The Boys from Santa Cruz Read Online Free PDF

he’s out here,” he called up to my grandfather.
    It was the lawyer I didn’t know I had. He looked kind of young even to me, but he wasn’t intimidated by Pender. “Shame on you,” he told him. “You know better than that.”
    Pender looked around as though the lawyer must have been talking to somebody else, then spread his hands apart, palms up, and shrugged. “I’m minding my own business, enjoying a peaceful smoke, next thing I know your client almost lands on top of me.”
    I was just thinking about making a run for it when Pender edged over a couple of steps and put his hand on my shoulder, like he’d read my mind. His hand weighed a ton. “What do you say, son? You lawyering up?” Just in case I’d forgotten, he looked over my shoulder to where I’d stashed my backpack.
    “I don’t mind talking to him,” I told the lawyer. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”
    Famous last words.
    My grandparents were waiting for us inside. Neither of them could look me in the eye, which pretty much told me what I wanted to know. But just to be sure, when the lawyer drew my grandparents over to the side of the room to confer with them, I asked Pender if it was Fred and Evelyn who’d ratted me out. “In a heartbeat, son,” he said with a friendly wink. “In a goddamn heartbeat.”
    Although I’m mostly self-taught, I’m far from stupid. I’m also my father’s son, so I should have known better than to trust a cop. But I was new at this and I was up against an expert.
    In hindsight, I think Pender’s talent wasn’t so much getting you to like him as it was getting you to believe that he liked you. He told me he needed me to help him make some sense out of a few things, starting with the most bizarre crime scene he’d ever stumbled on. The way he said it almost made me feel honored to have been a part of it.
    So I explained about Teddy and the phone call and the trunk and the explosion and how she tried to kill me. When I got to the part about shooting the vultures, the lawyer tried to stop me. I laughed at him. “Turkey vultures aren’t exactly an endangered species,” I told him.
    “Besides, he needs the vultures,” added Pender. He was sitting catty-corner to me, on my left, in Fred’s master-of-the-house armchair. I’m on the sofa and my lawyer’s sitting across from me on the other sofa, to Pender’s left.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked Pender. “What would I need the vultures for?”
    “To explain away the gunshot residue I’m sure we’ll find on you.” He still had that pleasant half smile, but there was a greedy glitter in his close-set, piggy little eyes as he lowered the boom. It reminded me of the expression that used to come over Teddy’s face just before she fired up her first hit of the day. “Come on now, son, you don’t really expect anybody to buy that ridiculous story, do you? For no particular reason, your stepmother decides to kill you. Then for no particular reason she changes her mind and decides to kill
herself.
Only instead of simply blowing her brains out like anybody else would, she decides first she’s going to walk into the middle of a blazing fire, then she’s going to kneel down and stick her head into a burning trunk, and
then
she’s going to blow her brains out.”
    “That’s not what I said. I said she shot herself
first,
then she—”
    “Shut up,” the lawyer said quietly but firmly. I shut up. “Agent Pender, this interview is over.”
    Pender ignored him. He leaned forward and put his huge hand on my knee. It made my skin crawl. “Son, I want to help you, but you have to give me something to work with. I don’t care if you killed Teddy. Teddy was a monster, and believe me, I know, I’ve seen her rap sheet. So tell me you pulled the trigger in self-defense, I’ll buy it. It’s the victims I need to know about, so we can bring their families some peace.”
    “Victims? What victims?”
    “The ones on those videos you and Teddy