The Boys from Santa Cruz Read Online Free

cool,
I ordered myself.
Gas tank must be around the other side.
Fortunately, the hose reached. Unfortunately, the tank wasn’t on that side, either. I nearly pissed my pants.
Where’s the fucking gas cap? Is the cop getting suspicious? Don’t look at him, don’t look at him. But if he sees I don’t know how to fill up the car, he’s going to think I stole it.
To cover myself, I knelt down and pretended to check the right rear tire.
Think, dude, think! It’s got to be someplace!
    So now I was walking around the stupid car, tugging the hose as far as it would stretch, pretending to check all the tires and the lights and shit. The cop’s eyes were boring holes in me, and I was trying to act casual, but I was sweating bullets and my mind was racing a million miles a second by the time I noticed that the rear license plate was mounted on a spring. Suddenly it all came back to me. In the Olds, the rear license plate flipped down and the gas cap was hidden behind it. I must have seen Teddy do it a dozen times. End of crisis.
    The rest of the ride was a piece of cake. It was dark by the time I reached my old hometown of Santa Cruz, where the palm trees meet the pines. I have to admit I got a little lump in my throat when the candy-colored lights of the Boardwalk came into view. We’d had some good times in this town, me and my mom. I used to have a season pass for the rides. Once I rode the Giant Dipper sixty-seven times in a row. I even had a little gang of friends. We were eleven, we had bicycles and boogie boards, and we owned that town from the university heights to the beachfront flats.
    Then my mother died and I went to live with my grandparents, Fred and Evelyn Harris. That lasted about six months, until my grandfather slapped me for calling my grandmother a bitch (which I didn’t, I only said she was
acting
like a bitch, which she was). Anyway, I punched him in his droopy nuts, and they sent me to live with my father.
    But now my father was dead, too. I knew that for sure by this time: I’d heard it on the car radio. They said he’d shot himself to avoid being taken into custody, but they never said why he was being taken into custody in the first place.
    I didn’t know if Fred and Evelyn had also heard the news. They probably had, I thought, but since they hated my father more than they hated me, I hoped that would work in my favor. If they were willing to let bygones be bygones, I figured, so was I.
3
    “Stop it there,” said Izzo. He and Pender were sitting side by side on the narrow, scratchy sofa bed in the living room of the trailer, watching
Principals of Accounting, Tape 4
with the lights dimmed and the blinds drawn.
    Pender hit the Pause button. The background rattle and hum of the air-conditioning swelled to fill the silence. “What?”
    “You missed it. Run it back—there was a reflection in the window over the bed.”
    Pender reversed the tape, then ran it forward in slow motion, freezing the image when a figure wearing a backward-facing baseball cap and a San Francisco 49ers jersey appeared briefly in the dark glass of the horizontal window over the bed, peering into the viewfinder of the camcorder balanced on his shoulder. They couldn’t quite make out the face behind the viewfinder. All they knew for sure was that it couldn’t have been Luke Sweet or Theodora Swantzer, Sweet’s transgendered, ex-con partner, because those two were both clearly visible on the bed. Butt-naked save for their Lone Ranger masks and Swantzer’s genital-concealing panties, they were taking turns smacking around a skinny, teenage runaway who looked as if she were just beginning to realize how much trouble she was in.
    The agents exchanged grim smiles. It had been doubly hard on them, watching the victims suffering, knowing that the killers were beyond the reach of earthly justice. It felt as if Sweet and Swantzer were taunting them—
look what we did,
they seemed to be saying with every thrust and blow,
look what