The Boys from Santa Cruz

Unsub reached for the.38 automatic in the waistband of his jeans, Pender for the Smith amp; Wesson Model 10 he was carrying in a behind-the-back kidney holster instead of his trusty calfskin shoulder holster, which would have required him to wear a jacket in the August heat.

Advantage Unsub, who drew first and pulled the trigger while Pender was still fumbling behind his back. Happily for Pender, either the gun misfired, or Unsub had neglected to chamber a round.

By then Pender had succeeded in drawing his gun, but the lobby was too crowded for him to fire. Unsub faked left and darted right, across the lobby, dodging panicked postal patrons, then vaulted over the counter, heading for the loading dock in back. Which was supposed to have been covered by the plainclothes who’d blown the stakeout in the first place, only he, of course, was around front now.

The year was 1985. Pender-forty years old, twenty pounds over fighting weight, and smoking a pack of Marlboros a day-hauled himself ingloriously over the counter and chased Unsub out the back door, across the loading dock, down the concrete ramp, across a dusty alley, and through the back door of a two-story wood-frame antiques store. Izzo charged through the front door of the shop as Pender burst in through the back. A woman who had taken cover behind a glass knickknack case pointed timorously to the staircase leading up to the second floor.

“Any way out from there?” whispered Izzo.

“Only through the window.”

Izzo was wearing a Kevlar vest beneath a single-breasted gray suit tailored to fit it, so he took the point. Through the third of the three doors on the second floor, the agents could hear Unsub talking to someone on the telephone. The smaller Izzo gave Pender a little would-you-care-to-do-the-honors? wave in the direction of the door. Pender pointed down to his sandals. Izzo shrugged, splintered the door latch with his Florsheim. The door sprang open. Over Izzo’s shoulder, Pender saw Unsub sitting behind an empty desk with the phone in one hand and the.38 in the other.

Izzo yelled, “Drop it! Put your hands up!”

Unsub said, “I love you, too, baby,” into the phone, then put the muzzle of the.38 in his mouth, sucked in his cheeks, and pulled the trigger. This time the gun did not misfire.

3

I believed Teddy when she said she’d kill me. Up until then we’d maintained an uneasy truce, but with my father out of the picture, all bets were off. I didn’t leave the property, though. I had no place to go. Instead I snuck around behind the trailer and peeked in through the louvers in time to see Teddy, now wearing a T-shirt and shorts, backing out of the bedroom dragging Big Luke’s old green steamer trunk.

When she kept going, dragging the trunk out the door and down the cinder-block doorstep (which Big Luke had been meaning to replace with something permanent at least as long as I’d been there), I assumed she was going to haul ass like he’d told me to do. I peeked around the side of the trailer to see if she was gone yet, but she’d only dragged the trunk as far as the fire pit, a scooped-out circle of blackened ground with split logs around it to sit on. We hadn’t used it all summer, because the surrounding woods were too dry for open fires.

Teddy knelt and opened the trunk with a key, then trotted into the shed at the end of the driveway and came out with a big red gasoline can. She didn’t bother with the spout, just unscrewed the top and sloshed gas all over the trunk. She patted through her pockets looking for a lighter, but for once in her life (Big Luke and Teddy both smoked like chimneys) she didn’t have one.

She started back for the trailer. I ducked out of sight again, but as soon as she went inside, I raced straight across the clearing for the fire pit. I had to know what was in that trunk, I just had to. And to be honest, what I thought I was going to find was dope. (Big Luke and Teddy were small-time dealers, weed and meth, mostly.) Instead the whole trunk was stuffed full of videocassettes. What the fuck? I reached down, picked up one that the gasoline had somehow missed, and was turning it around to read the label when I heard a popping sound. Simultaneously, the dirt kicked up a couple feet to my left. I looked up, saw Teddy standing in the doorway of the trailer holding her dainty little pearl-handled.22 pistol. She fired again, from the hip. The trunk took a little hop, then there was a whomp and a whoosh, and the next thing I knew I was flying backward through the air.

I landed about ten feet away, barefoot: the explosion had blown me right out of my sandals. Through the flames and the oily black smoke and the rippling heat waves, I saw Teddy walking slowly across the yard toward me, aiming the gun two-handed. Every couple of steps the gun jerked, but I must have been deaf from the explosion because I didn’t hear any shots. It was like I was watching a movie, only somebody had turned off the sound.

But my nose still worked. I smelled the stench of gasoline and melting plastic and something even worse, that took me a second to identify. It was burning hair: I realized suddenly that my Mohawk was smoking. And Teddy was still coming. So now I was scrambling to my feet and slapping at my hair, while all around me bullets I couldn’t hear were smacking into the dirt, kicking up silent puffs of dust.

Then a miracle happened. When she reached the burning trunk, Teddy stopped, raised the gun, put the barrel in her mouth, looked me right in the eye, smoke billowing around her, and pulled the trigger.

Another miracle: I could hear again. Not the shot, but the soft crackling of the flames and the bubbling of the melting plastic, and finally, after what seemed like an impossibly long time, a two-part thud as Teddy dropped to her knees, then pitched face forward into the trunk.

It was over then, except for one last spooky sound, a high-pitched, drawn-out eeeeeeeeeeee, like steam whistling through a teakettle. I don’t know what it was exactly, whether it was Teddy screaming, which would have meant she was still alive somehow, or just something that happens when a body burns in that position, superheated air being forced through the vocal cords or something like that. But even after all these years, sometimes at night, when it’s very quiet, I still hear it: eeeeeeeeeeee…

4

Before 1985, the snuff film was something of an urban legend. Everybody knew somebody who knew somebody whose cousin claimed to have seen a sex video that included an actual murder, but nobody claimed to have seen one personally until the FBI’s Organized Crime division raided a warehouse in Paramus, New Jersey, in June of that year, and found a carton of identical video-cassettes labeled Principals of Accounting, Tape 3.

Even then, the videos might have gone unnoticed if Special Agent William C. Izzo hadn’t been the spelling bee champion of P.S. 139 in Queens in his youth. He not only knew the difference between principals and principles, he still remembered the mnemonic: the princiPAL is the student’s PAL.

At first viewing, Izzo thought he’d uncovered some run-of-the-mill amateur porn: roly-poly, middle-aged woman having sex with a buff, dark-haired white guy wearing a white Lone Ranger mask. But in the last fifteen minutes of the half-hour video, the victim was throttled unconscious, then revived, throttled, revived, and ultimately strangled to death.

Watching it even once wasn’t easy-poor Izzo had to view it repeatedly, first with his ASAC (Assistant Special Agent In Charge), then with the SAC, then with the AD (Assistant Director). And after the spin-off investigation had been green-lighted with Izzo as CA (Case Agent), he watched it over and over, frame by frame, with a technician, searching for clues to the identity and/or location of the videographers.

The big break in the investigation, however, was provided not by Izzo, but by a rookie agent sifting through the warehouse garbage on a barge moored off Perth Amboy. In early August, the rook discovered a stained and crumpled bill of lading for a carton of educational videocassettes shipped from a post office box in Marshall City, California.

When efforts to identify the box’s leaseholder failed, Izzo proposed a potentially man-hour-eating stakeout.