The Boys from Santa Cruz

“Just listen to-”

“Three.”

3

“Quitting time,” said Pool, standing in the doorway of Pender’s office, holding her purse.

“Already?” Pender glanced at his watch, widened his eyes comically. “Oh well. Like the frog said, time’s fun when you’re having flies.”

“Are you working late?”

Pender nodded. “One thing I’ve learned about the Beltway at rush hour: you can spend it sitting in traffic or you can spend it sitting in your office-either way, you spend it sitting.”

“Good night, then.”

“G’night, Pool.” Pender waited with his great bald head cocked, listening for the civilized little ding of the elevator bell and the whoosh of the elevator doors, then unlocked the bottom left drawer of his desk, took out a shot glass and a bottle of Jim Beam, and poured himself his first drink of the day.

To demonstrate his mastery over the booze (as if holding off your first drink until after 5:00 weren’t proof enough), Pender took only the smallest of sips, savoring it appreciatively and at length before knocking back the rest of the shot. He sighed as the whiskey hit his stomach and began to spread its amber warmth outward.

After his second drink, Pender had mellowed enough to think about telephoning Pam to congratulate her on opening her own agency. Then he remembered how badly their last conversation-it had to have been at least a year ago-had gone, and had just about decided to send her a congratulatory telegram instead, when his desk phone rang.

“Pender here.”

“Ed, it’s Thom Davies.” Pronounced Davis-the database wizard was an expatriate Shropshire lad.

Pender grabbed a pad and pencil. “What’ve you got for me, Tommy boy?”

“The greatest of admiration, along with the following information regarding your alleged live one.”

“Shoot.”

“All righty, then: Mistah Sweet, he dead.”

“Dead,” Pender echoed weakly. He’d been so sure of the scenario he’d constructed in his mind that he’d forgotten it was only a scenario.

“Dead. Deceased. ’E’s a stiff. Bereft of life. Pushing up daisies. Kicked the bucket. Joined the bleedin’ choir invis-”

“I got it, I got it.” Pender cut him off before he could run through the rest of the dead parrot sketch. “This is Luke Sweet Junior we’re talking about?”

“It is indeed. Do you remember that California mental hospital that went up in blazes a couple of weeks ago?”

“Vaguely.”

“That’s probably because Oklahoma City knocked it clean off the front pages two days later. At any rate, according to the San Jose Mercury News, your man was one of the inmates presumed to have died in the fire.”

“Presumed?” Pender pronounced it with the same distaste most people reserve for words like smegma.

“I gather there was some difficulty sorting out the remains.”

“Yeah, well, speaking of remains, I see by today’s stranger homicides list that somebody murdered Sweet’s maternal grandparents last week.”

“So you think the reports of his death may be exaggerated?”

“Considerably. Would you mind faxing over those newspaper articles?”

“Or I could teach you how to run a search on your computer. You know, that white box thingie on your desk, looks a little like a television set?”

“I was wondering what that was,” said Pender.

4

“He lives, he wakes,” says a voice somewhere above and behind Ellis Brobauer. “’Tis Death is dead, not he.”

Brobauer takes stock: he is lying on his back on a grassy, gently sloping hillside, his arms outstretched. Ache in his neck, wrenching pain in his shoulders, fingers numb. Eyelids glued together, crusty with gunk; lips dry and cracked with deep, painful fissures. The North African sun beating down-somehow Rommel must have flanked the column, cut off his unit. Brobauer can’t remember his tank being captured; he wonders how badly he was injured, and how his crew had fared.

“Water,” he croaks. His throat is raw, as though he’s been screaming for hours. When there’s no response, he tries again, in his rudimentary, phrase-book German. “Wasser, bitte.”

Glug-glug-glug. Waves of warm water cascade down, pounding against Brobauer’s upturned face as he spits and sputters and gasps for air, tossing his head from side to side, trying to evade the deluge.

Then it’s over. Brobauer licks his lips, then opens his eyes a slit, squinting against the glaring sky. Suddenly it all comes back to him: the solo morning round, the stranger who shot Willis Jones, the jouncing, stiflingly hot ride in the trunk of the stranger’s BMW. “Who are you? What do you want? If it’s money, I assure you I can- What are you doing? Wait, stop!”

The denim-clad man pauses with the wooden mallet raised. In his other hand he holds a metal tent stake with a sharp, serrated tip poised above and between the third and fourth metacarpals of Ellis Brobauer’s outstretched right hand. His eyes are oddly out of focus, as if he were seeing things that weren’t there, or not seeing things that were. “What?”

His mind momentarily blank, Judge Brobauer blurts out the first thing that pops into his head-anything to keep that mallet from beginning its downward arc. “Why-why are you doing this?”

The other man lowers the mallet and closes his eyes; while he speaks, in an uninflected monotone, his eyeballs shuttle back and forth behind the closed lids, as if he were reading a teleprompter. “I’m only twenty-five years old, but I’ve already been lied to and betrayed by everyone I’ve ever trusted, robbed of my freedom and robbed of my mind, then locked up for life in this shithole they call Meadows Road.”

Brobauer’s abductor opens his eyes again; the unfocused look returns. “Wish me luck, Pocket Pal,” he adds, raising the mallet, and with a series of forceful taps he drives the leading edge of the stake through Ellis’s palm, neatly parting the metacarpals without breaking them, and pinning the back of the old man’s hand against the grassy hillside.

5

Just before six o’clock, the fax machine in Pool’s outer office/command center dinged and began spitting out pages. Pender gathered them up, brought them back to his office, and locked the door behind him. Then he poured himself another shot, put his feet up on the desk, tilted his creaky old behemoth of a chair back, back, back until his head was level with his chocolate brown Hush Puppies, and began reading.

BONNY DOON MENTAL HOSPITAL DESTROYED BY EXPLOSION, FIRE, shouted the large-type, front-page