The Boys from Santa Cruz

that the more threatened the boy felt, the more dangerous he’d become, declaring him a threat to the public would only increase the danger to both himself and the public.

“So what am I supposed to tell them, then?” Ajanian said testily, adjusting his cap as the men and women with the cameras and microphones closed in on them.

“As little as possible,” suggested Pender.

“Thanks for nothing,” Ajanian whispered out of the side of his mouth as the flashbulbs started popping.

“The Bureau is always happy to be of assistance to local law enforcement agencies,” replied Pender.

4

“Hi. You must be Luke.” Dark-haired Indian girl, around my age and height, soft-spoken, pretty cute.

“If I must, I must.” I hadn’t seen Rudy since he’d left the kitchen twenty minutes ago.

“I’m Shawnee. Uncle Rudy says you’re gonna be staying with us awhile, and I should find you a room.”

“Okay by me,” I told her. But in that rambling old house by the river, “finding” a room had a double meaning. Because of the way it had been built and altered and added on to over the years, the place was like a three- dimensional maze, with forked, rambling corridors, secret rooms, and staircases that led up, down, sideways, and in some cases, to nowhere.

So I followed Shawnee up, down, and sideways, to a room on the second-and-a-half floor. It wasn’t much bigger than a closet, with a low, slanting ceiling and barely enough space for a twin bed and a small chest of drawers. Even so, I was a lot better off than I’d have been being lost in the mountains, or dead, both of which had already loomed as strong possibilities that night.

Lying in bed, through the tiny, open window I listened to the running river, which sounded like a hundred people whispering in a foreign language, and heard an owl hooting in the darkness. It must have been around midnight by then. Beat as I was, I thought for sure I’d fall asleep the second my head hit the pillow, but then I realized I had to take a piss.

On the way up, Shawnee had showed me the bathroom I was supposed to use. I pulled on my jeans, opened the door, and climbed down the short, steep staircase, but when I reached the hallway, I couldn’t remember to save my life which way I’d come, from the left or the right.

You probably should have left a trail of bread crumbs, I told myself. Then I eeny- meeny-miny-moed which way to go, and picked wrong. The door I chose opened on a rickety wooden staircase built along the side of the house. The outside of the house. But when you gotta go, you gotta go, and the great outdoors seemed like as good a place as any, so down the steep wooden stairs I went.

The grass was damp under my bare feet. The river smelled fresh and new, and the night sky was amazing, with the stars scattered like diamonds across black velvet. I took a mighty whiz into the flower bed alongside the house. Just as I had finished and was shaking off, I heard a car or truck climbing the driveway and saw the beam from its headlights sweeping toward me across the lawn.

I moved a few feet up from where I had pissed, flattened myself against the side of the house, and held my breath. The light kept coming and coming, stopping just short of my toes. It was so bright I could see the individual blades of grass casting shadows. Then it went out. Car doors slammed. I heard men’s voices. “Take him into the barn,” said one of them. I was pretty sure it was Rudy.

From where I stood, I was staring straight at the barn in question, only fifteen or twenty yards across the lawn. I started edging my way around to the back of the house. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a cluster of dark figures crossing the lawn, and quickly crouched behind the nearest bush.

A light went on in the barn. Rudy was standing under a swinging lamp hanging from the underside of the loft. The cluster of figures on the lawn resolved itself into two men half-dragging a third man by the arms. They hauled him into the barn and slung him onto the floor, and in the instant before Rudy slid the barn doors closed, I recognized the fallen man by the white feathers in his headband. It was Buzzard John.

I crossed the lawn quietly on my bare feet and peeked through the slit between the two sliding doors. “My…fucking…house,” Rudy was saying, accenting each word as he stood over Buzzard John, whose headband had slipped down over one bleeding eyebrow. The other eye was all puffy and purple, and his thin blade of a nose was mashed sideways. “You bring a stranger to my…fucking… house!”

“It was a kid,” Buzzard John said through swollen lips. “He didn’t have nowhere else to go.”

“Then you take him to your house, you call me on the telephone. But you don’t bring a stranger to my…fucking…house!”

I swear to god, part of me wanted to bust in and rescue Buzzard John. After all, where would I have been if he hadn’t stopped for me, or brought me here? But Rudy definitely had a point. My dad would have agreed with him. Big Luke had an under-the-counter business, too, and I wasn’t even allowed to bring any friends home with me (not that there was anybody especially clamoring for the honor), much less strangers.

Anyway, what could I have said that would have made a difference? It wasn’t like Rudy owed me any favors. No, all I was likely to accomplish by sticking my two cents in was to get myself beat up and kicked out. They were probably almost finished with him anyway, I told myself as I turned away from the barn and headed back across the lawn to the house.

5

Pender ducked out of Sheriff Ajanian’s press conference and caught a ride back to the lodge with a freelance photographer. The search-and-rescue effort had been suspended for the night, the lights were dimmed, and the sound of snoring emanated from the cots set up around the periphery of the main room.

Pender’s intention had been to look for a motel in which to spend the night, but the Bu-car was blocked in by a fire truck. He decided he was too exhausted to drive, anyway, and wandered off in search of a spare cot to crash on. It was hard to believe that he’d gone swimming in the Kern River only that morning; the idyll with Amy already felt like ancient history.

The beds and cots were all taken, but there was an unoccupied sofa in a darkened office on the second floor that looked like it would do in a pinch. Pender took off his shoes and curled up on his side, fully clothed, using the arm of the couch for a pillow. But as soon as he closed his eyes, the dead girl’s ravaged face appeared to him out of the darkness, eyeless and accusatory, and suddenly he was wide awake again.

He swung his feet off the couch and sat up, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, wondering if there was anything he could have done differently last week. Maybe if he’d questioned the boy a little more skillfully that night in Santa Cruz, Little Luke would still be behind bars, and little Dusty would still have her eyes. “I had him,” he said aloud. “I had the little bastard in my goddamn hands and I let him get away.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” said a slurred male voice from across the room.

Startled, Pender looked up and saw a man sitting in the dark, with a bottle on the desk in front of him. “Who’s that?”

“Owen Oliver. Doctor Owen Oliver, not that it matters anymore.” The man switched on the gooseneck desk lamp, and Pender recognized the Mountain Project psychologist Sheriff Ajanian had pointed out earlier. Gone were the corduroy jacket and the tie; his shirtsleeves were unbuttoned and turned back loosely, and his hair was a wispy mess.

“Sorry for busting in on you,” said Pender, climbing wearily to his feet. “I was looking for a place to sleep-I didn’t see you there.”

“No, no, stay where you are.” Grandly, his shirtsleeves flapping, Dr. Oliver waved him back down. “Care for a nightcap?”

“I’m not really supposed to…”