The Boys from Santa Cruz

the feathers had fallen off. One of his eyes was closed, the other was all pupil, and there was blood trickling out his ear. It occurred to me that Brent was going to be really pissed off when he came to. So just to make sure he wouldn’t turn me in out of spite, I heaved the walkie-talkie halfway down the mountain.

Along with the map and the canteen, I also found a very cool compass and a big stash of trail mix and protein bars in Brent’s day pack. Served the fat bastard right for holding out on me, I thought, wolfing down a Tiger’s Milk bar while I consulted the compass and the map. It didn’t take me long to get my bearings. Gary had thoughtfully taught us how to read topo maps earlier in the week, and Brent’s search grid was clearly marked. As it turned out, I had come a lot closer to disaster than I could have known. Continuing due west would have led me down a deep ravine within a couple hours, and without food or water I might not have had the strength to climb up the other side.

No, west-northwest along the ridge I was on, though no picnic, was a much better route. I used the bandanna to tie Brent’s feathers to the end of my walking staff, slung the canteen around my neck, and with map and compass in hand, off I went.

Hiking at a steady pace, stopping only when I absolutely had to rest my legs, I was off the mountain before sunset. Nightfall found me standing by the side of a dark two-lane road with my thumb out for a ride.

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.

4

By the time the Buzzard-mobile showed up, I’d been standing by the side of that dark country road for what felt like hours. I hadn’t seen but three cars, all of which passed me by like I wasn’t even there. I was tired, hungry, and sick at heart. I missed my bus, my music, my whole life before that one phone call from my dad busted it into a million little pieces. I also couldn’t stop thinking about Dusty, and wondering if maybe I wasn’t some kind of jinx. Seemed like everybody I’d ever loved died on me, starting with my mother.

So what’s the use of all this struggling? I asked myself, and the answer was: ain’t none, dude. I’d just about made up my mind to turn myself in (if I didn’t starve first, that is) when I saw my shadow stretching out ahead of me and realized there were headlights coming up behind me. I turned around and started walking backward with my thumb out as a big old flatbed truck materialized out of the darkness. Its engine was coughing and farting, and its chassis and railed wooden bed were rattling and squeaking like the whole thing was about to shake itself apart, but at least it stopped for me.

The smell hit me as I was climbing in. Even though I knew it was bad manners, I couldn’t help covering my nose and mouth with my cupped hands.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it,” said the driver, with a goony laugh. There weren’t any dashboard lights, just the dim glow of the headlights reflecting off the windshield, but when he lit a cigarette, in the blue-white flare of the match I caught a glimpse of him from the neck up. He had one of those narrow, ax-shaped heads, with close-set eyes, a blade-thin nose, and no chin to speak of. His black hair was pulled straight back by a greasy- looking leather headband that matched his greasy-looking leather jacket.

“Here, this’ll help.” He handed me the lit cigarette, straight from his lips. The yuck factor was so high it was practically off the charts, but I took it anyway, and puffed at it until I had surrounded myself with a cloud of smoke that almost, but not quite, overpowered the stink.

“What is that smell?” I asked him, now that I knew he was aware of it, too. He jerked his thumb behind him, toward the flatbed. I turned and pressed my nose against the slider window in the back of the cab. At first I saw only a dark shape, then another car passed us in the opposite direction, and in the fast-moving sweep of the headlights, I saw a pair of huge, filmy brown eyes staring back at me. I was eyeball to eyeball with a dead horse.

“Christ on a crutch!” I jerked my head away so suddenly I got a crick in my neck.

“Welcome to the Buzzard-mobile,” the driver said with a dim-watted grin. “Buzzard John, at your service.”

“Luke Sweet, at yours.” As I shook his hand, I noticed he was staring at the long white feathers I’d taken from Brent and stuck through the knot of the bandanna for luck.

“You know what kind of feathers those are you got there?” he asked me.

“No sir, I don’t.” I could tell he dug it when I called him sir.

“Them’s eagle feathers. Bald eagle. Possession’s a federal crime, unless you’re a member of a recognized tribe. Like me.”

“Then you take ’em.” I untied the feathers and handed them over. “Last thing I need is a federal beef.”

He chuckled as he reached into his pocket and handed me a neat little clasp knife with a cartoonish-looking buzzard’s head carved into the wooden handle. “And you take this.”

“What for?”

“I can’t accept eagle feathers as a gift. It would put me too deep in your debt, spiritually. A trade is different.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

“Fair enough,” Buzzard John agreed, arranging the feathers into his leather headband. “So where ya headed, Luke Sweet?”