Pender put down the printout, picked up his phone, speed-dialed Thom Davies in Clarksburg, got his British-accented voice mail. “CJIS, Thom Davies. Leave your message at the tone, and please bear in mind: a lack of foresight on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”
“Hey, Thom, it’s Ed Pender. Could you take a look in your magic box, see what you can come up with on one Luke Sweet, Jr.? That’s Luke as in the third book of the New Testament, Sweet as in, please sweetheart, do this for me ASAP. I think we might have a live one.”
2
The old man’s golf game was a zigzag journey of short increments; a diagram of his progress from tee to green would have resembled a map of a honeybee’s pollen dance. His putting was nothing to write home about, either, but he dressed a good game, from his fawn-colored Ben Hogan cap to his tasseled FootJoys, and never cheated, never improved a lie or took a mulligan even when he was playing alone.
Early morning was the old man’s favorite time of day. The tattered wisps of fog scudding across the emerald fairways, the smell of the dew-damp grass, the hoarse barking of the sea lions conspired to awaken even his age-dimmed senses. “It doesn’t get much better than this, does it, Willis?” he said to his favorite caddy, as the two stood alone on the fourth tee, waiting for a doe and her white-spotted, wobbly-legged fawn to cross the misty fairway.
“Lord, no,” said Willis Jones, who’d had to drag himself out of a warm bed while it was still dark out, then ride two buses and a company shuttle. As he knelt to tee up the rich old white man’s ball for him, he spied a shiny green golf cart bucketing along at top speed down the cart path, heading toward them from the fourth green, with the driver leaning out the side, steering with one hand and waving with the other.
“Now what does that fool think he’s doin’?” the caddy muttered when the cart left the path to cut diagonally across the fairway toward them, tracing dark stripes against the grain.
“Stop, stop,” called the old man, waving his arms over his head. “Wait there, I’ll come to you.”
His caddy followed him, leaving the old man’s bag behind but carrying the three-wood he’d been about to hand him.
“Mr. Brobauer?” Dressed in a worn denim jacket and jeans with the cuffs turned up, the man climbing down from the cart was of medium height, round-shouldered, and barrel-chested, with close-cropped hair and an almost simian brow.
“Yes, I’m Judge Brobauer.” Although it had been many years since he’d served as a Superior Court justice, the old man had retained the customary honorific.
“You have to come with me right away. There was an accident.” The words came out flat and underinflected, like an over-rehearsed speech in an elementary school play.
“To whom?” asked the old man, a widower with two grown children and no grandchildren.
“I…don’t know. But you have to come with me right away.”
Willis Jones shook his head firmly. “Somp’ns not right, Judge,” he said, interposing himself between the other two, with his back to the newcomer. “I don’t know this fella from Adam, I never even seen him around here before. So how ’bout you let me give you a lift back to the clubhouse, just to—”
Brobauer heard a flat, anechoic popping sound. Jones crumpled violently to the ground like a hundred-and-sixty-pound marionette with all its strings cut simultaneously. It happened so quickly and bloodlessly that Judge Brobauer half-expected Jones to scramble to his feet, grinning, as if he were performing in a Candid Camera stunt. Instead, the hulking newcomer waved a smoking pistol in the direction of the cart he’d arrived in. “Get in,” he said matter-of-factly.
Brobauer glanced from the man with the gun to the man on the ground, then back to the man with the gun. “We can still work this out,” he said. “I could say your gun went off accidentally. You could plead involuntary manslaughter.”
The gunman shook his head slowly but firmly. “If you don’t get in the cart I’ll have to kill you here.”
“No, wait, listen to—”
“I am going…to count…to three.”
“Please, you have to—”
“One.”
“let me—”
“Two.”
“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 headline in the morning edition of the San Jose Mercury News on April 18. DEATH TOLL COULD REACH 20 was the subhead. Pender had to put on his half-moon reading glasses to make out the text, which had been further reduced in size by the faxing process.
Somewhere between two and three o’clock on the afternoon of the seventeenth, exact time still to be determined, there’d been an explosion in a private mental hospital known as Meadows Road, presumably in the basement boiler room, presumably caused by natural gas. It felt as if the entire building had been lifted off its foundations, reported one survivor. The subsequent fire had greatly complicated efforts to evacuate the confused mental patients, according to the chief of the Bonny Doon Volunteer Fire Department. Not long afterward (exact time again to be determined), the three-story building had suffered a “catastrophic structural failure.”
On the following day, The Mercury News again headlined the story. The number of injured had risen to thirty-seven, seventeen dead bodies had been identified, and a third category had been added: eleven persons “missing or unaccounted for.” At the end of the article, in smaller type (reduced to ant tracks on the fax), the newspaper printed the lists of casualties and m.o.u.f.’s for the first time.
Pender squinted over the small print long enough to realize the names were not in alphabetical order, then put the pages down, took off his half-moon reading glasses, and rubbed his eyes. He could feel a headache coming on—probably those damn drugstore glasses. One of these days, he told himself, he’d have to break down and visit an optometrist, get some real eyeglasses. The only thing holding him back was sheer vanity, not over his looks (that train left the station when he began losing his hair at the age of nineteen) but over his eyesight. Having boasted about his twenty-twenty vision too often to too many colleagues over the years, he knew he’d be eating mucho crow the day he showed up at the office wearing specs.
Back to work, this time bending over the fax with the magnifying glass, skimming down, down…And there it was, toward the bottom of the list of persons missing or unaccounted for: “Sweet, Luke Jr., 25, Santa Cruz.”
But missing ain’t dead, thought Pender. He skimmed past the text of the next day’s article to check out the appended, updated casualty list. Whoops: “Sweet, Luke Jr.” was now one of four names listed as missing, presumed dead.
Presumed—there was that word again. But why the change? Pender asked himself. How had four bodies gone from being unaccounted for to being presumed dead after only two days? It couldn’t have been through DNA identification—at that time, a one-week window was the best-case scenario for industry-standard RFLP testing, and then only if the samples were of good quality and high molecular weight. If they’d had to use the newer PCR technique to amplify the smaller or more damaged samples, the identification would have taken even longer.
So maybe they’d identified all four bodies through dental records, Pender told himself. Or maybe the Santa Cruz authorities had just assumed that no one could have survived an explosion of that magnitude. But Pender’s gut told him that someone had, and in the absence of high-molecular-weight evidence to the contrary, Pender always followed his gut.
6
The sun is low over the ocean when the old man’s surprisingly robust old heart finally ceases to beat. Asmador (he used to have another name, a human name he can no longer remember) presses his ear against Brobauer’s chest to be sure he’s dead, then gathers up his things and hides behind an elephantine live oak at the edge of the clearing to wait for the vultures.
And wait, and wait. The problem is that the corpse is too fresh, the process of putrefaction not advanced enough to attract the attention even of a Cathartes aura, which is able to detect the presence of a single molecule of cadaverine within a ten-mile radius. However, leaving the body to ripen into carrion on this hillside overnight is not an option. Vultures rarely scavenge after dark, and he hasn’t gone to all this trouble just to feed some mangy coyotes.
But the wind begins to shift as the sun sinks lower, swinging around to the south and carrying with it the faint, sickly sweet scent of decay. Asmador’s low forehead furrows, his nostrils twitch, and his unhandsome face takes on an expression of sheer animal cunning. Legs bowed, arms swinging, he snuffles along through the woods, bent double with his nose nearly to the ground, until he’s traced the odor to its source: a dead opossum hidden in a tangled thicket.
Its lips are drawn back in a snarl, revealing worn and yellowed fangs; its pelt writhes with oat-colored maggots. Asmador picks up the reeking carcass by the tail and carries it back to the clearing, lays it atop the dead lawyer’s chest. Retreating behind the live oak again, he sniffs his fingers—there’s something about the smell of carrion that he finds calming.
The sky is on fire to the west, and the sun has flattened itself against the vast, blue-gray horizon like a crimson-yoked egg sizzling on a griddle when the first turkey vulture comes swooping in low over the hillside. Its wings are raised in a shallow, dihedral V, and its body tilts unevenly from one side to the other. It lands clumsily, its powerful black wings beating backward, and takes a compensating hop, looking for all the world like a gymnast trying to stick the landing at the end of a vault.
Instead of rushing in, the vulture circles the funer
eal offering unhurriedly, with a mincing, high-stepping gait, its red head cocked suspiciously to the side. Then the arrival of a second vulture galvanizes the first one into action. Interposing itself between rival and prize, hissing and grunting angrily, it spreads its wings to make itself appear larger as it backs slowly toward its intended supper.
That’s right, thinks Asmador, peering out from behind the tree, his cheek pressed against the rough, elephant-hide bark—you chase dat dirty baldhead out of de town.
7
There were advantages and disadvantages to living in a National Historical Park. Nights were quiet, and the view from the raised back porch of the lockkeeper’s cabin was a knockout—the flat, silvery-smooth ribbon of the C & O Canal at the bottom of the hill, the swampy Potomac winding through the midground, the verdant Virginia countryside on the horizon. On the other hand, Pender’s lease required that all new exterior renovations be period, the period being the 1850s, and if you needed to borrow a cup of sugar, forget it: there were no neighbors within a mile of Tinsman’s Lock in any direction.
The term cabin was actually a misnomer. Chez Pender was sprawling and ramshackle, jerry-built by the lock’s first keeper on a wooded hillside overlooking the canal. It had six tiny, low-ceilinged bedrooms lining either side of a corridor off the living room; the living room itself featured a peaked roof and grandfathered non-period sliding glass doors leading out to the back porch. Due to the severe slope of the terrain, the front entrance of the house was at ground level, while the porch was raised on stilts.
Only one bedroom had been habitable when Pender first moved in. On a forced leave of absence from the Bureau—which is to say, while he was drying out after his divorce—he had restored the others one at a time, refloored the living room, replaced the plumbing, rewired the house, propped up the sagging porch, and in his remaining spare time had rebuilt the engine of his vintage Barracuda. Amazing what a man can accomplish with no job and no booze.
The Boys from Santa Cruz Page 12