“I hate eating alone, Pudge. If I bought you a dinner, you think we could chat?”
“A three-piece dinner?”
Mazzetti smiled. “With an extra order of okra if that’s what you want.”
Yvonne Zuni knew this would be the best time to come by the apartment. She had an ASP stashed in her waistline and her Glock Model 27 in her purse where it was easy to grab. This was tricky, but she’d weighed the pros and cons and decided to knock on the door.
She heard a chain on the inside slide across the bolt, and then the door opened wide. The pretty, well- endowed blond woman in her early twenties stood in a tight T-shirt and short, short jean cutoffs. Even with no bra on under the thin T-shirt the girl had more curves than almost any woman Yvonne knew.
The girl smiled, revealing straight white teeth that contrasted nicely with her deep tan, which, Sergeant Zuni suspected, had no tan lines. “I didn’t think I’d see you again. I always felt like I should have thanked you more for what you did.”
“This might be a chance.” Yvonne stepped into the apartment without being invited and did a quick scan of the living room and hallway. “I know he still comes by sometimes.”
“About once a week.”
The sergeant tried hard not to say anything or show any disappointment. But the girl picked up on it immediately, embarrassed by her inability to give this guy the boot.
Sergeant Yvonne Zuni said, “You know he’s never gonna get serious.”
“That’s not the problem. You saw just how serious he can get. But I know what you’re saying. He’s never gonna make a commitment to me.” She sat down on the couch and put her face in her hands. “Everyone likes the idea of dating a stripper, but no one wants to bring one home to Mom.”
“In your case you’re probably better off not bringing that prick home to your mom.”
The young woman smiled and said, “He’s never even said anything about that night. Even with the ten stitches and the scar on his eyebrow, it’s like he’s blocked it out of his memory. He’s never mentioned the fight, what caused it, what he made me do, or how you shut him up.”
Yvonne sat next to the young woman and put her arm around her shoulder. “Right now he’s got another problem, and I’ve got to ask you some really hard questions. But first I need to know if you owe me enough to keep from saying anything to him.”
“You know how he is-I’m sure he’ll get me to admit that I talked to you. But I’ll do my best to keep the nature of our conversation secret.”
“I won’t put you in any danger.”
“I’ve been in danger since I dropped out of high school and started hanging out with lowlifes like Gary Lauer.”
Patty Levine sat in her county-issued Freestyle on the north side of West State Street. She could see Stallings’s Impala three blocks up on the other side of the street. She brought up her binoculars so she could get a clear view of the driver in the blue Nissan 300ZX stopped on the side of the road. Behind the sporty little car Patrol Officer Gary Lauer dismounted from his heavy motorcycle, checked both ways for traffic, then strutted up along the driver’s side of the vehicle.
She and Stallings had agreed that they needed to do surveillance on the two suspects. Unless something drastic happened this afternoon while they were following Lauer, they intended to pick up Chad Palmer as he left his office. Neither of them could clearly state what they hoped to gain by watching the suspects, but it was better than sitting around the office waiting for leads to come to them. That was one of the things she really admired about John Stallings. Despite his seniority and experience he was still interested and working every day.
It had been easy to find Lauer in the middle of his shift. All they had to do was monitor his zone’s radio traffic and listen for a stop. Based on his record he was an industrious traffic enforcement cop. It was Stallings who had picked three different spots where he thought Lauer would be working. Stallings called them “game trails.” Those were places where it was easy to hunt, because the game wandered along the trail. Lazy hunters and even lazy animals could find a comfortable spot to sit and wait for a target. In this case, Lauer sat west of the Arlington Expressway and waited for people to hit the slower speed on the on State Street. If traffic wasn’t bad, drivers tended to keep moving along quickly. That was money in the bank for a traffic cop like Gary Lauer.
Patty could see the driver was a younger woman. Lauer crouched down to look at her eye to eye through the window, and the way both he and the woman were smiling made Patty believe the young woman was very attractive too.
This was a trend with the burly motorcycle cop. The first traffic stop that she and Stallings had pulled up on was a pretty young woman in a Volvo S60. The stop before this one was an attractive woman with a cowboy hat driving a Dodge pickup truck. Patty could almost guess the line he was feeding this woman now. How he liked his job even though it was dangerous. How he had to go to the gym to stay in shape in case he was in a life-and-death struggle. How it was hard to find a woman that understood the stress of police work. Christ, she heard enough guys feed that bullshit to waitresses, strippers, and nurses that she knew all the lines by heart.
She used her Nextel phone to call up Stallings on the direct connect. “Whatcha think?”
“Statistically I wonder how many women he pulls over compared to men.”
“You think this is gonna get us anywhere?”
“I doubt it, but I did want to get a feel for how the guy worked. It looks like he uses the job as a way to meet women. It wouldn’t be an issue except for what we suspect him of. I’m still hoping the cop in him wouldn’t have any part of that.”
“My female radar, which has been honed over the years, says that this guy is a creep who does not respect women. I don’t think he’s above giving Ecstasy to a girl to make her come home with him.”
She kept watching Lauer as he stood up and patted the car with his left hand. He didn’t write a ticket or even a warning to the young lady, but he did hold a piece of notepaper that she’d given him. Patty said into her phone, “Looks like he just scored a phone number.”
“My guess is that this guy has volumes of phone numbers at home.”
He let the Nissan pull away, then climbed back onto his motorcycle. He slowly pulled into traffic, shutting off his rear blue light once he was rolling west again. He passed Stallings without even giving him a glance. That was when two cars moving at once attracted Patty’s attention. A silver Ford Taurus and a black Dodge Charger fell in behind Lauer on his motorcycle.
Then Stallings clicked her up on the phone. “Looks like we have company.”
“You saw them too?”
“I’d lay money that it was Internal Affairs.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because they’re about as subtle as a sledgehammer and can’t follow people for shit.”
Thirty-nine
Tony Mazzetti sat with Pudge in front of the fried chicken place for more than an hour. If nothing else, the little guy was entertaining.
Pudge said, “The word on the street is the shooters you’re looking for are, in fact, Caucasian. That would mean this could be the start of the race war I have foreseen for quite some time.”
“You don’t think it could just be a squabble over money or drugs?”
“You just assume that since young black men were shot they were involved in the drug trade. Is that what you’re saying?”
Mazzetti stared at the corpulent little man. “Yeah, Pudge, that’s exactly what I’m assuming. We did find a half a kilo of cocaine under one of the mattresses and thirty thousand dollars in cash.”
“I see you are skilled in the lessons of rhetoric and are prepared to debate me on the subject.”
“Actually I’m not prepared to debate you at all. I bought you dinner to see if you had any new information. Come on, Pudge, you see what’s going on here. No one benefits from an unsolved homicide. If you know something, now would be a good time to spill it.”
Pudge took a moment and turned to look Mazzetti in the eyes. “In this case it might not hurt to think the
