Free Fall in Crimson by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

won't find this in the file because I didn't put it in the file. We were getting the July rains. The ground was pretty soft. I poked around until I found where somebody had run a real heavy machine back through the bushes and made a half circle and brought it back to the place where it had been driven in. Okay, so it was a brute. It made a deep track, so I'd guess about a five-hundred-pound bike, and where the tread was clear in one place in the mud I saw that funny Y pattern of that rear K-One-twelve of a set of ContiTwins, like those BMW Nine-seventy-two cc come through with. You pay six or seven thousand for one of those, for just the bare-bones machine. I would like to think no biker had anything to do with it."
    He parked in shadows and turned toward me. "Listen, we got a group of nice people here.
    Maybe close to thirty couples in our club. The C.C. Roamers. Me and Debbie, we got a Suzuki GS-550-ET I bought used. We don't get a chance to go as much as we used to, but we still go when we can. We take tours. Guys and their wives or girlfriends. There's real estate salesmen, and a dentist and his wife, store managers, computer programmers, a couple of builders, a guy in the landscaping business. People like that. It's great. We lay out a tour so we can take the back roads, ride along there in the wind. Have a picnic in a nice grove. You can hear the birds and all, those engines are so quieted down these days. I like it. So does Debbie. A lot. We've got our own special matching jackets and insignia. But the outlaw clubs give the whole thing a bad name.
    Like those damn Bandidos out west, and those Fantasies down in south Florida. Some of their officers are into every dirty thing going. Maybe, like they say, most of the troops are pretty much okay, just blue-collar guys from body shops and so on, who like to go roaring around with their women and drink a lot of beer and get tattooed and let all their hair grow and scare the civilians.
    Little recreation clubs like ours draw a lot of flack, McGee. And when there is biker violence, it reflects on us too, and people look at you funny and make smart remarks. That's why I hope whoever was on that machine, he just pulled off to adjust something, or get out of the sun, or eat his lunch, or some damn thing. But he could have been an outlaw biker riding alone, and he could have run short of cash money, and so he hid there behind the bushes waiting for somebody to stop who looked worth robbing."
    "And if that's how it was?"
    "He's away clean. No ID, no witnesses. I couldn't even get a mold of the tire track. The rain washed it out before I could get back with the kit."
    "What do you really think?"
    "I've got the gut feeling that whoever was on that machine beat Esterland to death. How long would it take him, a man powerful enough to hit that hard? You saw the autopsy report. They guessed he was hit six or seven times. Pull him out of the driver's seat, brace him against the car; Page 18

    bang him six times, open the rear door and tumble him in, and slam the door. Fifteen seconds?
    Twenty seconds? Take the wallet, take out the cash, toss the wallet into the car. Walk back into the brush, crank up, and roll away. Forty seconds?"
    "Was it the person he had the appointment with?"
    "I've got no gut feeling about that at all. Maybe yes, maybe no. When you try to figure out the odds on whether a man setting up a secret meet is going to get killed by somebody else who just happened to be there, you can tend to say it had to be the one he was meeting. On the other hand, it could be just another one of those damn coincidences that screw up the work I do forty times a year."
    "I appreciate your cooperation. And when you see Mrs. Banks, you give her my best wishes."
    "I surely will. Dallas McGee? Is that right?"
    "Not quite. Travis. Tell her it's been ten or twelve years. I was at their house for supper. With them and those three pretty daughters."
    "My Debbie was the middle one. Here, I'll drop