Free Falling Down by David Cole Page B

Sonoran Desert vegetation. Spread out over forty-nine acres, with a completely remodeled parking lot, many looped trails, and a lot of new fencing.
    Some years before, the night security guard had been inexplicably shot five times in the head, and the park was now marginally less accessible. Most of the fencing would be easy to get over for anybody determined. Mostly, I realized, the fencing just kept out random night visitors like sexually active teenagers or the stray large dog, but not bobcats or coyotes.
    I’d used the park five years before because I could always guarantee privacy when talking to clients. Back then, I rarely met clients face-to-face because I didn’t like them seeing me.
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    I remember being nervous, back then. I remember I couldn’t find the water fountain where, bending over to drink from the spray, I’d fingered my belt pouch, wanting to take another Ritalin or two, just to keep me focused.
    Sliding the zipper open and closed, open and closed, trying to resist the pills. I did that a lot, back when I was addicted to meth.
    But I’d always remember that day when I first met Ana Maria Juarez, which led to Tigger’s murder.
    I could hit replay and run the vivid memory.
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    Tigger was out of sight as I walked up to the pincushion cactus ramada. The circular roof was interlaced with twigs and branches, woven into a grid of plastic-coated green wire. A semicircular concrete bench provided shelter for those who wanted to escape the hot summer sun. I could hear traffic noises from Oracle and Ina roads, but nobody sat on the bench.
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    Tigger’s real name was Tigist. She was Ethiopian, scarcely five feet tall, with luminous kohl-blackened eyelids and intense ocean-green irises, the eyes set deep over a long, slightly hooked nose in the exact middle ofa thin face. Since few people remembered how to pronounce her name, she’d started calling herself Tigger after reading a Pooh book to her son. And the name fit, since both the fictional and the real Tigger were always nervous, excited, bouncing up and down with relentless energy.
    Tigger was a Fugitive Recovery agent. She tracked down bail-skippers, arresting them without any help except assorted stun guns. I’d never met a client without having Tigger look them over first, then staying out of sight during the meeting so she could track the client back to a vehicle and make sure it left before I did. It’s part paranoia, I tell you, but when I did mostly illegal things with computers, I had fixed rules about security.
    And the first rule was to make sure that clients were exactly who they claimed to be. I still follow that rule.
    Another rule was to avoid letting clients know things about me, which was why I disliked personal meetings. I’m a lot more social now, but back then few people knew what I did. I remember when Tigger told me from her microphone that the women had moved.
    I remember what they looked like, the colors, the fingernails, what they wore, and how they spoke.
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    I’d walked along curving dirt paths toward guidepost twenty-six, where a trapezoidal concrete table sat underneath another circular ramada.
    Two women sat on a concrete bench along one side of the table. One of them toyed with a folded sheet of paper and a yellow legal pad. Seeing me approach, she stood up quickly, her eyes darting in all directions to see if we were alone. She was near my height, but slim and small-boned, with shoulder-length brown hair pulled back by twin brown barrettes. She wore yellow spandex runners’ pants and a pale strawberry North Face tank top, with spaghetti straps over bare arms and shoulders.Veins popped along her well developed arms, and her body looked muscled and taut in that way which only comes from working out with free weights.
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    â€œLaura?” I heard somebody say. “Excuse me?”
    This had to be Mary Emich, seeing the old woman, the walker, confused, mistaking her for