Chapter 24
Trust was critical between partners. Con had trusted Tate Abernathy with his life and the man had saved him from a minimum of twenty-five years behind bars.
It’s not that he would’ve blamed Alex Frost for telling Marcus Allen what happened last night—or almost happened—but now that she hadn’t, Con knew he could trust her.
He just how to figure out a way to prove to Alex that she could trust him, too.
“This is my partner, Agent Frost,” Con said. “Frost, Dwight Dozier.”
Instead of meeting the man at his desk this time, he’d asked Dwight to set them up in a small conference room in the OC Post building.
He waited for the two of them to shake hands before continuing.
“Dwight reports on entertainment, amongst other things.” Like The Sandman . “I asked for his help looking into the pirated films. Dwight, tell Frost what you said on the phone this morning.”
The man pushed his glasses up his nose and ran a tongue across first his top then bottom lip.
His mouth was incredibly chapped.
“Well, I reached out to a contact who I used for a story about illegal streams years ago when it was a much bigger deal. He said the same thing I told you yesterday. There’s no money to be made in pirated films anymore.”
Con encouraged the man to continue by flapping a hand.
“I mean, these films are sold overseas at flea markets, by immigrants in Paris laying them out on a blanket outside popular tourist sites. But this is… small potatoes, you know?”
Con was beginning to regret coming here—it seemed like a waste of time. On the phone, Dwight had said that he might have found something.
But this was just more of the same.
“Is that it?” he asked with a frown.
“No, no. My guy said that recently these ripped copies have been showing up at some of the smaller, non-affiliated theaters. The thing is, in order for a theater to legally play a new release, they have to pay an exorbitant sum to the production company. Some can’t afford it, so they screen illegal copies, instead.”
Dwight’s expression suggested that he thought that this was a big break. Con was of a different mind.
“Are you saying that if we find one of these theaters, we can trace the video back to its source?” Con asked.
Dwight’s sly grin melted off his face.
“N-no—my guy said it’s almost impossible to trace these things.”
“Fucking hell,” Con grumbled. “Frost, let’s—”
“Hold on,” Alex interrupted. She appeared pensive. “Most of these movies are released on legit streaming services soon after the theatrical release. What’s stopping these theaters from just streaming those versions of the movies?”
“Well, that’s the thing. They can’t. Most theaters are equipped with a commercial projector, and these are locked to streaming services by the manufacturer. Kind of like a region lock, you know?”
Con didn’t know—this was a strange, unfamiliar world.
Alex explained.
“Back in the day when Blu-rays were a big thing, you couldn’t take a North American version of a movie and watch it in players that were manufactured in Europe. It was called region locked.”
Con shrugged, not understanding the implications of any of this.
“Do you have a list of theaters that might play these illegal versions?” Alex asked.
“I do.” Dwight produced a scrap of paper and handed it to her. “There are three local theaters but the one at the top? Midnight Matinee? I checked them out. They’re playing two IP movies right now. If anyone has a copy of these pirated movies, it’s them.”
“ Hmm . Thanks.”
“No problem.”
Alex and Con left OC Post and went back to his car.
“What do you think?” Con asked, putting Midnight Matinee’s address into the GPS app on his phone. He was once again forced to close the gold rush audiobook before it started playing and made a mental note to return it the next time he got a chance.
The fucking thing was possessed.
And why wouldn’t it be? It was narrated by a goddamn serial killer.
“I’m not sure. But if this theater plays IP films, they might already have a ripped copy of Shadowstrike . Could lead somewhere.”
“Or it could be just like everything else: a dead end.”
When Con saw the dejected expression on Alex’s face, he shrugged.
“Meh, worth a look.”
The app directed them toward one of the seedier sections of Orange County.
“I looked into the gold rush book, by the way,” Alex said, deftly changing the subject. She had a knack of doing that, Con noticed. Alex also seemed to be aware of everything going on around her. He’d closed the audiobook app before the image had even completely loaded on his screen, but she’d seen it.
“And?” he asked absently, not sure where she was going with this.
“And I was right. The first settlers went to Yerba Buena and not the Mojave.”
Was this some sort of quirk of hers? An OCD fixation? Or was she trying to show him up?
Con realized that he didn’t much care either way. He just didn’t want to talk about anything related to The Sandman anymore.
That was behind him.
That was in the garbage with all of his notes.
“Don’t mean to be rude, but I’m not really interested in the gold rush,” he said flatly. “Downloaded the stupid thing by accident and I don’t know how to get rid of it.”
It was a cheap lie, a bad one, too, and Alex knew it.
“Right. Sorry.”
Fifteen minutes later, they pulled up outside the address that Dwight had given to them for Midnight Matinee. Con’s first instinct was that the reporter had made a mistake.
There was a no marquee, no traditional arced red doors. It was just a plain, rundown, and graffiti-stained concrete structure sandwiched on one side with an apartment building and a narrow alley on the other.
It was also clearly a front for dealing drugs.
Con immediately noticed the spotters hanging out on the stoops of the adjacent apartment building. They were just kids, barely capable of growing facial hair, a mix of Latinos, Blacks, and Whites. Their varied races suggested a smaller outfit that wasn’t affiliated with any of the local gangs.
The theater was the perfect location for a small-scale drug dealing operation. Dark inside, nobody allowed in without a ticket. Few entrances and exits. Difficult for law enforcement to infiltrate without being noticed.
Con continued past the theater and parked two blocks away down a side street.
“You see what I see?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s a front. Two spotters on the steps of the apartment building. The guy in the alley is probably the runner.”
Con hadn’t seen the runner but knew that there had to be one close.
The system was simple, and it was designed to put separation between the actual dealer and the user.
A junkie approaches the spotters, who were also constantly on the lookout for 5-0. They would direct the user to the runner who would take the order and the cash. They then left, met up with the dealer at an undisclosed location, and returned with the product. Or maybe, in this case, the spotter instructs them to head inside, and the runner approaches them in the theater proper.
Yeah, that was probably the case here.
“I figure we go inside and wait for someone to offer us something. We use that against them as leverage to find out what they know about the movies,” Con suggested.
Alex frowned.
“What?”
“It’s just… you look like a cop.”
Con glanced down at himself. Last night, he’d tossed out everything he had related to The Sandman. In the morning, he’d completed this cleansing ritual by shaving and getting dressed in one of the few clean outfits he had left.
“No offense, but I don’t think anybody’s going to be dumb enough to try and sell you drugs. Maybe yesterday,” Alex joked, “but not today.”
Con observed his partner. Alex’s brown hair was pulled up into a ponytail and she was wearing jeans and a white blouse that she’d tucked in.
“You look like a cop, too,” he shot back.
She smiled.
“Wait.”
Alex untucked her shirt and then balled up the material near her waist. Then she got out of the car and proceeded to reach down and place her palms in the muddy trail that led to a sewer grate.
“What are you doing?”
Alex said nothing as she rubbed the dirt on the thighs of her jeans and then repeated this process with the hem of her shirt. Finally, she let down her hair and messed it up, allowing some of it to fall in front of her face.
“How about now?” she asked. “Now, do I look like a cop?”
Con was astounded.
Alex didn’t look like a cop. She looked like… well, a junkie. It wasn’t a perfect disguise—her eyebrows were too well manicured, and she lacked the sores on her face that was a telltale sign of a user—but it was damn good.
And it would fare especially well in a dimly lit theater.
Except…
“I don’t like this idea,” Con said softly.
Alex got back in the car.
“To be honest? I’m not sure I like it much either, but we have nothing else to go on. And, like you said, we need leverage.”
“I’m not sure about this, Alex. It’s your second day on the—”
Alex unexpectedly went rigid.
“Listen,” she began sternly, “I gave you a pass yesterday. I’m not going to hold what happened over your head forever, I wouldn’t do that, but I want to make something perfectly clear. I worked my ass off to get this job. I know what people think, I know they believe that my father pulled some strings to get me to where I am now. But he didn’t. I earned this. And I won’t have someone treating me with kid gloves. If we’re going to work together, you’re going to need to trust me.”
The outburst came out of nowhere and it was shocking.
Later, Con would realize that Alex had pulled a page out of his handbook: saying exactly what he needed to hear in order to get him to agree with her. Toying on ideas of trust and respect, teamwork. But rather than feel duped, he was impressed.
“Okay,” he finally conceded. “You go in, I’ll wait outside. Have your phone on you and if anything happens, I’ll rush in.
Trust . It was important between partners in most industries. It was critical for survival in the FBI.
This knowledge, however, did nothing to assuage Agent Striker’s apprehension as Alex removed her gun and badge, left them in the car, and then began meandering back toward Midnight Matinee in a stilted stagger.