Robert Crais - Free Fall

I followed him up the walk and 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.”

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 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 CL SED. 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.