The Boys from Santa Cruz (22 page)

“Come on,” he urged them. “You guys are all pros, you find people every day of your lives. If you’ve got any ideas, now’s the time to speak up.”

A tiny woman wearing a softball jersey raised her hand tentatively, revealing a heavily tattooed forearm.

“Yes, what’s your name, dear?” said Pender.

“Sandy Pollock—and don’t call me dear.”

“Sorry, no disrespect intended. What’ve you got?”

“Do you know if Skip had his cell phone with him when he was taken?”

“I believe so. I know he had it with him yesterday—he called me from it while he was driving home from Salinas, and I didn’t see it anywhere around the apartment.”

“Great. Far out. Tanya, would you get me Skip’s cell number and his service provider so I can get hold of their security people? Then assuming he has his phone turned on, if he makes a call or takes a call, it doesn’t matter how short or long it is, they can still get the GPS coordinates by triangulating from the location of the microwave relay towers.”

“Sandy, Sandy!” Short guy, big head, tragic acne, trifocals. “Give me the number. I’ve got an automatic dialer rigged up back in my cubicle—you know, for radio call-in contests and stuff. I can set it to continuous calling.”

“And let’s hook it up to a tape recorder,” the office manager suggested. Older than the others, sideburned and pudgy, he was the only necktie wearer in the room apart from Pender. “Even if he
can’t
say
anything, they might be able to narrow down the search parameters based on ambient sounds, stuff like birdcalls, traffic noises, railroad crossings. I saw that on
Tales of the FBI,
” he added, with a friendly nod in Pender’s direction.

Twenty minutes later, Pender was still trying to process this new information about cellular call tracking. The implications for law enforcement in general were staggering. But then again, so were the implications for a special agent who had been thinking about calling his boss to report that he was at the San Francisco airport but couldn’t get a flight out until Monday, when he was actually calling from a rent-a-car on the road to Marshall County, because his gut told him that’s where Sweet was holed up with his latest captive—assuming, of course, that he hadn’t already killed him.

It should have been easier to call 911—wasn’t the 9 button at the bottom right and the 1 at the top left? But Skip’s fingertips were so numb and clumsy and the buttons set so flush and close together he could hardly differentiate them from the faceplate, much less from each other.

After several failed attempts, it finally occurred to Skip that he didn’t actually have to call 911. Any number would do. Even better, somewhere toward the top of the faceplate there was a redial button that would reconnect him with the last number he’d called. And as far as he could remember, the last number he’d called was…Pender! Pender of the Eff Bee Fucking Eye.

Of course, finding the redial button with both hands tied behind your back was no walk in the park. He had to switch the phone on, try a button, switch it off, try another. Trial and error, trial and error, story of my life. If at first you don’t succeed—

Suddenly Skip heard the
skreee
of the rusty, off-track sliding door. Quickly he folded up the phone and hid it between his palms. He heard footsteps coming toward him.

“On your feet, Epstein.”

Skip sat up, the cell phone concealed between his bound hands. Luke, or Asmador, or whatever he was calling himself, untied Skip’s ankles. Skip got his feet under him and tried unsuccessfully to stand up; his legs felt like fat water balloons.

“I think I’m going to puke,” he said between clenched teeth, when suddenly the Clash started playing “Rock the Casbah” behind his back—it was, of course, the ring tone of his cell phone.

“What’s that?” The phone was snatched from Skip’s hands. He heard “Sorry, dude, you got the wrong number,” followed by a rending noise, followed by two hollow thuds he took to be the sound of his cell phone being snapped in half and thrown against a wooden wall a few feet away.

Lieutenant J. B. Sperry, in command of the Marshall County Sheriff Department’s tactical response squad, jabbed with his pointer at a tiny red-penciled cross on the topographical map spread out across Sheriff Mike Lisle’s desk.

“
X
marks the spot where Epstein’s cell phone was triangulated,” he explained to the recently arrived Pender. “Access is via either the county road
here
”—jabbing the map with his pointer again—“or this old fire trail coming in from the south”—jab—“which is going to be slower and rougher, but should provide better cover.”

“The problem is, we don’t have any information on the site itself, such as how many buildings are still standing, if any,” said
Sheriff Lisle, who had graying temples and a Batman jaw. “That’s why I want to wait for the satellite photos before we mount an assault.”

“But while we’re waiting, Sweet could be on the move,” argued Sperry, a beefy Joe Montana type, dimpled 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.

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 naïvely, 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.

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 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.”

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.