The Boys from Santa Cruz

was able to use the vehicle’s bluntly sloping armored nose to plow down the brush and saplings that sprang up in its path, but as they climbed, the saplings turned into full-grown trees.

“End of the line,” called Lieutenant Sperry. “We’ll hike in from here.”

The squad piled out. Pender, who’d exchanged his sport jacket for a too-small Kevlar vest, flipped down the darkened visor of his borrowed, ill-fitting helmet and slipped into line. Again Sperry gave him the ol’ skunk eye; again he permitted him to remain. “Just keep your eye on me and follow my hand signals. This”-palms down-“means get down, this”-finger to lips-“means maintain silence…”

Yeah, I think I could have figured that out, thought Pender.

“And when I do this”-slapped one, then two fingers against his forearm, then with bladed hands perpendicular to the ground, made veering motions to the left or right-“I’m signaling to teams one and two which way to go. Which has nothing to do with you-if we have to split up, I want you to stay behind and cover our rear. If I need you to come up, I’ll do this.” He clicked the tin cricket in his hand twice. “Got all that?”

“Got it.”

“Okay, team. Cell phones off, let’s move out.”

4

It’s been a long, hard day for Asmador. Digging up the decomposing corpse he’d buried last week along with Fred and Evelyn’s rapidly decaying heads, dragging it half a mile to the top of the highest grassy hill to serve as vulture bait, hiking back down to get Epstein, walking the gimp up to where he’d left the corpse, and finally lashing the two of them, the live man and the dead one, together-that was a lot of walking and a lot of work under a broiling sun.

And with no guarantee of success. Asmador hasn’t the slightest idea whether a week-old, disinterred corpse will serve to whet the appetite of a Cathartes aura. And even if the scent does manage to attract the vultures, there is always the possibility that the presence of a live human, no matter how firmly bound, will scare them away. Even if it doesn’t, it’s still anybody’s guess whether, having been attracted initially to the corpse, the birds will move on to the fresh-

Wait, wait-there they are, right on time! Asmador, crouched behind a patch of creosote bushes on the very crest of the hill, some twenty yards above Epstein and the corpse, can feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising. Watching the birds swoop and glide in ever-narrowing circles, he is reminded of that sweet pastoral passage in the Book: Sitting with our backs against the trunk of a red-barked madrone at the edge of a high, grassy meadow dotted with white puffs of clover, we watched a pair of hawks riding the thermals, swooping and gliding so lightly and gracefully they looked like they were made out of paper.

Surely these vultures are no less graceful-maybe even more so, thanks to their greater wingspan. But why aren’t they landing? They circle and circle, but they don’t land. Is it because of all that squirming and screaming Epstein’s doing? The vultures are no more used to their meals moving around or making noise than you are, Asmador reminds himself.

But just then, the larger of the two birds flattens out its orbit and dives. Half-rising from his crouch to get a better view, Asmador spots a sudden glint of sunlight bouncing off something shiny in the wooded hillside directly across the valley. It’s there and gone like a firefly, then there and gone again, a little farther to Asmador’s right. The longer he watches, the more certain he becomes that there are several humans in the woods across the valley, moving from Asmador’s left to his right, in the general direction of the barn.

But who are they? If they’re cops, there’s no time to waste. He has to get to the barn first. That’s where the car’s parked-he can’t take a chance on being cut off from it. So the only question that remains is whether or not to kill Epstein first. If he doesn’t, and those are cops over there, there’s a good chance Epstein will wind up being rescued. But if he does kill Epstein, and the interlopers are only kids or hunters, he’ll not only have spared Epstein the greater part of the suffering he had in mind for him, he’ll have disappointed the Infernal Council once again.

To kill or not to kill? For once, the answer is not in the Book, so Asmador digs into his jeans pocket, feels around for loose change, comes up with a quarter. Heads you kill him, tails you don’t, he tells himself, and with a flick of his thumb Asmador sends the coin spinning into the air.

5

Like the Eskimos say, unless you’re the lead dog, the view never changes. Drenched in sweat beneath the bulky Kevlar vest, with more sweat dripping down his face from under the too-small helmet, Pender followed the camouflaged back of the deputy in front of him through a sun-dappled second-growth forest, pickin’ ’em up and layin’ ’em down to a medley of unlikely march-time oldies playing on his internal jukebox: “Ballad of the Green Berets,” “The Battle of New Orleans,” and “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover.”

The column halted at the edge of a wooded ridge looking out over a wedge-shaped valley that fanned west to east, with a range of grassy hills, greenish gold in the spring, forming the opposite rise. Below and to the squad’s right, on the broad side of the wedge, lay a flat patchwork of abandoned fields, subsumed now by scrub brush and man-high weeds, with only a few discontinuous stretches of three-rail wooden fencing still standing to demarcate the borders.

Below to the left, at the narrow end of the valley, the front end of a weathered gray barn protruded from a steep scree of dirt and rocks. At first it appeared to Pender as if the barn had been constructed half underground, but a closer look through borrowed binoculars spoke instead of a monumental landslide that had buried the rear half of the barn but left the front half miraculously standing.

The lieutenant showed Pender the readout on his handheld GPS device-the first one Pender had ever seen. “The cell phone was picked up in or near that structure,” Sperry whispered, pointing to the barn. “We’re going to circle around the back, then split into two teams to flank the barn. I need you to stay up here and watch our backs- I’ll leave you the glasses along with a walkie-talkie and a cricket. If it looks like we’re heading into any shit, key Talk and click the cricket twice, but do not, repeat not, speak into it for any reason until I give you the go-ahead. Otherwise you might accidentally give our position away. Got all that?”

“Got it.”

“Good.” Sperry turned to the squad. “Okay, let’s move out. I’ll take the point. And maintain mission silence, everybody-we want the element of surprise on our side.”

Although he’d never have admitted it, not even to himself, Pender was more than a little relieved at no longer having to keep up with the younger, fitter tac squadders. After taking a slug of water from a plastic bottle one of them had loaned him, he removed his helmet and sluiced the rest of the water over his steaming dome. Then he dropped to a prone position at the edge of the tree line and began scanning the barn, left to right, top to bottom, with the binoculars.

The sliding front door was wide open, askew on its hinges. No signs of life inside or out-but of course Sweet could be hiding almost anywhere in there. Or he could be lying in wait behind the building, or around the side, or somewhere out there in the weeds, or in the hills directly across the way, Pender realized. Expanding the parameters of his scan accordingly, he began sweeping the binoculars the length and breadth of the valley.

But the only thing moving on this hot, windless spring afternoon was a pair of turkey vultures circling the grassy hill to the north, directly across the valley from Pender’s position. Pender watched them soar, following them through the glasses as they swooped and glided, then resumed his visual sweep of the valley. But the cop part of his brain, the area where law enforcement professionals store information like the mug shots of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted criminals and the license plate numbers of stolen cars, had already begun flashing the red lights and sounding the awooga horn to remind Pender that turkey vultures were an integral part of Luke Sweet’s m.o. lately.

So he turned the glasses back to the vultures, and when one of them suddenly peeled away from the other and swooped downward, Pender followed its flight all the way to the ground. It touched down with a skidding hop