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 CLOSED. 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.

Eric Dees took the tape from Pete Garcia, then grinned at me. "Sonofabitch if you didn't cause some trouble."

I said, "How'd you figure it, Dees?"

"You put in eighteen years on the job, you make a few friends." As he spoke he put the tape on the floor, then stepped on it. He took a can of Ronson lighter fluid out of his pocket, squirted the fluid on the cassette, then lit it. Once it was going, he used more of the fluid. 'They heard the talk, and they let me know there's an investigation going down. They said there's something about a tape, so I check and find out the tape is gone." The fire was going pretty good, so he put away the fluid and came over and stood close to Mark Thurman. "You fucked up bad, Mark. You should've just let it sit."

Mark Thurman said, "Jesus Christ, Eric, we were wrong." The smell of the burning plastic was strong.

Riggens said, "Hey, we went through that. We agreed. You agreed. You gave your word."

Thurman shook his head. "It was wrong. We did the bad thing together, and then we covered it up together. We should've stood up together, Floyd. Doesn't that bother you?"

"Going to fuckin' jail bothers me more!" Riggens was yelling. "Losing the job and the pension and getting raked through the papers bothers me a helluva lot more!"

Garcia was pacing near the doors, glancing out like he expected something.

Dees said, "You think I like this? You think I want it?" He looked at the fire. It was already dying away. "You should've trusted me, Mark. I was going to work it out. I'm still going to work it out."

Riggens said, "Fuckin' A."

I said, "How, Dees? You going to bring Charles Lewis Washington back to life?"

Riggens screamed, "Fuck you. With no tape, no one can prove anything. So maybe you showed it. Big fuckin' deal. Without the tape it's just hearsay, and we can ride that out."

I nodded. "Unless there's a copy."

Garcia stopped the pacing and looked at me. Pinkworth shifted behind Eric Dees and Riggens sort of let his mouth open. Dees said, "I'm willing to bet that you haven't made a copy. I figure you take the tape, you're thinking about cutting a deal, why do you need a dupe? You got a dupe, why make a big deal out of holding out? You'd just say, okay, here's the tape. You see?" Garcia was looking from Dees to me, Dees to me.

I spread my hands. "But it's still a bet. You bet, sometimes you lose."

Dees nodded. "Yeah, but probably not this time."

Guess you didn't earn command of a REACT team if you weren't smart. Of course, if you were smart, you didn't get yourself into a fix like this, either.

Mark Thurman said, "Okay, the tape is gone and you're going to work things out. Let us out of here."

Dees shook his head. "Not yet."

Jennifer said, "You said if you got the tape back, you'd let us go. You said that."

"I know."

The crunching sound of tires over gravel came from outside, and Akeem D'Muere's jet black Monte Carlo eased between the fences and came toward the concession stand. Garcia said, "He's here." Pinkworth and Riggens went to the doors.

Eric Dees took out his 9mm Beretta service gun and Mark Thurman said, "What the hell is D'Muere doing here, Eric?"

Floyd Riggens turned back from the doors. "Akeem's pissed off about all the trouble. He wants to make sure it don't happen again."

Jennifer said, "What does that mean?"

I met Eric Dees's eyes. "It means that Akeem wants to kill us, and Eric said okay."