Free Fall ec-4

by Robert Crais

  "Yeah."

  He stared at Thurman with empty eyes. He wet his lips and he stared.

  I went to the door, but Lou Poitras didn't go with me. I guess there weren't many escaped felons he'd let walk away.

  I stopped in the door and looked back at him. "Tell me the truth, Lou. When you heard about the charges, did you doubt me?"

  Lou Poitras shook his head. "Nope. Neither did Griggs."

  "Thanks, Lou."

  When I turned away, he said, "Try not to get stopped for a traffic violation. Our orders are shoot to kill."

  Ha ha. That Lou. Some kidder, huh?

  CHAPTER 31

  Thurman said, "How'd it go?" He didn't look at me when he asked.

  "We'll know by one o'clock."

  "I want to call Jennifer."

  "Okay. You hungry?"

  "Not especially."

  "I am. We've got to kill time and not get caught until one. We'll grab something to eat. You can call Jennifer. We'll move around."

  "Fine."

  We drove over the hill into Hollywood. I drove, and Thurman sat in the passenger seat. Neither of us said very much or looked at the other, but there wasn't any tension in the car. There was more an awkwardness.

  We followed Laurel Canyon down out of the hills, then turned east on Hollywood Boulevard. As we drove, Thurman's eyes raked the sidewalks and the side streets and the alleys, just like they had done when he was riding a black-and-white here, just like they had done when he saved the nine-year-old girl from the nut on the bus. He said, "Hollywood was my first duty assignment when I left the academy."

  "Yeah."

  "My first partner was a guy named Diaz. He had twelve years on the job and he used to laugh a lot. He used to say, Jesus Christ, why you wanna do this for a living? A good-looking white guy like you, why don't you get a real job?"

  I looked over at him.

  Thurman laughed at the memory. "I said I wasn't born on Krypton like Clark Kent and I wasn't good enough to be Batman like Bruce Wayne, so this was the next best thing. You get to wear a uniform and drive around in a fast car and put the bad guys behind bars. Diaz got a kick out of that. He started calling me Clark Kent." Thurman fell silent and crossed his arms and stared ahead into Hollywood. Maybe remembering Diaz. Maybe remembering other things. "You think they'll let me stay on the department?"

  "We'll see."

  "Yeah." We rode like that for a while, and then he said, "I know you're not doing it for me, but I appreciate what you're doing in this."

  "They haven't gone for it yet, Thurman. A lot could go wrong."

  We went to Musso & Frank Grill for breakfast and used the pay phone there to call Lancaster. Mark Thurman spoke to Jennifer Sheridan and I spoke to Joe Pike. I said, "It's happening fast. We should know by one o'clock."

  "You want us to come down?"

  "No. If it goes right, we'll call you, and then we'll come up. Once we turn over the tape, they'll move on Akeem and the Eight-Deuce. I don't want Jennifer down until those guys are off the street."

  "Sounds good."

  We took our time with breakfast and didn't leave Musso's until the waiters and the busboys were giving us the glare treatment. When we left, we walked down Hollywood Boulevard to Vine, and then back again, looking at the people and the second-rate shops and trying to kill time. We passed the place where Thurman had gone onto the bus to save the nine-year-old girl. He didn't bring it up.

  We picked up the car and drove east to Griffith Park where you can rent horses and ride along trails or in carefully controlled riding pens. The park was crowded, and most of the trail riders were families and kids, but most of the pen riders were serious young women with tight riding pants and heavy leather riding boots and their hair up in buns. We bought diet Cokes and watched them ride.

  At eleven minutes before one that afternoon, we pulled into the parking lot at Griffith Observatory at the top of the Hollywood Hills and went into the observatory's great hall to use their pay phone. I figured it was a pretty safe place from which to make the call. You don't find a lot of cops browsing through the meteorite display or admiring the Chesley Bonestell paintings.

  At exactly one o'clock by the observatory's time, I called Lou Poitras at his office. Charlie Griggs answered. Mark Thurman stood next to me, watching people come in and go out of the hall. Griggs said, "North Hollywood detectives. Griggs."

  "This is Richard Kimball. I've been falsely accused. A guy with one arm did it."

  Griggs said, "Let's see you smart off like that when they put you in the gas chamber." Always a riot, Griggs.

  "Is Lou there, or do I have to deal with the B team?"

  Griggs put me on hold and maybe six seconds later Poitras picked up. "I brought in Baishe, and we talked to a woman named Murphy at the DA." Baishe was Poitras's lieutenant. He didn't much like me. "Murphy brought in someone from the chief's office and someone else from the mayor's office, and we got together on this. Everybody's pretty anxious to see the tape."

  "What about Thurman?" When I said his name, Thurman looked at me.

  "They'd like to have him, but they're willing to give him up to get the other guys. They don't like it much."

  "They don't have to like it, they just have to guarantee it. Does he stay on the job?"

  "Yeah."

  "Do I have their word?"

  "Yes."

  When Poitras said yes, I nodded at Thurman and he closed his eyes and sighed as if the results had just come back negative. I said, "Are they going to deal square with the Washington family?"

  "Shit, this comes out, the Washingtons are going to own City Hall."

  "Are they going to deal square?"

  "Yes. That came from the DA's person and the mayor's person."

  "Okay. What's the next step?"

  "They want Thurman to come in with the tape. They've made a lot of promises with nothing to go on except my word, and they don't like that. It all hinges on the tape. As soon as they see the tape, they'll move on Dees and those other assholes, and they'll move on Akeem D'Muere and anyone wearing Eight-Deuce colors. Everybody comes in."

  "Okay."

  "We can do it whenever you say. Sooner is better than later."

  I looked at Thurman. We would have to call Jennifer and Pike, and then we'd have to go get them and come down. It was eight minutes after one. "How about your office at six?"

  "Make it Baishe's office. Let him feel like he's in charge."

  "Done."

  I hung up the phone and told Mark Thurman the way it was going to be. I said, "We have to call Lancaster."

  Thurman said, "Let's not. I want to be the one to tell Jennifer. I want to see her face when I tell her that it's over."

  "I told her we'd call."

  "I don't care. I want to get flowers. Do you think we could stop for flowers? She likes daisies." He was like a cork that had been pulled down very far into deep water and suddenly released. He was racing higher and higher, and the higher he got the faster he moved. The sadness and the shame were momentarily forgotten and he was grinning like a kid who'd just won first prize in one of those contests they're always having in the backs of comic books.

  I said, "Sure. We can get daisies." I guess I was grinning, too.

  He said, "Oh, boy." Oh, boy.

  We took the four-mile drive down out of Griffith Observatory and stopped at a flower shop in Hollywood for the daisies and then we hopped on the freeway and went north toward Lancaster and the house where Mark Thurman and Jennifer Sheridan had been hiding. It didn't take very long at all.

  The neighborhood was alive with kids on skateboards and men and women working on their lawns and teenagers washing cars and the varied stuff of a Saturday afternoon. Joe Pike's Jeep was in front of the house where we had left it, and the drapes were still closed. We pulled into the drive and parked and Thurman got out first. He said, "I want to go in first." He held the flowers like a sixteen-year-old going to his first prom.

  I followed him up the walk a
nd stood beside him when he rang the bell once, then unlocked the door, and went in yelling for Jennifer Sheridan. He needn't have bothered.

  Pete Garcia was sitting on the couch and Floyd Riggens was sitting in the green Ez-E-Boy. Riggens had his legs crossed and a cold Pabst in his right hand. He made a nasty grin when we walked in and said, "Jennifer's not here, asshole. We've got her, and we want the goddamned tape."

  CHAPTER 32

  No one said anything for maybe three seconds, and in that time you could feel the silence in the house, and the emptiness. There was me and Thurman and Riggens and Garcia, but no one else. I knew without looking. No one else. Garcia seemed nervous.

  Thurman squinted, like maybe he hadn't heard right. "Jennifer?" Loud.

  Riggens said, "You think I'm kidding?"

  Thurman yelled toward the back of the house, then went to the foot of the stairs. "Jennifer?" Getting frantic.

  Riggens grinned. "He thinks I'm kidding, Pete."

  I said, "What did you do with her, Riggens?"

  "Put her someplace safe until we get this straight. There's the copy of the tape, there's the copy of Jennifer. You see where we're going with this?"

  "Where's Pike?"

  Garcia said, "Fuck him." When Garcia moved, he seemed to jerk, and when he wasn't moving he rubbed his palms on his thighs like they were wet.

  "What happened to Pike?" Maybe something in my voice.

  Riggens made a little shrug, but he'd heard it, too.

  "Who the fuck knows. They separated in town and we got her. He's not so much. He wasn't so goddamn much."

  Thurman came back from the stairs, his eyes nervous and his face flushed. "She's gone."

  Riggens said, "What did I say?"

  "You bastard." Thurman threw the flowers at Riggens and started for him, but Riggens lifted his left hand and showed a 9-mil Browning. His face went cold as an ax blade. "You wanna fuck with me? You want to see how far if it'll push?"

  Thurman stopped. He didn't look like a kid going to the prom anymore. He looked like an oversized street cop with a serious mad on. He looked dangerous.

  I said, "Mark."

  Riggens straight-armed the Browning and told Thurman to back up, but Mark Thurman didn't move.

  I said, "Mark."

  Garcia's eyes flicked from Thurman to me and then to Riggens. Beads of sweat had risen on Garcia's forehead and he wiped his palms again. I didn't like that.

  I stepped close behind Thurman, then eased him back.

  Riggens said, "You sold us out, you fuck."

  Mark Thurman said, "If she's hurt, I'll kill you, Floyd." He looked at Garcia. "I'll kill every one of you."

  Floyd nodded. "You shoulda thought about that before you decided to sell us out, you prick." He gestured again with the Browning. "Where's the tape?"

  I said, "What tape?"

  Pete Garcia said, "Oh, fuck this." He jerked up from the couch so quickly that Mark Thurman stepped back.

  Garcia said, "Just shoot the sonofabitch, Floyd. Jesus Christ."

  I said, "Oh, that tape."

  Riggens shifted the muzzle from Thurman to me. "Come on. You guys give us the tape, and we'll give you the girl. That's the way it's going to work."

  I shook my head. "Too late, Riggens. We gave it to IAD."

  Garcia said, "Then the broad's dead." He shouted it, as if what little control he had over himself was going.

  Mark Thurman said, "That's not true. We still have it."

  I looked at him.

  Thurman said, "It's in the car. Floorboard behind the driver's side." He looked at me. "I'm not going to risk Jennifer."

  Riggens said, "Go see, Pete."

  Garcia went outside and came back maybe two minutes later with the tape. "Got it."

  Riggens cocked his head toward a large-screen Zenith in the corner. "Check it out."

  Garcia took the tape to the VCR and fumbled with the controls. His hands were shaking so badly that it took him a couple of tries to get the cassette into the machine. I didn't like all the shaking. Garcia wasn't the nervous type, but he was nervous today. I thought about why he might be nervous, and I didn't like that, either.

  When the Zenith filled with Charles Lewis Washington and the Premier Pawn Shop, Riggens said, "Fine. Eric's waiting. We'll take your car."

  The four of us went out to Mark Thurman's Mustang. Floyd Riggens asked if Thurman knew how to get to something called the Space Age Drive-in, and Thurman said that he did. Riggens told Thurman to drive and me to ride in the shotgun seat. Riggens and Garcia sat in back.

  We worked our way out of the subdivision and onto the Sierra Highway, driving up through the center of town. It took maybe ten minutes to cross through Lancaster, and pretty soon we were away from the traffic and the traffic lights and into an area that the local cognoscenti probably called the outskirts of town. Not as many houses out here. Less irrigated lawn, more natural desert.

  Maybe a quarter mile past a Tastee-Freez, Floyd Riggens said, "There it is."

  The high sail of the Space Age Drive-In Movie Theater's screen grew up out of the desert maybe two hundred yards from the highway behind a marquee that said CLOSED. It was surrounded by barren flatland and overgrown scrub brush and yucca trees. A narrow tarmac road branched off the highway and ran up past the marquee and a little outbuilding where people had once bought tickets to giant-ant movies, and disappeared along a high fence beside the movie screen that had probably been built so that people couldn't park on the side of the road and watch the movies for free.

  Riggens said, "Turn in just like you were going to the movies."

  We turned up the little road and followed it up past the marquee and the ticket booth and toward the entrance between the screen and the fences. The fences shouldered off of the movie screen and seemed to encircle the perimeter of the drive-in. A chain-link gate had been forced out of the way.

  The Space Age Drive-In looked like it had been closed for maybe a dozen years. The tarmac road was potholed and buckled, and the outbuilding had been boarded over, and the fences had wilted and were missing boards. A long time ago someone had painted a cowboy in a space suit riding an X-15 on the back of the screen, tipping his Stetson toward the highway, but like the fences and the ticket booth and the marquee, he hadn't been maintained and he looked dusty and faded. Much of his face had peeled.

  We went through the gate and passed into a large open field of crushed rock and gravel with a series of berms like swells on a calm sea. Metal poles set in cement sprouted maybe every thirty feet along the berms, speaker stands for the parked cars. The speakers had long since been cut away. A small cinderblock building sat in the center of the field with two cars parked in front of it. Concession stand. Eric Dees's green sedan and its blue stable mate were parked in front of the stand. The concession stand's door had been forced open.

  Riggens said, "Let's join the party."

  Pinkworth came out of the stand as we rolled up and said, "They have it?" He was holding a shotgun.

  Riggens grinned. "Sure."

  Garcia got out with the tape and went into the concession stand without saying anything. More of the nervous, I guess.

  Pinkworth and Riggens told us to get out of the car, and then the four of us went inside through an open pair of glass double doors. There were large windows on either side of the doors, but they, like the doors, were so heavy with dust that it was like looking through a glass of milk.

  The concession stand was long and wide with a counter on one side and a little metal railing on the other. A sort of kitchen area was behind the counter, and a couple of single-sex bathrooms were behind the railing. I guess the railing was there to help customers line up. The kitchen equipment and metalwork had long since been stripped out, but tattered plastic signs for Pepsi and popcorn and Mars candy bars still spotted the walls. There was graffiti on some of the signs, probably from neighborhood kids breaking in and using the place as a clubhouse. Pete Garcia and Eric Dees were standing together by another
pair of glass double doors at the back of the stand. Garcia looked angry and maybe even scared. Jennifer Sheridan was sitting on the floor outside the women's bathroom. When Jennifer and Mark saw each other, she stood and he ran to her, and they hugged. They stood together and held hands and she smiled. It was an uneasy smile, but even with all of this, she smiled. Love.

  Eric Dees took the tape from Pete Garcia, then grinned at me. "Sonofabitch if you didn't cause some trouble."

  I said, "How'd you figure it, Dees?"

  "You put in eighteen years on the job, you make a few friends." As he spoke he put the tape on the floor, then stepped on it. He took a can of Ronson lighter fluid out of his pocket, squirted the fluid on the cassette, then lit it. Once it was going, he used more of the fluid. 'They heard the talk, and they let me know there's an investigation going down. They said there's something about a tape, so I check and find out the tape is gone." The fire was going pretty good, so he put away the fluid and came over and stood close to Mark Thurman. "You fucked up bad, Mark. You should've just let it sit."

  Mark Thurman said, "Jesus Christ, Eric, we were wrong." The smell of the burning plastic was strong.

  Riggens said, "Hey, we went through that. We agreed. You agreed. You gave your word."

  Thurman shook his head. "It was wrong. We did the bad thing together, and then we covered it up together. We should've stood up together, Floyd. Doesn't that bother you?"

  "Going to fuckin' jail bothers me more!" Riggens was yelling. "Losing the job and the pension and getting raked through the papers bothers me a helluva lot more!"

  Garcia was pacing near the doors, glancing out like he expected something.

  Dees said, "You think I like this? You think I want it?" He looked at the fire. It was already dying away. "You should've trusted me, Mark. I was going to work it out. I'm still going to work it out."

  Riggens said, "Fuckin' A."

  I said, "How, Dees? You going to bring Charles Lewis Washington back to life?"

  Riggens screamed, "Fuck you. With no tape, no one can prove anything. So maybe you showed it. Big fuckin' deal. Without the tape it's just hearsay, and we can ride that out."