The Boys from Santa Cruz

chin and all. He had, he’d been sure to let Pender know, done his tac squad training at Quantico. “In which case, every minute we delay increases his chances of getting away.”

“Whereas going in blind increases our chances of sustaining casualties,” Lisle said wearily-obviously, they’d been over this ground before. “What do you think, Agent Pender?”

“I think we need to move as quickly as possible. If Sweet hasn’t killed Epstein already, it’s only because he’s still torturing him. And since we’re only going up against one man, I can’t see how deploying sooner rather than later is going to put your people in any additional jeopardy.”

After mulling it over, or giving the appearance of having mulled it over, Lisle nodded decisively. “Okay, let’s do it.”

In the muster room, the tac squad was buddying up, each team member double-checking his or her partner’s weapons, armor, and communication gear, and being double-checked in return. The tense mood, the nervous banter, and the clatter of equipment reminded Pender of his old high school football team suiting up before a game. All that was missing was the click-clack of spikes on the locker room floor.

Pender didn’t stick around for the coach’s pep talk. Instead, operating on the Hopper principle-it’s more effective to ask forgiveness than to ask permission-he slipped out the back door while Sperry was still addressing his squad, and climbed into the back of the shiny black Lenco BEAR, the multiuse, ballistic engineered armored response vehicle that was to ferry the tac squad up into the foothills.

Air-conditioned for stakeouts, armored for assaults, with run-flat tires, bulletproof portholes, shielded gunports, a rotating turret, and a sniper’s platform on the roof, the BEAR had padded benches running the full length of the cabin on either side. Pender hunched his shoulders and tried to make himself inconspicuous as the squad began belting themselves in around him. But somehow the sharp-eyed Lieutenant Sperry, sitting in the swiveling command seat next to the driver, managed to pick the six-four, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound federal agent in the houndstooth-checked hat and tomato-soup-colored sport coat out of a dozen armored, helmeted deputies in paratrooper boots and desert camo. They locked eyes. You need me, Pender vibed him. You know you need me. I’m the only guy you’ve got who knows Sweet and Epstein both, you’d be crazy not to-

Sperry broke eye contact first. “Somebody get that man a vest and a helmet,” he barked.

2

Skip was marched stumbling out of the barn. He could tell he was outside even with the rubber sack over his head.

Dull as his mind had grown from the ordeal and the unrelenting fear, he was still capable of forming coherent thoughts. Schmuck, he told himself, you’re letting him walk you to your death.

For like many American Jews of his generation, Skip Epstein had at one time or another blithely measured himself against the victims of the Holocaust, and had convinced himself, however naively, that if it ever happened here, he wouldn’t allow himself to be led like a lamb to the slaughter the way they had. No way they take me without a fight, he’d always promised himself-and yet here he was, letting himself be marched along by a single psychopath with a gun.

When the path, if it was a path, turned uphill, Skip found the ankle-high grass tough going. At times only his captor’s firm grasp on his bound wrists kept him upright. Both hips were screaming as he stumbled along, and beneath the stifling hood the sweat pouring into his eyes stung like liniment. Do something, Skip told himself. For God’s sake, do-

“Down you go,” said the other man, swiping Skip’s legs out from under him. Unable to break his fall, he landed hard on his side, on his elbow, knocking the air out of his lungs.

When you can’t breathe, everything else is irrelevant. It wasn’t until his diaphragm had begun functioning again and he’d managed a few exploratory sips of air that Skip became aware of the stench creeping in under the hood-it smelled as if he were lying next to an open cesspool filled with roadkill.

Distracted first by the struggle to breathe, then by the terrible odor, Skip was only vaguely conscious of the way his body was being manhandled, rocked and shoved, lifted and dropped. Eventually, though, he managed to piece it all together, and concluded that he was being tied up again-and this time he was not alone. His captor had knocked him down alongside some other poor bastard and was now lashing the two of them together, back to back, with coils of rope.

Once he was securely bound, Skip’s hood was removed. After being blinded by darkness for so long, he was suddenly blinded by the light. He quickly shut his eyes, but not before the hulking, round-shouldered silhouette of his departing captor was imprinted in negative behind his eyelids.

“Hey,” Skip whispered after a few minutes of silence. “Hey, I think he’s gone.”

No response from whomever he was tied to.

“Man, what a stink. You know where it’s coming from?”

No answer.

“Say something, man. Grunt if you can’t talk.”

Nothing.

One last try: “Can you hear me?”

Apparently not. Skip opened his eyes again. The terrain ahead of him was pretty much what he’d expected-a sideways view of a grassy, green-gold hillside that could have been almost anywhere in Northern California. Leaning back, Skip wiggled his shoulders, trying to jostle his new companion awake. “Hey, wake up-maybe we can untie each other.”

Still no response. “C’mon, man,” he said, more urgently. But when he closed his fingers around his fellow captive’s wrists and began rubbing and chafing them to bring him around, the flesh-the dead man’s rotting flesh-had the texture of crackling pig at a luau, and slid loosely over the bone.

At least now you know where that god-awful smell is coming from, Skip told himself, when his diaphragm finally stopped spasming. By then, however, the vultures were already circling overhead, so the realization was far from comforting.

3

The Sierra foothills were greener than they’d been during Pender’s last visit, and the streams ran higher. A few miles out of town, Pender heard “Third Rate Romance” playing quietly on his mental jukebox. A moment later he caught a glimpse, through the inch-thick acrylic of the view port, of a familiar-looking old roadhouse, its doors and windows boarded up and a FOR SALE OR LEASE sign on the lawn.

“Hey, didn’t that used to be the Nugget?” he asked.

“Sure did,” said one of the tac squad deputies. “Me and my wife used to go dancing there almost every weekend.”

“I don’t suppose you’d happen to know what became of the gal that owned it?”

“Amy, you mean? She passed away, oh, two, three years ago. Cancer, I think it was. She fought the good fight, though. Couldn’t have weighed more than seventy-five, eighty pounds, but she kept on dancing right up until the end.”

I bet she did, thought Pender, feeling like somebody’d hit him in the chest with a medicine ball. I just bet she did.

But there was no time to dwell on the past, no time for grief or even tenderness. Gut it out, you big sissy, Pender ordered himself, as the BEAR swung off the county road onto a deeply rutted, unpaved fire trail. You can mourn her later.

For the moment, job one was grabbing a strap and hanging on for dear life as the BEAR lurched up the steep, narrow fire trail in four-wheel drive, tires spinning, branches scraping at its roof and sides. For a while the driver