobauer heard a flat, anechoic popping sound. Jones crumpled violently to the ground like a hundred-and-sixty-pound marionette with all its strings cut simultaneously. It happened so quickly and bloodlessly that Judge Brobauer half-expected Jones to scramble to his feet, grinning, as if he were performing in a Candid Camera stunt. Instead, the hulking newcomer waved a smoking pistol in the direction of the cart he’d arrived in. “Get in,” he said matter-of-factly.

Brobauer glanced from the man with the gun to the man on the ground, then back to the man with the gun. “We can still work this out,” he said. “I could say your gun went off accidentally. You could plead involuntary manslaughter.”

The gunman shook his head slowly but firmly. “If you don’t get in the cart I’ll have to kill you here.”

“No, wait, listen to-”

“I am going…to count…to three.”

“Please, you have to-”

“One.”

“let me-”

“Two.”

“Just listen to-”

“Three.”