The Boys from Santa Cruz

2

When Skip regained consciousness the previous night, he’d been lying on his kitchen floor with his hands tied behind his back, a throbbing at the base of his skull, and a rubbery-smelling sack covering his head. An inner voice had tried to convince him that he was having a nightmare, that if only he could wake up, it would all be over, but he wasn’t buying it. Face it, man, he’d told himself: Luke Sweet’s got you now. Same as he got his grandparents, same as he got Judge Bro-

Oh, God! A wave of sheer animal terror had overwhelmed Skip when he pictured the old man’s eyeless corpse. He’d fought against the panic and mastered it to a degree, but had still been trembling when a firm hand gripped his arm just above the elbow and steered him through an open door. Unable to see or smell anything through the rubber sack, he hadn’t realized he was in the garage until he heard the clank and whine of the electric door rising above him.

Sweet’s car must have been parked directly outside the garage, backed up with its rear bumper nearly flush with the garage entrance and the trunk lid raised, Skip had realized, because the door was still rising overhead when a hard shove on the back sent him tumbling blindly into the trunk. Turning as he fell, he’d landed hard and curled up instinctively on his left side, with his knees almost to his chest; the trunk lid had slammed closed only inches above him.

Skip had spent the next several hours being tossed around, half-asphyxiated, in the trunk of the moving car. Eventually, mercifully, he’d passed out, and when he’d come to again, he’d found himself lying on a hard floor somewhere so deep in the boondocks that all he could hear were crickets and a lonesome hooting that even a city boy like Skip was able to identify as an owl.

Stiff-jointed, bruised, and sore, his hips and head aching and his bladder all but bursting, Skip had to beg his captor to let him take a piss. The man-presumably Luke Sweet-had untied Skip’s wrists and ankles but left the rubber sack covering his head, then led him outside to pee against what Skip guessed, from the hollow spattering sound, was probably the side of a wooden building.

Back inside, lying on his left side with his wrists and ankles bound again, Skip had heard the rasp of a disposable cigarette lighter; seconds later, the funky, leafy scent of pot smoke had been so strong he could smell it through the rubber sack. “Listen, Luke,” he’d said, raising his unsupported head, “you’ve got this all wrong. I’m on your side, Luke.”

“My name,” the other man had replied, “is Asmador.”

“Okay, Luke, Asmador, whatever you want to call yourself, all I’m saying is, your grandparents asked me to find you before the cops did, and bring you to Meadows Road so you could get some treatment. Otherwise you’d have gotten thrown into Juvie, or maybe even done hard time if they decided to try you as an adult. I thought I was doing you a favor-I had no way of knowing they were going to keep you there all those years.”

The only response had been the hiss of a deep, long toke, followed by a spate of coughing. Skip’s instinct, or compulsion, had been to talk on despite the absence of feedback, if only to keep the darkness at bay. And the withdrawal symptoms: going from eight Norco tablets a day down to zero without tapering off first was going to be like hitting the brakes at a hundred miles an hour without a seat belt-helloooo, windshield! “I swear, Luke-”

“Asmador,” the other man had hissed again, between tokes.

“Sorry, Asmador. I swear, even if you did blow the place up, your secret’s safe with me. I mean, I saw them beat you up when you first got there, and God knows what they’ve put you through since. In my book, they deserved whatever they got.”

No answer. Skip had tried another approach. “Hey, what do you say you take this bag off my head? Just for a couple minutes-I promise I won’t peek. It’s just that it’s getting kind of hard to breathe under here. Okay, Luke? I mean, Asmador?”

But by then Sweet had been snoring stertorously-he’d either fallen asleep or was feigning it. Skip had sighed, rolled onto his back, and closed his eyes, intending to rest for a few minutes and let his head clear while he worked out his next move.

The next thing he knew, it was morning. Birds were singing, a faint glow of daylight had crept in under the neck of the rubber sack, Skip’s head was pounding, and the old familiar pain in his lower back and hips had turned feral, like a family pet gone rabid. Rolling onto his right side for relief, Skip felt something in his right front pants pocket digging painfully into his right thigh.

Something hard.

Something like a cell phone.