The Boys from Santa Cruz (9 page)

So what’s the use of all this struggling?
I asked myself, and the answer was: ain’t none, dude. I’d just about made up my mind to turn myself in (if I didn’t starve first, that is) when I saw my shadow stretching out ahead of me and realized there were headlights coming up behind me. I turned around and started walking backward with my thumb out as a big old flatbed truck materialized out of the darkness. Its engine was coughing and farting, and its chassis and railed wooden bed were rattling and squeaking like the whole thing was about to shake itself apart, but at least it stopped for me.

The smell hit me as I was climbing in. Even though I knew it was bad manners, I couldn’t help covering my nose and mouth with my cupped hands.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it,” said the driver, with a goony laugh. There weren’t any dashboard lights, just the dim glow of the headlights reflecting off the windshield, but when he lit a cigarette, in the blue-white flare of the match I caught a glimpse of him from the neck up. He had one of those narrow, ax-shaped heads, with close-set eyes, a blade-thin nose, and no chin to speak of. His black hair was pulled straight back by a greasy-looking leather headband that matched his greasy-looking leather jacket.

“Here, this’ll help.” He handed me the lit cigarette, straight from his lips. The yuck factor was so high it was practically off the charts, but I took it anyway, and puffed at it until I had surrounded myself with a cloud of smoke that almost, but not quite, overpowered the stink.

“What
is
that smell?” I asked him, now that I knew he was aware of it, too. He jerked his thumb behind him, toward the flatbed. I turned and pressed my nose against the slider window in the back of the cab. At first I saw only a dark shape, then another car passed us in the opposite direction, and in the fast-moving sweep of the headlights, I saw a pair of huge, filmy brown eyes staring back at me. I was eyeball to eyeball with a dead horse.

“Christ on a crutch!” I jerked my head away so suddenly I got a crick in my neck.

“Welcome to the Buzzard-mobile,” the driver said with a dim-watted grin. “Buzzard John, at your service.”

“Luke Sweet, at yours.” As I shook his hand, I noticed he was staring at the long white feathers I’d taken from Brent and stuck through the knot of the bandanna for luck.

“You know what kind of feathers those are you got there?” he asked me.

“No sir, I don’t.” I could tell he dug it when I called him sir.

“Them’s eagle feathers. Bald eagle. Possession’s a federal crime, unless you’re a member of a recognized tribe. Like me.”

“Then you take ’em.” I untied the feathers and handed them over. “Last thing I need is a federal beef.”

He chuckled as he reached into his pocket and handed me a neat little clasp knife with a cartoonish-looking buzzard’s head carved into the wooden handle. “And you take this.”

“What for?”

“I can’t accept eagle feathers as a gift. It would put me too deep in your debt, spiritually. A trade is different.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

“Fair enough,” Buzzard John agreed, arranging the feathers into his leather headband. “So where ya headed, Luke Sweet?”

That
was
the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? By now I’d had plenty of time to think about it. The only person I knew in this part of the country was a guy named Rudy, a Hatchapec Indian pot grower my dad used to do business with. And while I couldn’t be sure of an open-arms welcome from a pot rancher, Rudy had always acted friendly toward me. And one other thing I knew for sure. Welcoming or unwelcoming, there was no way he’d be calling the cops on me. “You know where the Hatchapec reservation is?” I asked him.

“I ought to,” he said. “I am one.”

Buzzard John was right. After a while, I kind of forgot about the smell in the truck. Especially after he fired up this humongous bomber of a joint. It was goofy fun at first, being stoned again after not smoking anything for over a week. We laughed and toked and made up jokey slogans for his business. “You Can’t Beat Our Dead Horses,” and “From Moo to Glue” were my two favorites.

A half hour or so later, the Buzzard-mobile dropped me off at the bottom of a long dirt driveway. “Those folks you’re visiting, it’s not such a good idea to drive up there unless they’re expecting you. This late in the growing season, some folks bobby-trap their driveways. So if I was you, young Luke, I’d stick to walking in the ditches.”

Right around then was when being stoned started to lose its attraction for me. And a few minutes after I started up the hill, it turned into a distinct liability. I was keeping to the gully like Buzzard John said, when I heard a truck coming up behind me. I turned around and was immediately blinded by the glare of a spotlight.

“Hands on your head!” Car doors slammed; footsteps pounded. Two guys jumped out. They slammed me against the side of a truck, then one guy held me while the other patted me down. I was expecting to be handcuffed and read my rights, but instead they lowered a sack over my head and shoved me into the back of their pickup. One of them must have climbed in with me, because when I started to reach for the hood, I felt a gun barrel prodding my chest. “Leave it on,” was all he said.

The truck roared on up the hill. Jouncing around in back, I grabbed the side of the bed and held on for dear life, praying that the guy with the rifle had the safety on. The truck stopped, they hustled me out, took off the hood. I found myself standing at the edge of a cliff with the men flanking me, one at each elbow. The ravine below looked bottomless in the dark.

“Who are you spying for?” asked the guy at my right elbow. I saw he was wearing a straw cowboy hat, but I still hadn’t seen either of their faces.

“Nobody. I swear on my mother’s life, I’m not spying for anybody.”

They leaned me out over the abyss. “I’m going to ask you one more time,” said the man. “So unless you can fly, you’d better give me an answer. Who sent you?”

“Nobody sent me,” I said again, wearily. “My name is Luke Sweet, Jr. I’m looking for a guy named Rudy. I don’t know his last name. He’s a Hatchapec, he’s got kind of a hooked nose, you know, like…” I half-turned, drew a sharp angle in the air with my forefinger. The guy to my left kind of chuckled. The other guy, the one with the hat, yanked me back from the ledge and spun me around.

“Yeah, I thought I recognized you,” he said. It was Rudy, of course, crooked schnoz and all.
Either he’s gonna kill me here and now for making fun of his nose, or everything’s finally gonna be okay,
I thought, sticking out my hand. Rudy ignored it. “Take him down to the house,” he told the other man. “Keep an eye on him until I get there.”

The epicenter of the search-and-rescue operation was the rustic, two-story former hunting lodge that served as the headquarters for the Mountain Project. In front of the lodge, jammed into the partial clearing and scattered among the fir trees, were sheriff’s department and state police cruisers, ambulances, California Department of Forestry fire trucks and jeeps, pickups with light bars, and a variety of three- and four-wheeled off-road vehicles. CB radios and walkie-talkies spat and crackled, search dogs barked, and in the distance helicopter rotors beat the air with a percussive
whop-whop-whop
you could feel in your bones.

Night was just starting to close in by the time Pender arrived in the Bu-car. Searchers, including sheriff’s deputies, park service
rangers, and dozens upon dozens of volunteers, were being shuttled back to the lodge in canvas-covered, olive green National Guard trucks, fed hot meals from the lodge kitchen, then bedded down on cots or in sleeping bags wherever there was room for them.

The epicenter of the epicenter was the vast, two-story-high main room on the ground floor, which was ringed on three sides by the jutting second-floor balcony, rather like an old Elizabethan theater. Huge topographical maps, pale green and white, were spread out contiguously on trestle tables, and grids staked out on them with string and thumbtacks. Pender, wearing a plaid sport coat that made him look like the backseat of a ’57 Chevy, walked up to a man wearing a Civil Aviation Authority baseball cap and a navy blue windbreaker with
SEARCH AND RESCUE
across the back, who seemed to be giving the most orders and receiving the most deference.

“Ed Pender, FBI,” he said, sticking out his hand. “I got here as soon as I could.”

The man looked down at Pender’s hand like he’d never seen one before. “I’ll be with you when I get a second. In the meantime, why don’t you get on the horn to your people, see if you can find out where the hell is that chopper they promised me three hours ago.”

Before Pender could respond, a man in a khaki uniform bustled around from the far side of the map table. “Agent Pender, thanks for coming,” he said, grasping Pender’s outstretched hand and pumping it vigorously while simultaneously steering him aside with a smooth, politic pressure of his left hand on Pender’s elbow. “I’m Sheriff Ajanian. Sorry about the confusion—actually, I’m the one who sent for you.”

Medium height, tailored uniform that couldn’t disguise a hard little volleyball belly. Toothbrush mustache, probably a comb-over under the peaked cap. Nervous, darting eyes.

“What can I do for you, Sheriff?”

“I understand you interviewed young Sweet last week?”

“For half an hour or so, till he lawyered up.” Jonesing for a cigarette, Pender glanced around the room, but nobody else was smoking.

“That half an hour, Agent Pender, makes you the nation’s number one law enforcement expert on Luke Sweet, Jr. Here’s our situation: The Mountain Project is one of these Outward Bound operations. The last session started last Friday night, the seventeenth, with five kids, one of whom was Sweet. Last night around midnight, one of the counselors did a bed check, and Sweet and a fifteen-year-old girl by the name of Dusty Walker came up missing.

“The search kicked off at first light. The other Mountain Project kids joined the search party—one of them, a sixteen-year-old from San Diego named Brent Perry, failed to return to his rendezvous point this afternoon. The search dogs found him lying by the side of the trail a few hours ago with his skull cracked open. They medevaced him over to Eureka General—as far as I know, he still hasn’t recovered consciousness.

“Now, as sheriff of this county, my chief concern of course is the public welfare. So what I’m trying to ascertain here, given the attack on Perry, and Sweet’s history, is whether the boy should be considered a danger to public safety. Trying to get a straight answer out of the shrink over there”—Ajanian nodded toward a dazed-looking post-preppy in the far corner of the room. Wearing a corduroy jacket with elbow patches, a button-down shirt and loosely knotted tie, chinos, and penny loafers, he was getting a pep talk from a younger woman with cropped hair—“is like pulling hens’ teeth. But you’re familiar with the situation down in Marshall County, you’ve talked to the kid, what’s your opinion?”

That clears
that
up,
thought Pender, who’d been wondering why he’d been sent for ever since Pool gave him his marching orders. The county sheriff, he now understood, was less interested in his actual opinion than he was in simply getting Pender to
give
him an
opinion. That way, Ajanian’s ass was covered if things went bad.
The FBI assured us…,
he would say at the press conference.

As chief Bureau liaison dealing with multivictim, multijurisdictional homicides (read: traveling serial killers), Pender had played this game before. “Good question,” he said. “Frankly, I’d like to poke around a little, get a better feel for the situation up here, before I make up my mind one way or the other.”

Just then, Ajanian was interrupted by one of his deputies, who drew him aside and whispered into his ear. They conferred earnestly for a moment, then Ajanian returned to Pender. “A CDF chopper just spotted something that might help you make up your mind. My search-and-rescue boys are going to take a flyover. Care to ride along?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said Pender.

A big old rambling wooden house built out over a river you could spit into from the back porch. Indians coming and going all evening, watching TV, playing cards, teenagers playing Nintendo, kids in pajamas just hanging out past their bedtimes, trying not to be noticed. In the kitchen an old Indian woman was making tortillas in a cast-iron press and cooking rice and beans over a huge black cast-iron stove.

I was sitting at the round, scar-topped kitchen table eating Indian pizza (flatbread crust, bean topping) with a couple of Rudy’s cousins when Rudy returned. Black hair pulled back in a braid, black hooded eyes, right-angled nose, skin the color of black-raspberry fruit rolls. His faded denim jacket and jeans fit him like they’d been tailored. He shooed his cousins away, sat down, tilted his chair back on two legs, tipped his straw cowboy hat down
over his eyebrows, and folded his arms. “Now suppose you tell me why you shouldn’t be lyin’ dead at the bottom of the canyon,” he said.

The thought of making stuff up or holding stuff back never even occurred to me. I gave Rudy the whole story, from the phone call in the trailer to the ride in the Buzzard-mobile. He listened impassively with his chair tipped back and his arms folded. No comments, no questions, nothing in his expression to reveal how he felt or what he was thinking. Every so often, somebody would come into the kitchen and whisper something to him, like in
The Godfather.
He’d hold up his hand for me to stop talking, whisper something back or nod or shake his head, then gesture for me to go on.

When I finished, Rudy told me to wait there, that he’d be right back, and left the kitchen. I knew without being told that my life was in his hands, like he was some old Roman emperor. I also knew I ought to be working on some kind of an escape plan in the event of a thumbs-down, even if it was only making a break for the back door or saying I had to use the bathroom and climbing out the window.

But I stayed put, even with nobody watching, for the simple reason that I had nowhere to escape
to
.