Free Free Fall by Robert Crais Page B

another Marlboro and drew the smoke deep off the match and stared out through the windows into her shabby backyard. You could hear the kids screaming over the loud bass throbbing of the music and I imagined that it went on without end, and that her living hell wasn’t a whole lot different from Floyd’s.
    Out in the living room there was an upright Yamaha piano that looked like it hadn’t been played in a long time. A schoolbag was sitting on one end of it, and half a dozen wilting yellow roses were floating in aglass jar on the other end. Between the two was a framed picture of Floyd and Margaret Riggens standing together at his police academy graduation. They were fifteen years younger, and they were smiling. It was a photograph very much like the one that Jennifer Sheridan had, only Jennifer and Mark still looked like the people in their picture, and Floyd and Margaret didn’t.
    I guess romance isn’t for everyone.

CHAPTER
9
    W hen I pulled away from the house that Floyd Riggens once shared with his wife and children, the sun was low in the west and the ridgeline along the Verdugo Mountains was touched with orange and pink. I worked my way across the valley, letting the rush hour traffic push me along, and enjoyed the darkening sky. I wondered if Margaret Riggens found much in the mountains or the sky to enjoy, but perhaps those things were too far away for her to see. When you’re hurting, you tend to fix your eyes closer to home.
    I cut across the northern edge of Burbank and Pacoima, and then dropped down Coldwater to a little place I know called Mazzarino’s that makes the very best pizza in Los Angeles. I got a vegetarian with a side of anchovies to go and, when I pulled into my carport fifteen minutes later, the pizza was still warm.
    I opened a Falstaff and put out the pizza for me and the anchovies for the cat, only the cat wasn’t around. I called him, and waited, but he still didn’t come. Off doing cat things, no doubt.
    I ate the pizza and I drank the beer and I tried watching the TV, but I kept thinking about MargaretRiggens and that maybe I had come at all of this from the wrong direction. You think crime, and then you think money, but maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe Mark Thurman had gotten himself involved in another type of crime. And maybe it wasn’t Mark alone. Maybe it was Mark and Floyd. Maybe it was the entire REACT team. For all I knew, it was the full and complete population of the state of California, and I was the only guy left out of the loop. Me and Jennifer Sheridan. I was still thinking about that when I fell asleep.
    At ten oh-six the next morning I called this cop I know who works in North Hollywood. A voice answered the phone with, “Detectives.”
    “Is that you, Griggs?” It was this other cop I know, Charlie Griggs.
    “Who’s this?”
    “Guess.”
    Griggs hung up. Some sense of humor, huh?
    I called back and Griggs answered again. I said, “Okay, I’ll give you a hint. I’m known as the King of Rockin’ Detectives, but I wasn’t born in Tupelo, Mississippi.”
    “I knew it was you. I just wanted to see if you’d call back. Heh-heh-heh.” That’s the way Griggs laughs. Heh-heh-heh.
    “Lemme speak to Lou.”
    “What’s the magic word?”
    “C’mon, Charlie.”
    “What do you say, wiseass? You wanna speak to Lou, tell me what you say? Heh-heh-heh.” This guy’s an adult.
    “I’m going to get you, Griggs.”
    “Heh-heh-heh.” Griggs was killing himself.
    “I’m going to give your address to Joe.”
    The laughing stopped and Griggs put me on hold. Maybe forty seconds later Lou Poitras picked up. “I don’t pay these guys to goose around with you.”
    “Griggs hasn’t done a full day’s work in fifteen years.”
    “We don’t pay him to work. We keep’m around because he’s such a scream. Sort of like you.” Another comedian.
    I said, “Four months ago, a guy died during a REACT arrest down in South Central. You know anyone I can talk to about