Free The Boys from Santa Cruz by Jonathan Nasaw Page B

He was also the one who pointed out that I should probably hit him from behind, because nobody would believe I could take him in a fair fight.
    I didn’t know about that. Though Brent was twice my size, he was also fat and slow. But I didn’t want to argue the point. I told him okay, turn your back, then I let him have it with my new walking stick. Maybe a little too hard. He groaned and toppled over sideways in a seated position, like he was one of those G.I. Joe action figures that stays in the same position until you rearrange its limbs.
    “Sorry,” I told him. No answer. “You okay?” No answer. I rolled him over onto his back. The bandanna with the feathers had fallen off. One of his eyes was closed, the other was all pupil, and there was blood trickling out his ear. It occurred to me that Brent was going to be really pissed off when he came to. So just to makesure he wouldn’t turn me in out of spite, I heaved the walkie-talkie halfway down the mountain.
    Along with the map and the canteen, I also found a very cool compass and a big stash of trail mix and protein bars in Brent’s day pack. Served the fat bastard right for holding out on me, I thought, wolfing down a Tiger’s Milk bar while I consulted the compass and the map. It didn’t take me long to get my bearings. Gary had thoughtfully taught us how to read topo maps earlier in the week, and Brent’s search grid was clearly marked. As it turned out, I had come a lot closer to disaster than I could have known. Continuing due west would have led me down a deep ravine within a couple hours, and without food or water I might not have had the strength to climb up the other side.
    No, west-northwest along the ridge I was on, though no picnic, was a much better route. I used the bandanna to tie Brent’s feathers to the end of my walking staff, slung the canteen around my neck, and with map and compass in hand, off I went.
    Hiking at a steady pace, stopping only when I absolutely had to rest my legs, I was off the mountain before sunset. Nightfall found me standing by the side of a dark two-lane road with my thumb out for a ride.
3
    Although he’d been an agent since 1972, Pender had no idea how the Bureau was going to react to his having gone AWOL for six days—four if you didn’t count the weekend. The range of possible responses ran from a slap on the wrist to dismissal, with the classic punitive stint running background employment checks as a likely median.
    He knew better than to offer a mea culpa, though. The bestway to handle this sort of trouble was to brazen it out and hope that the prevailing confusion and inefficiency of the Bureaucracy would work in his favor. So instead of returning the Bu-car to the FBI field office in Sacramento, he drove to the CalaverasCounty Sheriff’s Department and waltzed confidently into the office where the interagency task force working the Mapes-Nguyen investigation had been housed.
    It was empty. Cleaned out—not even a desk or chair left. Pender tracked down one of the detectives he’d been working with and learned that Leonard Nguyen had been captured last Thursday morning after a shoplifting bust/shoot-out up in Canada. With both suspects now accounted for (it was Charles Mapes’s suicide by cyanide, also after a shoplifting arrest, that had triggered the investigation in the first place), and Nguyen currently spilling his guts to the Mounties in hope of avoiding extradition, the task force had been disbanded.
    “Nobody told
me,
” said Pender, disingenuously. Not that he wasn’t delighted to learn that Nguyen had been captured—serial killers rarely retired voluntarily. But at the moment, job one for Pender was finessing his career out of the hole he’d dug for it. He checked his watch: 5:00 P.M . California time meant 8:00 P.M . back east. An excellent hour for reporting in to the home office without actually having to talk to anybody. He found a pay phone in the lobby, used his phone card to call the