Robert Crais: Free Fall

Rusty squinted at the kid who worked the bar and said, “It’s a cash business, Hound Dog. You don’t watch’m, they’ll rob you blind.”

The kid showed Rusty his middle finger without looking up. “I don’t have to steal it. I’m going to own it one day.” The kid’s name was Kevin. Rusty’s son-in-law.

Rusty shook his head and looked back at me. “The day I get any respect around here I’ll drop dead and be buried.”

I said, “Eat the food around here and it’ll happen sooner rather than later.”

Rusty Swetaggen laughed so hard that an architect looked over and frowned.

Kevin said, “You want a Falstaff, Elvis?”

“Sure.”

Rusty told him to bring it to the table and led me to an empty window booth where someone had put a little Reserved sign. People were waiting by the maitre d’, but Rusty had saved the booth.

After Kevin had brought the beer, I said, “You get anything on my guy?”

Rusty hunkered over the table. “This guy I talked to, he says the people from the Seventy-seventh like to hang at a bar called Cody’s over by LAX. It’s a shitkicker place. They got dancers in little chicken-wire cages. They got secretaries go in to get picked up. Like that.”

“Is Thurman a regular?”

“He didn’t give it to me as a fact, but a REACT unit is a tight unit, sort of like SWAT or Metro. They do everything together, and that’s where they’ve been hanging.”

“You got the address?”

He told me and I wrote it down.

“Your guy know if Thurman is mixed up in anything dirty?”

Rusty looked pained, like he was letting me down. “I couldn’t push it, Hound Dog. Maybe I could’ve gotten more, but you want Mr. Tact. The rest is going to take a couple days.”

“Thanks, Rusty. That’s enough for now.”

I finished the Falstaff and took out my wallet. Rusty covered my hand with his. “Forget it.”

I said, “Come on, Rusty.”

Rusty’s hand squeezed. “No.” The squeeze got harder and Rusty’s jagged teeth showed and suddenly the pumpkin head looked like a jack-o’-lantern from hell and you could see what had kept Rusty Swetaggen alive and safe for twenty-four years in a black-and-white. It was there for only a second and then it was gone, and he gently pushed my wallet toward me. “You don’t owe me anything, Elvis. I’m glad to help you, and I will always help you in any way I can. You know that.” There was something in his voice and his eyes and the way he held his hand that said that my not paying was profoundly important, as profound as anything had been or ever would be in his life.

I put the wallet away and stood. “Okay, Rusty. Sure.”

He looked apologetic. “I’ve got a couple more calls to make, and I’m waiting to hear from a guy. You want tact.”

“Sure.”

“You hungry? We got a pretty good halibut today.” Like nothing would make him happier than to feed me, to give to me.

“I’ll see you around, Rusty. Thanks.”

One hour and forty minutes later I parked in a McDonald’s lot about three-quarters of a mile from LAX and walked across the street to Cody’s Saloon. Mid-afternoon was late for lunch and early for quitting time, but a dozen men were lining the bar and sipping cold beer out of plain glasses. There weren’t any female real estate agents and none of the guys at the bar looked like architects, but you never know. Maybe they were politically incorrect and wanted to keep it a secret. There was a big sign on the roof of a neon cowgirl riding a bucking horse. The cowgirl looked sort of like a cheerleader from Dallas. Maybe she was politically incorrect, too.

A young guy with a lot of muscles was behind the bar, talking with a couple of women in skimpy cheerleader outfits who were hanging around at the waitress station. A red-haired woman in an even skimpier outfit danced without enthusiasm in a chicken-wire cage behind the bar. Neither the bartender nor the waitresses were looking at the dancer, and neither were most of the guys lining the bar. Guess it’s tough to get motivated with the chicken wire. They were playing Dwight Yoakam.

I went to a little table across from the dancer’s cage and one of the waitresses came over with her little pad. I ordered another Falstaff. When you’ve got a forty-dollar retainer, the sky’s the limit.

When she came back with it, I said, “What time do things pick up?” I gave her the nice smile. The Kevin Costner.

She smiled back and I saw her eyes flick to my hands. Nope. No wedding ring. I made the smile wider. She said, “Mostly after dinner. We get a lot of cops in here and they don’t get off until later.”

I nodded. “You know an officer named Mark Thurman?”

She tried to remember. “What’s he look like?”

“Big. Like a jock. He probably comes around with a guy named Floyd Riggens. They work together.”

Now she remembered and her face grew hard. “I know Floyd.” Floyd must be a real pip all the way around.

I grinned like it was an old joke. “That Floyd is something, isn’t he?”

“Uh-huh.” She wasn’t seeing much humor in it.

“What time do they usually get here?”

“I don’t know. Maybe eight. Something like that.” Like she was getting tired of talking about it. Maybe even pissed. Floyd must be something, all right. “Look, I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Sure.”

She went back to the bar and I sipped the beer and pretty soon I ordered another. There didn’t seem to be a lot to do until eight o’clock, so sipping Falstaff seemed like a good way to pass the time.

Dwight Yoakam stopped and Hank Williams, Jr., came on and pretty soon the day-shift waitresses left and the night shift cranked up the Garth Brooks and the Kentucky Headhunters. The night-shift dancers were younger and moved better in the cage, but maybe that was because of the music. Or maybe it just seemed that way because of the Falstaff. Maybe if you drank enough Falstaff your personal time scale would grind to a stop and everyone around you would move faster and faster until they looked like a Chip ’n Dale cartoon running at fast forward and you looked like a still picture frozen in time. Maybe they would continue to age but you would stay young and pretty soon they’d be dead and you’d have the last laugh. That Falstaff is something, isn’t it? Maybe I was just drunk. Occupational hazard.

By seven o’clock the crowd had grown and I didn’t want to be there if Riggens or Thurman walked in early, so I paid for the beer, went back to the McDonald’s, and bought a couple of cheeseburgers to eat in the car.

At fourteen minutes after eight, Mark Thurman’s blue Ford Mustang turned into Cody’s parking lot. There were three other people in the car. A brown-haired woman was sitting in the front passenger seat beside Thurman. Riggens and an overweight blonde were shoehorned into the back. The overweight blonde was loud and laughing and pulling at Riggens’s pants as they got out of the car. The brown-haired woman was tall and slender and looked like a thirty-six C. They walked across the parking lot, Riggens and the blonde together, Thurman and the brunette together, and then the four of them went into the bar.

I sat in my car for a long time after they disappeared, smelling the McDonald’s and tasting the beer and watching the neon cowgirl blink. My head hurt and I was tired from all the sitting, but I wasn’t anxious to get home. Getting home meant going to bed and sleep wouldn’t come easy tonight. Tomorrow I would have to speak with Jennifer Sheridan and tell her what I had found.

Sleep never comes easy when you’re going to break someone’s heart.

I woke the next morning with a dull ache behind my right eye and the sound of finches on my deck. I have a little A-frame off Woodrow Wilson Drive in Laurel Canyon, in the hills above Hollywood. I don’t have a yard because the A-frame is perched on a hillside, but I’ve got a deck, and a nice view of the canyon. A woman I know gave me a build-it-yourself bird-feeder kit for Christmas, so I built it, and hung it from the eve of my roof high enough to keep the birds safe from my cat. But the birds scratch the seed out of the feeder, then fly down to the deck to eat the seed. They know there’s a cat, but still they go down to pick at the seed. When you think about it, people are often like this, too.