Sky Zone: A Novel (The Crittendon Files) Read online

  Other Novels by Creston Mapes

  Dark Star: Confessions of a Rock Idol

  Full Tilt

  Nobody

  Fear Has a Name

  Poison Town

  For Mindy and Bernard,

  With thanks, love, and admiration

  Contents

  Cover

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  AfterWords

  Sky Zone: Discussion Questions

  Extras

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to:

  Patty, Abigail, Hannah, Esther, and CP for your support and encouragement.

  Anita Mapes for your creativity and generosity.

  Steve Vibert, Buck Alford, and Frank Donchess for your timeless friendship.

  Natasha Kern and Mark Sweeney for believing in my writing.

  LB Norton and Julee Schwarzburg for making me a better author.

  Jerry Jenkins and Nora St. Laurent for your enthusiasm.

  Joseph Cheeley III for expert legal insights.

  Christie Cooksey for your keen eye and friendship.

  Jeane Wynn for your hard work on my behalf.

  Jason Chatraw for your guidance, expertise, and friendship.

  The team at DCC, with a special bow to Karen Stoller, Amy Konyndyk, and Caitlyn Carlson for your keen eye, creativity, and tirelessness.

  The gang at Starbucks for a fine place to write.

  My readers for encouraging me to keep at it.

  I have told you these things so that you won’t abandon your faith.

  For you will be expelled from the synagogues, and the time is coming when

  those who kill you will think they are doing a holy service for God.

  This is because they have never known the Father or me.

  Yes, I’m telling you these things now, so that when they happen,

  you will remember my warning.

  —John 16:1–4

  1

  Festival Arena, October 6

  A breeze scattered leaves across the familiar winding blacktop driveway that led Jack Crittendon to the back of the gleaming steel-and-glass Columbus Festival Arena. At 4:30 p.m. the massive parking lot was a ghost town, but soon it would be teeming with cars, school buses, campers, and Greyhounds. People would be coming from across the region to catch a glimpse of controversial senator and independent presidential hopeful Martin Sterling as he stumped through the swing state of Ohio with hopes of making it on the November ballot next year.

  Eight months ago Jack would have been covering the event as a reporter for the Trenton City Dispatch. But after the debacle that sent four top Dispatch employees to prison for their involvement with the felonious Demler-Vargus Corporation, the newspaper had folded and left him out of work. Things had been unraveling ever since.

  He slowed at the guardhouse, where the slouching guy inside squinted to check the parking sticker on Jack’s windshield. The gate lifted, and Jack zipped through. He curved around to the enormous loading docks in back of the arena, where on concert days roadies loaded and unloaded stage equipment and where the stars lived in their decked-out tour buses for the brief time they were in town.

  Although Jack was thankful for the part-time job he’d found working for EventPros, the firm that provided security and guest services for events at the twelve-thousand-seat venue in downtown Columbus, something had to change. He had to find a full-time job in journalism or PR or anything that had to do with writing. Thus far, endless hours of research, filling out applications, and sending résumés had turned up zero, and he was feeling the strain at home.

  Jack’s wife, Pam, had been forced to give up her cherished role as stay-at-home mom to go back to work. She would have returned to the classroom, but her teaching certificate had lapsed. Plus, she wanted to spend her evenings with the girls, not grading papers and creating lesson plans. So she ended up taking a job as an administrative assistant at a local orthodontist’s office.

  Jack swung the Jetta into the dark parking deck, backed into his normal spot, and checked the time. He still had a few minutes. He dug around in the glove compartment for some mints and thought about texting Pam to let her know he’d arrived. They’d had to pay three more bills from their dwindling savings account, and it had caused major havoc between them on his way out the door. He felt as though she resented him for failing to provide, and he really didn’t feel like talking with her.

  But since she was eight months pregnant with Crittendon number three, he checked his phone to make sure he hadn’t heard from her. No texts or missed calls. He leaned back and closed his eyes. It was a relief to get away for a few hours. Although he was grateful for Pam’s mother, Margaret, who’d come to live with them after her husband died last winter, her constant presence in the midst of their deepening financial woes was stifling.

  Jack stuffed a handful of mints into his pocket, locked the car, and headed for the staging area in the bowels of the arena. On his way, he double-checked his uniform: black lanyard with ID badge, flashlight on belt, khaki cargo pants, black Reebok high-tops, black EventPros golf shirt, and orange EventPros windbreaker. All set.

  “Hey, Jack.” His elderly coworker Edgar, seated behind a table stacked with pagers and walkie-talkies, ran a trembling finger across a page, found Jack’s name, and signed him in. “You’ll be on the floor. Section A-2. Take a radio.”

  Good. He liked being close to the action.

  He grabbed the agenda for the evening and scanned the busy room.
People aged seventeen to seventy worked for EventPros. Many of the retired ones like Edgar treated the job as a hobby. It gave them a chance to get out of the house, earn some gas money, and see all the big stars—from Justin Bieber and Keith Urban to Green Day, James Taylor, and Carrie Underwood.

  Jack grabbed a walkie-talkie and untangled a headset from a knotted pile. Many of his colleagues, all dressed in similar uniforms, were sitting as long as possible before they would be required to stand for their four- to six-hour shifts.

  He spotted the colorful self-proclaimed “survivalist” Brian Shakespeare sitting at a table with two other friends and headed over.

  “Gentlemen.” Jack exchanged fist bumps, then clipped the radio to his belt and got the headset and mic adjusted.

  “You hear who’s gonna be here tonight?” said Shakespeare, who once claimed he was related to the famous English writer.

  “Besides Senator Sterling?” Jack said.

  “Everett Lester,” Sid Turk, an overweight, blond kid with oily skin, chimed in through a mouthful of Whopper.

  “You’re kidding me,” Jack said.

  They all shook their heads.

  “Since when? Pam loves him.”

  “It was a last-minute deal,” Shakespeare said. “I heard it on the news on the way over. Clarissa’s trying to keep it hush-hush, but Chico heard it too. It’s gotta be goin’ viral by now.”

  “Gonna be a full house for sure,” said Chico Gutierrez, a rail of a kid with straight black hair. “Anytime you can see Everett Lester for free, you’re gonna pack the joint.”

  Jack tested his radio by clicking his Talk button and listening for the static in his headset. The radios, headsets, and pagers were beat up and needed to be replaced.

  “Lester’s a pansy,” Shakespeare said. “He was better before his big conversion.”

  “Come on, dude. You gotta like some of his new stuff,” Jack said.

  “I’m just saying his music was better before. It’s just a fact. He’s not the same without the original band.”

  “Oh, dude, Death Stroke rocked so big-time,” Sid said. “Even I know that, and I was in diapers when they were in their heyday.”

  “That they did,” said Shakespeare, whose once-booming swimming-pool business drowned when the market plunged in 2008. He and Jack worked almost every event because they both had marriages, mortgages, kids, and cars, as well as a long list of bills to pay.

  “Are we gonna have enough staff?” Jack scanned the room again.

  “Are you kidding me?” Shakespeare said. “This was supposed to be a spur-of-the-moment whistle-stop. Two to four thousand people, tops. But with Lester here? We’re gonna be turning people away—you watch. Clarissa’s got calls out for all hands on deck, but we’ll be short. What else is new?”

  Tab Deacon blew into the staging area with a gust of wind, his walkie-talkie glued to his mouth, and a chronic limp. That was Tab—always a flair for the dramatic. He dashed up to Clarissa and whispered in her ear at length. The pointy-nosed, gum-chewing Clarissa Dracone, head manager of EventPros, pulled back and scowled.

  Jack found it odd he hadn’t picked up Tab’s voice on his headset, but he knew upper management had other channels they used to address sensitive issues.

  He watched the two face off. At six foot four, Tab stared down at Clarissa with creased brow and a face full of fret. She glared up at him in her baggy orange windbreaker, her lipstick suddenly looking starkly red against her pale white face.

  In an instant she snapped out of it and whipped into action, tapping one, two, three of the nearby supervisors and waving them into her office with walkie-talkie in hand. She quickly shuffled in behind them, practically stepping on Tab’s heel, and slammed the door.

  “Hmm.” Shakespeare switched from channel to channel on his radio, trying to pick them up. “Very interesting.”

  Jack did the same but got nothing.

  “Wonder what’s up?” Sid wiped his runny nose with a worn-out napkin. “Are you guys getting anything?” He and Chico only had pagers.

  Shakespeare shook his head. “Never seen anything like that before. I’ll be right back.”

  A twitch of anxiety turned at the pit of Jack’s stomach, but nothing ever worried Shakespeare. He was a former marine who looked you dead in the eye, told you exactly what he thought, and never backed down. Jack once saw him manhandle five drugged-out freaks at a Kid Rock show who’d gotten way too violent in the mosh pit. Shakespeare had zero tolerance for thugs. He once called himself a “righteous patriot,” and it fit.

  As Jack watched, Shakespeare tapped once at the office door and barged in. From his vantage point in the hallway, Jack saw Clarissa and the others turn toward his friend, each face pale with alarm.

  Shakespeare said something. Clarissa spoke right back and waved him in.

  Shakespeare spoke again, throwing a thumb back toward the staging area.

  Clarissa threw up her hands, turned, and glared at Jack.

  At first he thought he was just standing where her eyes happened to fall, but then he realized she was staring at him. His face flushed.

  Shakespeare turned to Jack and waved him into the office.

  Although Shakespeare wasn’t a supervisor, Clarissa knew he was her toughest, most street-smart team member—and apparently he wanted Jack in there with him.

  “Uh-oh,” said Chico, his black eyebrows raised.

  “Dude, let us know what’s goin’ on,” Sid said.

  “Will do.” Jack took a deep breath and headed for the office. He walked past other EventPros who hadn’t noticed the developing situation.

  He approached the door with a silent prayer to stay cool and stuck his head through the doorway. “Hey, folks. What’s going on?”

  The room was silent.

  Somber faces looked back at him.

  “Get in and close the door,” Clarissa said. “We’ve got a national security threat.”

  2

  Shakespeare’s house, three months earlier

  At five months pregnant, Pamela Crittendon was feeling sluggish and cumbersome, but much better than she had felt during her first trimester. However, she did question why on earth they were eating outside in July when it was ninety-two degrees. This Brian Shakespeare, Jack’s friend from work, was one strange bird.

  Pamela tried to cool herself with the oriental fan she’d been carrying around for months. It had been kind of Shakespeare and his wife, Sheena, to ask their family to dinner. They’d even invited Pamela’s mother, who was presently walking with Shakespeare through the rows of his huge garden.

  Jack was helping Bobby, one of Shakespeare’s boys, get the John Deere toy tractor going. Shakespeare ran back and forth between pointing out his prized vegetables to Margaret and checking the meat on the sizzling grill. His own five children—including four boys (two with special needs) and a little girl—were everywhere, ecstatic to have guests in what Pamela was gradually realizing was their own crazy little compound. Her own children, ten-year-old Rebecca and eight-year-old Faye, were laughing and playing with them like old friends.

  “You control individuals with guns and weapons, like Hitler did, but you control populations with food.” Shakespeare, wearing a brown denim apron, was on one knee, pulling weeds and lecturing to anyone within earshot. “The lettuce you see at Kroger, it’s coming from hundreds of miles away. There’s only a three-day supply in stores. What happens when the economy tanks or there’s a fuel shortage? I’m telling you, Margaret, you need to get on Jack’s case. He’s totally unprepared. I’ve been telling him this ever since we met.”

  Margaret glanced over at Pamela as if she’d seen a ghost. Unfortunately, her mother was buying into Shakespeare’s gloom-and-doom theory. That was all they needed, with all the other stress at home.

  “When everything collapses—and it’s only a matter
of time—food will be king. If food is cut off, you’ve got chaos. Societal bedlam. Pillaging. Theft. Gangs of looters. What do you do then?”

  Shakespeare grunted as he got up and moved on. Margaret stumbled in an effort to keep up with him, grabbing the crook of his arm.

  “See those blue tarps along the border? That’s our SPR—strategic petroleum reserve. Ten barrels of petroleum.”

  Shakespeare spoke in a deep, authoritative tone. The man had massive shoulders and a chest the size of a barrel. And, Pamela acknowledged to herself, with his curly black hair and large dark eyes, he was quite handsome in a rugged, outback sort of way.

  “In the shed we’ve got a dozen five-gallon metal tanks full of fuel, a riding mower, and seven bikes. What’s Jack gonna do when there’s no gas at the pumps?”

  Shakespeare excused himself to turn the meat. The aroma drifting over from the grill smelled scrumptious.

  The spacious backyard was enclosed by a five-foot-high wall of cut firewood, which formed a homemade fence about four hundred feet long. Earlier, Shakespeare had shown them his “H2O stash” in the crawl space beneath the house, which included numerous water storage tanks, each filled with a hundred and fifty gallons of potable water.

  A clanging bell.

  “Chow time!” Shakespeare rang a bell on a post next to the grill. “Grab a plate from the porch. We’ve got dogs, burgers, and steaks. Take plenty.”

  Sheena directed the guests to a spread that included potato salad, squash casserole, deviled eggs, chips, slaw, watermelon, cookies, and more.

  “The eggs are from our own hens.” Shakespeare nodded toward another small shed at the corner of the property as he set the platter of meat down. Pamela wondered what the neighbors thought of Shakespeare’s survival camp.

  The kids, red faced and sweaty, gathered with their plates on the porch steps while the adults sat down at a long picnic table in the direct sunlight. Eventually it seemed to dawn on Sheena that Pamela might be uncomfortable in the sun, and she dug out an old checkered patio umbrella, which she shoved into Shakespeare’s chest and asked him to set up.

  “So just what is it that you think is going to cause these food and gas shortages?” Margaret had chosen a spot right next to Shakespeare. He couldn’t know that he was poisoning the mind of one of the most paranoid human beings on the planet.