The Boys from Santa Cruz

4

It’s been a long, hard day for Asmador. Digging up the decomposing corpse he’d buried last week along with Fred and Evelyn’s rapidly decaying heads, dragging it half a mile to the top of the highest grassy hill to serve as vulture bait, hiking back down to get Epstein, walking the gimp up to where he’d left the corpse, and finally lashing the two of them, the live man and the dead one, together-that was a lot of walking and a lot of work under a broiling sun.

And with no guarantee of success. Asmador hasn’t the slightest idea whether a week-old, disinterred corpse will serve to whet the appetite of a Cathartes aura. And even if the scent does manage to attract the vultures, there is always the possibility that the presence of a live human, no matter how firmly bound, will scare them away. Even if it doesn’t, it’s still anybody’s guess whether, having been attracted initially to the corpse, the birds will move on to the fresh-

Wait, wait-there they are, right on time! Asmador, crouched behind a patch of creosote bushes on the very crest of the hill, some twenty yards above Epstein and the corpse, can feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising. Watching the birds swoop and glide in ever-narrowing circles, he is reminded of that sweet pastoral passage in the Book: Sitting with our backs against the trunk of a red-barked madrone at the edge of a high, grassy meadow dotted with white puffs of clover, we watched a pair of hawks riding the thermals, swooping and gliding so lightly and gracefully they looked like they were made out of paper.

Surely these vultures are no less graceful-maybe even more so, thanks to their greater wingspan. But why aren’t they landing? They circle and circle, but they don’t land. Is it because of all that squirming and screaming Epstein’s doing? The vultures are no more used to their meals moving around or making noise than you are, Asmador reminds himself.

But just then, the larger of the two birds flattens out its orbit and dives. Half-rising from his crouch to get a better view, Asmador spots a sudden glint of sunlight bouncing off something shiny in the wooded hillside directly across the valley. It’s there and gone like a firefly, then there and gone again, a little farther to Asmador’s right. The longer he watches, the more certain he becomes that there are several humans in the woods across the valley, moving from Asmador’s left to his right, in the general direction of the barn.

But who are they? If they’re cops, there’s no time to waste. He has to get to the barn first. That’s where the car’s parked-he can’t take a chance on being cut off from it. So the only question that remains is whether or not to kill Epstein first. If he doesn’t, and those are cops over there, there’s a good chance Epstein will wind up being rescued. But if he does kill Epstein, and the interlopers are only kids or hunters, he’ll not only have spared Epstein the greater part of the suffering he had in mind for him, he’ll have disappointed the Infernal Council once again.

To kill or not to kill? For once, the answer is not in the Book, so Asmador digs into his jeans pocket, feels around for loose change, comes up with a quarter. Heads you kill him, tails you don’t, he tells himself, and with a flick of his thumb Asmador sends the coin spinning into the air.