Santa Cruz Noir Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Introduction

  PART I: Murder Capital of the World

  Buck Low

  Tommy Moore

  North Coast

  Whatever Happened to Skinny Jane?

  Ariel Gore

  Pacific Avenue

  Monarchs and Maidens

  Margaret Elysia Garcia

  Capitola

  54028 Love Creek Road

  Jessica Breheny

  Bear Creek Road

  Possessed

  Naomi Hirahara

  Mount Hermon

  PART II: The Lineup

  Wheels of Justice

  Jon Bailiff

  Steamer Lane

  Mischa and the Seal

  Liza Monroy

  Cowell’s

  First Peak

  Peggy Townsend

  Pleasure Point

  Safe Harbor

  Seana Graham

  Seabright

  Miscalculation

  Vinnie Hansen

  Yacht Harbor

  PART III: Good Neighbors

  To Live and Die in Santa Cruz

  Calvin McMillin

  UCSC

  Treasure Island

  Micah Perks

  Grant Park

  Flaming Arrows

  Wallace Baine

  Soquel Hills

  The Big Creep

  Elizabeth McKenzie

  The Circles

  Death and Taxes

  Jill Wolfson

  Mission Street

  PART IV: Killer South

  The Strawberry Tattoo

  Maceo Montoya

  Aptos

  Crab Dinners

  Lou Mathews

  Seacliff

  Pinballs

  Beth Lisick

  Corralitos

  The Shooter

  Lee Quarnstrom

  Watsonville

  It Follows Until It Leads

  Dillon Kaiser

  San Juan Road

  About the Contributors

  Acknowledgments

  Bonus Materials

  Excerpt from USA NOIR edited by Johnny Temple

  Also in Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  This anthology is dedicated to my companion editor,

  Willow Moon Pennell, who was here first.

  Santa Cruz Noir is also dedicated to the memory of

  Logos Books & Records, 1969–2017.

  INTRODUCTION

  Beauty and the Break

  Every town has its noir-ville. It’s easy to find in Santa Cruz.

  We live in what’s called “paradise,” where you can wake up in a pool of blood with the first pink rays of the sunrise peeking out over our mountain range. The dewy mist lifts from the bay. Don’t hate us because we’re beautiful—we were made that way, like Venus rising off the foam with a brick in her hand. We can’t help it if you fall for it every time.

  We live in a place where the screaming never stops. No, not the publicly psychotic. Our crown jewel, the reason a million-plus pleasure-seekers visit every year, is the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, a roller coaster–screamin’, cotton-candy amusement park. Our most famous ride, the Giant Dipper, will plunge you seventy feet down its wooden tracks at fifty-five miles per hour. We hear your cries all the way down the riverfront. Hell yes, you had a good time!

  My companion editor, Willow Pennell, is second-generation Santa Cruz. She reminded me that the 1980s Santa Cruz film Lost Boys is still screened on our Main Beach every summer.

  “How does it hold up now?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Willow is firm. “Every shot, from the Boardwalk to the leather jackets on predatory vampire boys—that was my teen experience. I, too, had a hippie name and sparkly Indian skirt like ‘Star.’ The combination of hippie and punk. The cliques, the Pogonip. And don’t forget: Lost Boys is the only cinema of the pre-1989-earthquake Pacific Garden Mall.”

  Pacific Avenue, our “downtown,” was nearly flattened in a late-twentieth-century earthquake—the one time we really crumbled on the outside.

  Since the 1960s, most people who’ve landed in Santa Cruz arrived because they fell in love, got high, found an under-the-table gig, walked through our cute little doors of consciousness, and couldn’t find the way out. We are historic bootleggers, and we don’t let anyone go too easily. It’s a pleasant place to bottom out.

  Our origins are colonial and grisly, like all the Americas. Father Junipero Serra enslaved and buried the Ohlone Indians who lived here precontact. Mexico was kicked out next, by the Anglo settlers—but that’s always been a bit of a joke. Spanglish is our native tongue.

  We’re haunted by an ancestral race war, but we intermarried the fuck out of each other. Our fertile land, the ag and range bounty, saved us from disaster again and again. In recent years, our equilibrium has been shot through a Silicon Valley cannon, the billionaire-boom over the hill.

  We’ve been on the precipice of class war since the beginning. But perhaps all the good bud and coastal blue has made us soft. Everything stinks and yet . . . surf’s up.

  What makes Santa Cruz different from other California seaside towns? We have serious bragging rights. The Hawaiian princes brought surfing to the mainland, when they first paddled out our San Lorenzo River mouth in 1885. Their aloha is one of the best things that ever happened to us.

  The psychedelic experience may not have been invented here, but it was perfected. We prize our sensual roots. We were once the home of a Wrigley Chewing Gum factory, and the Doublemint smell still permeates the old factory site at the city limits. It’s one of those little reminders—we were first a working-class joint, before the university arrived in 1967 with its dream to become the American Oxford.

  Monarch butterflies migrate here en masse every year, coating the coastal eucalyptus, a mass of orange and black beating wings. Our bay faces south, not west. That is not Hawaii you see on the horizon; it’s the Monterey Peninsula.

  Yes, we were once dubbed the Serial Murder Capital of the World by the press, at our trippy-dippy apex in the 1970s. Willow reminds me: “Serial murderers seemed to like the pretty coeds around here. Despite the chipper holiday persona, our town always felt dangerous.”

  Downtown and the university are well-known to visitors—our North Coast, Westside, and Eastside (divided by the San Lorenzo River) are just around the bend. To the south, Santa Cruz County turns far more rural—but never let it be said, bucolic.

  The first person I dialed when I got the Santa Cruz Noir gig was my favorite editor, Ariel Gore. She spoke with darkest authority. She defined “noir” in a short list I kept in my pocket for a year:

  Often . . . the narrator has her own agenda.

  The darker twist.

  Moral ambiguity.

  More cynicism. More fatalism.

  The femme fatale. Even if she’s mother nature herself.

  Ariel stoked my film noir nostalgia. “Yes,” she wrote me, “it came out of the WWII-era realization that people were not, in fact, basically good, but rather easily overcome by their base impulses—or that they tried to be good, but were swamped by outside forces. They were drawn into bad things, and couldn’t figure how to get out. After all, people betrayed their own neighbors and lovers to the Nazis . . . that’s the worldview we inherited—which is actually quite timely now.”

  This afternoon, one of my merry weekend visitors walked in the back door, complete with a happy sunburn and Foster’s Freeze Softee in hand. “If I lived in a place like this,” she said, “I’d wake up with a smile every day.”

  Oh, we do, thank y
ou for that. There’s no beauty like a merciless beauty—and like every crepuscular predator, she thrives at dawn and dusk. You’re just the innocent we’ve been waiting for, with your big paper cone of sugar-shark cotton, whipped out of pure nothing. We have just the ride for you, the longest tunnel ever. Santa Cruz is everything you ever dreamed, and everything you ever screamed, in one long drop you’ll never forget.

  Susie Bright

  Santa Cruz, CA

  March 2018

  PART I

  Murder Capital of the World

  BUCK LOW

  by Tommy Moore

  North Coast

  The Mexicans say that the devil sleeps under the mouth of the San Lorenzo River. On moonless nights, he rides a black horse up the bank and through the streets of the Flats. If he catches you then he’ll tie you over his saddle and, before the sun rises, take you with him, beneath the river. I’ve spent nights waiting for their devil in the street, but of course I’ve never seen him.

  * * *

  I often end up here, by a fire in the dunes. Hitting a good vein in these hands is tricky. There is just the faint tickle of coke behind the watery brown chiva.

  “Let’s take your car up the coast, leave Santa Cruz for the night, like a little vacation,” I’d told her. My fingers find their way along the scalloped edge of my ear, tracing the bite she left—remembering Katie’s mouth. The waves crash onto the shore below, the whitewash hisses up the sand. We brought blankets, beer, mushrooms, food, a tarp. We built a fire. Tonight, the moon is almost full. Then, it was just a sliver and the stars were bright.

  I met Katie downtown. Jerry Garcia had just died and she didn’t know what to do. The first times, she wouldn’t come alone, she’d bring a girlfriend. They would use my place to shower, smoke some weed, and then wash the dishes, vacuum, take out the trash. It felt like a very honest and pure exchange. “Katie, come by yourself next time,” I told her. She started sleeping on the couch. I liked that, watching her dream, blissed out and far away. Eventually, she got into my bed. I took my time with her.

  On the beach that night, the mushrooms hit her hard. We were both laughing at nothing and she settled down next to me by the fire. I put her on top of me. I liked her like that. I kissed her. She became very still. She froze sometimes. I didn’t mind. I kissed her again, unbuttoned and pulled down her jeans, and then slid her up my chest and onto my face. The warmth between her legs. I had all of it. I felt a shift in her again as I laid her down. When I came, she pushed me off. Her pupils were huge, spooked. I put my arms around her, held her tight. She struggled. I hugged her tighter. “I’ve got to go, let’s go,” she said.

  “Calm down,” I said. “It’s just the mushrooms. Sit down with me by the fire. We’ll smoke some weed.” She struggled. I hugged her tighter, her head on my chest. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Relax,” I whispered as I stroked her little head. Her whimpers turned to panic, then screams.

  I nuzzled her head into my neck and that’s when she bit my ear. I hit her but she just bit down harder, so I hit her again and when she let go, I grabbed her by the hair and pulled her to the ground. She was blubbering, drooling blood. It was my blood and I could feel it warm, running down my neck. I kneeled on her chest and held my hand over her mouth until she was still and the only sound was my beating heart and the raw ocean wind and waves upon the shore.

  Had it really been a year? We could have had so much more time together but she didn’t give me the chance to plan, to curate a final moment for us, to draw it out, nice and slow.

  * * *

  The night fades into a soft purple. The fire has burned out and the ashes are scattering in the wind. There is the faint, sweet must of earthy matter decomposing in a dark channel within the ranging estuary behind the dunes. I love watching the sun rise up from behind the mountains.

  In the bright morning, I follow the tracks I left on the beach in the night, stepping into each faint footprint. A wad of torn flannel is entangled in a matted patch of dry kelp. I pick it up, shake off the sand, stretch it taut, loosening the crusted salt from the fabric. Why did she have to bite my ear?

  Between swaths of mussels, there are tide pools in the pocked surface of the rocky point at the northern limit of the crescent cove. I walk out to the widest pool, near the edge, just above the waves. Surrounded by sea anemones, there are hermit crabs between patches of eel grass. They are trudging along, dragging their shells, leaving little trails across the sandy bottom. I reach in, catch one, and hold it upside down, just beneath the surface of the water, until its alien head pokes out. The little crab lifts its soft body, tries to right itself, and pinches at my finger. The sea anemones seem to be waving at me. Their tentacles quiver in excitement. I drop the crab and the anemone puckers the meal into its gut.

  The sun is hot on my neck. I’ve been crouched over the pool for hours. Feeding crabs to the anemones has become automatic, almost meditative. I ram the last hermit crab deep into an anemone’s distended blossom, overflowing with empty shells. It chokes on the meat and spews forth whole, half-digested crabs. The tide is rising and a wave washes over the pool, soaking my jeans. Another wave crashes over the rocky spit, I hold on and as the ocean recedes, I make a run for the edge, jump to the shore, and walk onto the dry sand.

  The sun feels good. I pull off my wet pants and drape them on a flat rock to dry. I’m very hygienic. With Hep C, HIV, AIDS, one has to keep it clean. I have distilled water in a bottle and a little container of bleach, just in case, but I rarely share needles or spoons. With my jacket over my head to cut the breeze, I cook a bit of tar for now, no coke, and then for a little while, I let the windblown sand collect in my ears, my hair. I wish she was here, buttery and naked under the sun.

  There are people at the far end of the beach walking their dogs. Maybe they’ll see me, the naked guy, and fuck off? I guess not. It’s a long walk and I don’t want to hitch in the dark. I put on my pants and leave. The path to the headland, up through the ravine, is steep and I’m careful not to slip on the loose, chalky scree. Between tilled fields, the path becomes a dirt road. Crows hop around something dead in a fresh row, stabbing at a chocolate clog of blood and fur.

  If I sit here long enough with my thumb out, someone will stop. While I dump the sand from my shoes, a truck rattles by. Boxes of cabbage are on the open bed. As I lope over the highway, the wind scatters upon the harvested fields, rustling the faint smell of sulfur from the hollow brussels sprout stalks. More cars pass, no one stops. I pull down my stocking cap.

  Finally, a pickup pulls over. The driver pushes open the passenger door. I get in. It’s good to always have a knife, especially when you hitchhike. I can feel it in my front pocket when I sit down and I shift forward a bit in the seat so it’s easier to grab. The Mexican behind the wheel looks harmless. His hands and face are dusted in fine, cut grass.

  “Thank you.”

  “De nada.”

  “Katie was a lovely creature but she shouldn’t have bitten my ear.”

  He shrugs.

  I lift up my cap and show him.

  He nods and says something about a kitchen. Out my window, corduroyed farm rows flicker by. The torn strip of flannel has made its way into my palm and is soft on my lips. I catch him glancing at me.

  “You’ve probably seen her picture in the paper, maybe downtown near the bus station.”

  “No sé.”

  “You’re correct. I don’t know. They asked me about her, the police. So many people pass through this town. Transients, on their way north, south. People come, people go, it’s hard to figure where they’ll end up.”

  “Si.”

  “Yes. Not me, though. I’m from here. What about you? Mexico? Where you from?”

  “Watsonville.”

  “The original Santa Cruz Town Charter of 1866 forbade the ownership of property by Jews, Negroes, Mexicans, and subjects of the Ottoman Empire. You have a bunch of kids? Collect welfare? I’m sure you have a bunch of kids. Right?”

&nbs
p; “Si. Watsonville.”

  I pat the cooler between us. “Cerveza?” and I pull out two beers. “Now, it’s just nukes. The city don’t allow nukes. A fucking shame.” I open both cans and hand him a beer.

  He takes a small sip and then puts it between his legs. Five miles per hour under the speed limit. On his own, he would never ever drink a beer on the road. He’s been here awhile. He’s careful. I suck mine down and open another. I want to cut his throat but we’re in town now, on Mission.

  “Drop me here.”

  He pulls over. I get out.

  “You be good, ” I say and then slam the door.

  Walking through downtown, I notice the fresh crop of girls from the university shopping, enjoying their freedom. They all have perfect pussies.

  “Hey, you, Katie’s friend!”

  I turn to see a kid who seems to be somewhere between deadhead and squatter punk. “Can I help you?”

  “She was only seventeen, man.”

  “I haven’t seen her. I talked to the cops already.”

  “Well, talk to me.”

  “Look, kid, I’m sure she’s fine. She took a few things, her backpack, a sleeping bag. She’s probably up north doing the same shit; maybe she got some work trimming weed.”

  “She wouldn’t just split. We spent eight months in my van going to shows. I know her. I know her mom and dad. She always called them to check in.”

  “What can I say? She seemed happy, and then one day I came home and she was gone.” I step off the curb into the street. “Hey, kid, I miss her too. You know where I live?”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “Come by in a bit. She left a few things that the cops didn’t take. You can have them.”

  I can’t help but check the message board as I pass by the bus station. There are some new Missing posters: Katie Rose. Boyfriend probably put them up. That photo of her, a class picture. So cute. So clean. I’ll keep trying but I’ll never find another one like her. If I could have it my way, I’d fuck her every afternoon, kill her at night, and she’d be there, waking up next to me, smiling, in the morning.

  As I walk along the bike path on the levee, the San Lorenzo River is green and still. Two distinguished cholos emerge from the stand of willows along the riprap.