Robert Crais - Free Fall

Garcia said, “Jesus Christ, we’ve got a goddamned crowd.”

I smiled at him. “My fans.”

Pinkworth looked nervous and lowered his gun like someone might see it and tell. Garcia lowered his, too.

Riggens’s car screeched to a stop and he kicked open the door. His face was flushed and he looked angry. He also looked drunk. “Stay the fuck away from my wife.”

Garcia yelled, “Floyd,” but Floyd wasn’t listening. He took two long steps forward, then lunged toward me with his body sort of cocked to the side like he was going to throw a haymaker and knock me into the next time zone.

He swung, and I stepped outside of it and snapped a high roundhouse kick into the side of his head that knocked him over sideways.

The fat kid said, “Look at that!” and the fat kid’s father aimed a Sony video camera at us.

When Riggens fell, Garcia’s gun came up and Pinkworth started forward, and that’s when Joe Pike reared up from behind their car, snapped the slide on a 12-gauge Ithaca riot gun, and said, “Don’t.”

Garcia and Pinkworth froze. They spread their fingers off their pistol grips, showing they were out of it.

The crowd went, “Ooo.” Some show, all right.

Joe Pike stands six-one and weighs maybe one-ninety, and he’s got large red arrows tattooed on the outside of each deltoid, souvenirs from his days as a Force Recon Marine in Vietnam. He was wearing faded blue jeans and Nike running shoes and a plain gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and government-issue sunglasses. Angle the sun on him just right, and sometimes the tattoos seem to glow. I think Pike calls it his apparition look.

I said, “Gee, and I thought you’d got lost in traffic.”

Pike’s mouth twitched. He doesn’t smile, but sometimes he’ll twitch. You get a twitch out of Pike, he’s gotta be dying on the inside. In tears, he’s gotta be.

I took Garcia’s and Pinkworth’s guns, and Pike circled the blue sedan, finding a better angle to cover Riggens. When he moved, he seemed to glide, as if he were flowing over the surface of the earth, moving as a panther might move. To move was to stalk. I’d never seen him move any other way.

Garcia said, “Put down that goddamned gun. We’re LAPD officers, goddamn it.”

Pike’s shotgun didn’t waver. An older woman with a lime green sun hat and a purse the size of a mailbag looked at the other tourists and said, “Does the bus leave after this?”

I pulled Riggens’s gun and then I went back to Pinkworth and Garcia and checked their IDs. Pinkworth said, “You’re marked fuck for this, asshole. You’re going down hard.”

“Uh-huh.”

Riggens moaned and sort of turned onto his side. His head was bleeding where it had bounced on the tarmac, but it didn’t look bad. I took the clips out of the three police guns, tossed them into the blue sedan’s backseat, then went back to Riggens. “Let me see.”

Riggens pushed my hand off and tried to crab away, but he didn’t do much more than flop onto his back. “Fuck you.”

Pinkworth said, “You’re in a world of shit. You just assaulted a Los Angeles police officer.”

I said, “Call it in and let’s go to the station. Maybe they’ll give Riggens a Breathalyzer while you guys are booking me.” You could smell it on him a block away.

Garcia said, “Quiet, Pink.”

A green four-door sedan identical to the other two cop sedans came toward us across the lot. Riggens was still trying to get up when the green car pulled in behind him and a tall guy with short gray hair got out. He was wearing chino slacks and a striped short-sleeve shirt tucked neatly into his pants and short-topped Redwing trail shoes. He was tanned dark, like he spent a lot of time in the sun, and his face was lined. I made him for his mid-forties, but he could’ve been older. He looked at Riggens, then the two cops by the blue sedan, and then at Joe Pike. He wasn’t upset and he wasn’t excited, like he knew what he’d find when he got here and, when he got here, he knew that he could handle it. When he saw Joe Pike he said, “I didn’t know you were in on this.”

Pike nodded once.

I gave them surprised. “You guys know each other?”

Pike said, “Eric Dees.”

Eric Dees looked at me, then looked back at Pike. “Pike and I rode a black-and-white together for a couple of months maybe a million years ago.” Pike had been a uniformed LAPD officer when I’d met him. “Put away the shotgun, Joe. It’s over, now. No one’s going to drop the hammer.”

Pike lowered the shotgun.

Pinkworth craned around and stared at Pike. “This sonofabitch is Joe Pike? The Joe Pike?” Pike had worn the uniform for almost three years, but it hadn’t ended well.

Riggens said, “Who?” He was still having trouble on the ground.

Dees said, “Sure. You’ve just been jumped by the best.”

Pinkworth glowered at Pike like he’d been wanting to glower at him for a long time. “Well, fuck him.”

Joe’s head sort of whirred five degrees to line up on Pinkworth and Pinkworth’s glower wavered. There is a machine-like quality to Joe, as if he had tuned his body the way he might tune his Jeep, and, as the Jeep was perfectly tuned, so was his body. It was easy to imagine him doing a thousand pushups or running a hundred miles, as if his body were an instrument of his mind, as if his mind were a well of limitless resource and unimaginable strength. If the mind said start, the body would start. When the mind said stop, the body would stop, and whatever it would do, it would do with precision and exactness.

Dees said, “Long time, Joe. How’s it going?”

Pike’s head whirred back and he made a kind of head shrug.

“Talkative, as always.” Dees looked at the people from Des Moines. “Pink, move those people along. We don’t need a crowd.” Pinkworth gave me tough, then pulled out his badge and sauntered over to the crowd. The fat kid’s father didn’t want to move along and made a deal out of it. Dees turned back to me. “You’re this close to getting stepped on for obstruction and for impersonating an officer, Cole. We drop the hammer, your license is history.”

I said, “What’s your connection with Akeem D’Muere and the Eight-Deuce Gangster Boys?”

Dees blinked once, then made a little smile, like maybe he wasn’t smiling at me, but at something he was thinking. “That’s an official police investigation. That’s what I’m telling you to stay away from. I’m also telling you to stay the hell out of Mark Thurman’s personal life. You fuck with my people, you’re fucking with me, and you don’t want to do that. I’m a bad guy to fuck with.”

Riggens made a sort of a coughing sound, then sat up, squinted at me, and said, “I’m gonna clean your ass, you fuck.” He got most of his feet under himself but then the feet slipped out and he sort of stumbled backwards until he rammed his head into the green sedan’s left front wheel with a thunk. He grabbed at his head and said, “Jesus.”

Dees stared hard at me for another moment, then went to Riggens. “That’s enough, Floyd.”

Floyd said, “He hit me, Eric. The fuck’s takin’ the ride.” There was blood on Riggens’s face.

Dees bunched his fingers into Riggens’s shirt and gave a single hard jerk that almost pulled Riggens off the ground and popped his head back against the sedan. “No one’s going in, Floyd.”

Riggens got up, took out a handkerchief, and dabbed at his head. The handkerchief came back red. “Shit.”

I said, “Better get some ice.”

“Fuck you.”

Dees made a little hand move at Garcia. “Pete, take Floyd over there and get some ice.”

Floyd said, “I don’t need any goddamn ice. I’m fine.”