Robert Crais - Free Fall

“Use it.”

I started the Corvette and put it in gear in case the X led Riggens across the park toward us, but it didn’t get that far. Riggens horsed the sedan over the curb and cut across the sidewalk at the far corner where there was no fence and aimed dead on at the running X and gunned it. The X tried to cut back, but when he did, Riggens swung the wheel hard over and pegged the brakes and then Riggens and Thurman and Pinkworth were out of the car. They had their guns out, and the X froze and put up his hands. Thurman stopped, but Riggens and Pinkworth didn’t. They knocked the X down and kicked him in the ribs and the legs and the head. Riggens went down on one knee and used his pistol, slamming the X in the head while Pinkworth kicked him in the kidneys. Mark Thurman looked around as if he were frightened, but he didn’t do anything to stop it. There were maybe a hundred people in the park, and everybody was looking, but they didn’t do anything to stop it, either. Next to me, James Edward Washington snapped away with the little Canon.

Riggens and Pinkworth pulled the X to his feet, went through his pockets, then shoved him away. The X fell, and tried to get up, but neither his legs nor his arms were much use. His head was bleeding. Pinkworth said something sharp to Mark Thurman and Thurman walked back across the park, scooping up the little plastic envelopes. Riggens climbed the chain link and went into the ice cream truck and that’s the last we saw of it because a burgundy metal-flake Volkswagen Beetle and a double-dip black Chevrolet Monte Carlo playing NWA so loud that it rocked the neighborhood pulled up fast next to us and three guys wearing ski masks got out, two from the backseat of the Monte Carlo and one from the passenger side of the Volkswagen. The guy from the Volkswagen was wearing a white undershirt maybe six sizes too small and baggy pants maybe forty sizes too big and was carrying what looked to be a Taurus 9 mm semiautomatic pistol. The Taurus fit him just right. The first guy out of the Monte Carlo was tall and wearing a black duster with heavy Ray•Ban Wayfarers under the ski mask and was carrying a sawed-off double-barrel 20-gauge. The second guy was short and had a lot of muscles stuffed into a green tee shirt that said LOUIS. He was holding an AK-47. All of the guns were pointed our way.

James Edward Washington made a hissing sound somewhere deep in his chest and the tall guy stooped over to point the double twenty through my window. He looked at me, then James Edward, and then he gestured with the double twenty. “Get out the muthuhfuckin’ car, nigger.”

James Edward got out of the car, and then the tall guy pointed the double twenty at me. “You know what you gonna do?”

“Sure,” I said. “Whatever you say.”

The tall guy smiled behind the ski mask. “Tha’s right. Keep doin’ it, and maybe you see the sun set.”

The guy with the Taurus brought James Edward Washington to the metal-flake Beetle and put him in the right front passenger seat. The Beetle’s driver stayed where he was, and the guy with the Taurus got into the back behind Washington.

The guy in the long coat said, “They gonna take off and you gonna follow them and we gonna follow you. You get outta line, they gonna shoot your nigger and I gonna shoot you. We hear each other on this?”

“Sure.”

“M’man Bone Dee gonna ride with you. He say it, you do it. We still hear each other?”

“Uh-huh.” While the tall guy told me, the shorter guy in the Louis Farrakhan tee shirt walked around and got into my car. When he walked he held the AK down along his leg, and when he got in, he sort of held the muzzle pointed at the floorboard. The AK was too long to point at me inside the car. The guy in the long coat went back to the Monte Carlo and climbed into the back. There were other guys in there, but the windows were heavily tinted and you couldn’t see them clearly. If Pike was here, he might be able to see them, but Pike was probably on the other side of the park, still watching the cops. But maybe not.

Bone Dee said, “You got a gun?”

“Left shoulder.”

Bone Dee reached across and came up with the Dan Wesson. He didn’t look under my jacket when he did it and he didn’t look at the Dan Wesson after he had it. He stared at me, and he kept staring even after he had the Dan Wesson.

I said, “I always thought the AK was overrated, myself. Why don’t you buy American and carry an M-16?”

More of the staring.

I said, “You related to Sandra Dee?”

He said, “Keep it up, we see whether this muthuhfuckuh overrated or not.”

No sense of humor.

The Beetle started rolling and the guy in the shotgun seat of the Monte Carlo motioned me out. I tucked in behind the Bug and the Monte Carlo eased in behind me. I stayed close to the Beetle, and the Monte Carlo stayed close to me, too close for another car to slip between us. There was so much heavy-bass gangster rap coming out of the Monte Carlo, they shouldn’t have bothered. No one would come within a half mile for fear of hearing loss.

We went west for a couple of blocks, then turned south, staying on the residential streets and avoiding the main thoroughfares. As we drove, Bone Dee looked through the glove box and under the seats and came up with the Canon. “Thought you liked to buy American?”

“It was a gift.”

Bone Dee popped open the back, exposed the film, then smashed the lens on the AK’s receiver and threw the camera and the exposed film out the window. So much for visual evidence.

The Bug drove slowly, barely making school zone speeds, and staying at the crown of the street, forcing oncoming cars to the side. Rolling in attack mode. Kids on their way home from school clutched their books tight to their chests and other kids slipped down driveways to get behind cars or between houses in case the shooting would start and women on porches with small children hurried them indoors. You could see the fear and the resignation, and I thought what a helluva way it must be to live like this. Does South Central look like America to you? A short, bony man in his seventies was standing shirtless in his front yard with a garden hose in one hand and a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the other. He glared at the guys in the Bug and then the guys in the Monte Carlo. He puffed out his skinny chest and raised the hose and the Pabst out from his sides, showing hard, letting them have him if they had the balls to take him and saying it didn’t scare him one goddamn bit. Dissing them. Showing disrespect. An AK came out of the Volkswagen and pointed at him but the old man didn’t back down. Hard, all right. We turned again and the AK disappeared. With all the people running and hiding, I began to think that running and hiding was a pretty good idea. I could wait until we were passing a cross street, then backfist Bone Dee, yank the wheel, and probably get away, but that wouldn’t work too well for James Edward Washington. Not many places to hide inside a Volkswagen Beetle.

Two blocks shy of Martin Luther King Boulevard we turned into an alley past a ’72 Dodge with no rear wheels and stopped at a long, low unpainted cinderblock building that probably used to be an auto repair shop. The alley ran behind a row of houses along to a train track that probably hadn’t been used since World War II. Most of the railroad property was overgrown with dead grass, and undeveloped except for the cinderblock building. The houses all had chain-link fences, and many had nice vegetable gardens with tomato plants and okra and snap beans, and most of the fences were overgrown with running vines so the people who lived there wouldn’t have to see what happened in the alley. Pit bulls stood at the back fences of two of the houses and watched us with small, hard eyes. Guess the pit bulls didn’t mind seeing what happened. Maybe they even liked it.