“I could never tell.”
“Maybe I can figure it out later. At your place.” Then she winked.
Was he wrong or were the hunts getting easier?
Lisa was glad she’d seen him in the club. Even though it was much less of an accident than he suspected. She had scanned the giant club with kids crammed into it like chickens at a commercial chicken farm. She didn’t much care for the stuck-up college girls, and it had nothing to do with her having flunked out of community college. Who cared if she knew who wrote the Odyssey or how to figure out the outside distance of a circle? She could never remember if it was called the radius or the circumcision or maybe it was the circumference. She got a lot of worse things confused. She felt that she was basically a decent person and always tried to do the right thing. And the right thing in this case was letting this good-looking guy know that she was interested and he couldn’t ignore her.
Ever since her first boyfriend, Lucas Martin, had started to ignore her until he finally ended up sleeping with that bitch Peggy Lynn, she’d made it a point to keep a man’s attention. It usually didn’t work out that well, and she had two restraining orders to prove it. That didn’t mean she couldn’t keep trying. And that meant using the assets and talents that God had given her. That’s what the pastor had said at the Hahira Baptist Church. He had a whole sermon about using God’s gifts in the best possible way. God had given her a big, beautiful butt. It was so perfect it was a legend in Hahira, Georgia. In fact, there was no black man under the age of thirty who didn’t dream about her ass on a regular basis, and she knew it. Right now she was using the great ass God had given her by grinding it against this guy’s crotch on the dance floor of the giant club.
She’d taken the X tab that he’d given her, and between dancing with this guy’s tight, hot body next to hers and the drug, her heart felt as if it were about to jump out of her chest. Sweat had made her hair dampen and hang down into her eyes, but she kept grinding and moving to the beat. This was why she’d come with her friends on spring break even though she wasn’t really on spring break. This was more fun because she didn’t have to worry about getting back to some dreary class on writing or mathematics. She wished she could stay longer than a week, and if she had her way, that’s exactly what this guy would ask her.
Leonard Walsh trailed Stallings, yammering in his ear, “Wait, I’ll talk, I’ll talk.”
“I know you will.”
“Then why don’t you stop walking around?”
“Because now I want to know what kind of setup you have. Might be dangerous, and I don’t want to risk you getting hurt by substandard lab practices.” He stopped just short of the small trailer. He’d already made sure Patty was well back, ready to respond if he had to tussle with Leonard and far enough back to be safe if the little trailer blew for some reason. Meth production was a tricky, dangerous business, and more than one redneck had bought the farm trying to get rich in the competitive meth market.
He placed his hand on the trailer’s flimsy doorknob.
Leonard said, “Wait.”
Stallings paused.
“You don’t need to look in there.”
Stallings jerked open the door, and the smell, like rotten fruit, almost knocked him over. The trailer had four huge tubs and a barrel in one corner. The rear windows, open to the wide, empty field, provided rudimentary ventilation.
“Damn, Leonard, I’m impressed. This is a good setup”
The rangy redneck smiled, showing his yellowed teeth. “Thanks.”
“You don’t have any matches, do you?”
Leonard pulled out a frayed book. “Why?”
“Can’t have any possibility of an open flame.”
“Yeah right, good idea.”
Stallings turned and pushed him back outside, taking the matches out of Leonard’s hand as he did.
“Now, did Jason give you the new recipe?”
“Not yet. We were paying on installment. I still owe him sixty-five hundred bucks.”
“Do you know how to find him right now?”
Leonard shook his head. “It’s not like he owes me money. I owe him. He should be easy to find, but he ain’t.”
“Any ideas where he might be?”
“Nah. The manager of his apartment told me some black fellas was looking for him. I think he might have promised too many people things, and now he’s laying low.”
“He ever make anything else for you, like Ecstasy?”
Leonard nodded, digging into his pocket. He pulled out a small vial with three speckled tablets in it. “He tried to convince me that these were more profitable than meth. He said this X was cheap to make and easy to sell. I think that dumb-ass college boy didn’t understand that out here there ain’t no spring break partiers. Out here we need meth.”
“No idea where he might be?” Stallings said, casually collecting the vial from Leonard.
Leonard shook his head. “Said he had a girlfriend, but never said where.”
“Mention a name?”
“Called her Miss something. Baxter or Barnes. Hell, I can’t remember. All I cared about was our meth recipe.”
Stallings turned to Leonard and said, “Okay, you’ve been helpful. Now run.”
“What?”
“Run, Leonard, run.”
“Why?”
Stallings struck a match from the pack Leonard had provided. He looked over his shoulder at the meth trailer and smiled.
Leonard yelled “No!” but turned and started loping away toward his double-wide.
Stallings tossed the match inside the door, watching it ignite the cheap synthetic rug.
He jogged away; then the first of the tubs ignited.
On the ride back toward Jacksonville, Patty Levine looked across at her partner. “Why’d you light the trailer on fire?”
“Couldn’t leave an active meth lab intact.”
“But it’s Baker County. We had no jurisdiction.”
“Even if we did, we had no PC.”
“Aren’t you the least bit concerned he might make a complaint?”
“What’s he gonna do? Call in and complain someone blew up his illegal meth lab?”
Patty grunted and focused on the road.
Twenty-eight
On the drive back from blowing up the meth lab, Stallings stopped in a subdivision near Jacksonville called Normandy. He hoped to catch one of the other men in the Wildside video at home. Chad Palmer was a pharmaceutical rep who looked as if he made a lot of money. He was twenty-nine years old, appeared to be in good shape, was good looking, and shouldn’t have been hanging out at a bar that catered to college kids. That was enough to make Stallings want to talk to this guy.
The one-story, ranch-style house, with a perfectly manicured lawn and a load of plastic toys sitting on the front porch, wasn’t showy but seemed comfortable. He let Patty take the lead, knowing that the sight of her often set people at ease. The idea that a cop like Gary Lauer could be involved in giving drugs to young college girls gnawed at him. Stallings hoped someone like this guy Palmer might be their man.
Patty mashed the doorbell and waited. That detail demonstrated the difference between her and Stallings. He would’ve pounded on the door as he had a thousand times before. He stepped to one side and muttered his little mantra to himself, “Is this the day that changes my life?” Patty rarely even reacted to it anymore.
The door opened a crack, and a pretty young woman with green eyes peered out at them. She was in her
