come talk to me directly?”
Stallings immediately realized he was talking to Gary Lauer. In one quick motion he set down his sandwich and stood from his perch so he could face the motorman. “I did come talk to you face-to-face.”
“Then why’d you talk to my girlfriend?”
Stallings shrugged. “Where do you get your girlfriends, middle school?” He couldn’t resist baiting this asshole.
Lauer edged closer, an old intimidation trick that Stallings wasn’t about to fall for. He casually brought up his hand in a fist with his thumb sticking out in front of his index finger. He held it in place so when the younger man moved closer it would strike him right in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him.
Lauer said, “I know someone was by my girlfriend’s apartment asking questions about my vacations.”
Stallings knew to play dumb even though he wasn’t sure what the younger man was talking about. Besides, nothing provoked an irrational person like silence.
Lauer looked him in the face but stepped forward quickly, and Stallings felt his thumb mash into the uniform shirt. But the motorman was wearing a concealed ballistic with a steel shock plate vest over his heart and solar plexus. The move had no effect other than to hurt Stallings’s thumb.
Lauer raised his voice. “You think you’re better than everyone else because you put away a couple of big-time killers. But I got news for you, we all work hard around here, and I thought we all watched each other’s asses. Guess I was wrong.” Now he had Stallings’s back against a hedge.
“Look, you douche bag, you brought this on yourself. You like to scare women, like to boss them around-I know your kind. Younger women are easier to intimidate. If I find out you gave Ecstasy to any spring breakers you won’t know what hit you.”
“You got no juice left around here, old man. No one cares if you’re looking at me or not. I even got a decent overtime detail for a few nights. So you keep wasting your time while real criminals run loose around the city.” He started to edge closer, forcing Stallings back into the bush. Stallings let him push forward, then slipped to the side, turned, and smirked as the big motorcycle patrolman stumbled hard into the bush. He shoved his way back out and spun quickly to face Stallings.
Lauer said, “You better hope I don’t see you away from this building. Out on the street, your ass is mine. I’ll have another trophy to show off.”
Stallings smiled and replied, “You mean like a matching scar on your right eyebrow?”
Patty Levine was better prepared for tonight’s surveillance. She knew exactly what to wear to blend in at the tiny club on the southeast side of Jacksonville. Today she had on shorts and a nice shirt with her glasses and a baseball cap changing the shape of her face. She looked nothing like the professional detective who’d spoken with Chad Palmer on Monday morning. As a result she was sitting a few stools away from him and was even able to hear some of his conversation with the young woman on the other side of him.
She didn’t like watching Mr. Rich Kid, and she hated to see a guy like him attract so many very young women. He’d chatted with three different women in the short time she’d been inside. Maybe he’d do something tonight to expose his role in Allie Marsh’s death as well as the others.
She kept a casual eye on Palmer from down the bar. Two young men took stools to the right of her. The overpowering odor of Axe Body Wash made her eyes water slightly. After only a minute, the guy closest to her turned her way and said, “You go to school around here?”
Patty laughed involuntarily. She said, “UF.” Everyone in Florida understood that meant the University of Florida in Gainesville.
The young man smiled. “No shit, me too. What’s your major?”
Patty wondered if the young man was blind or just so drunk he didn’t notice the eight years’ difference between them. She knew how to end this quickly. With a casual turn of her head she said, “Physics.”
As she expected, the young man sort of nodded his head and turned back to his friend.
Her phone vibrated in her front pocket. She dug it out of the tight shorts, saw it was Stallings calling her, and flipped it open. She had to mash it to her ear to hear over the noise inside the bar. She knew to keep it very general on her side of the conversation and said, “Hey, what’s going on?” Her partner had been very quiet this evening. He mentioned a quick run-in with the detestable Gary Lauer at the PMB earlier in the day but didn’t go into any details. But she knew the confrontation had affected him. He didn’t want to admit a cop might be involved in any kind of crime against a young woman. As much as she disliked the motorman she wanted him to be cleared in this too.
Stallings said over the phone line, “You doing okay in there by yourself?”
Patty glanced over at the boy to her right, laughed, and said, “You’d be surprised how well I could do in here if I wanted to.”
“What about our boy?”
Patty turned slowly to see what Palmer and the young woman were up to. As soon as she faced his way he laid a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, took the young woman’s elbow, and they both started heading out the door. All Patty had time to say was, “He’s on the move now. He’ll be through the front door in about five seconds.” Now came the tricky part.
Forty-one
Tony Mazzetti sat in the dark office alone, wishing he’d become a fireman instead of a cop. No one expected anything of firemen except the obvious: spray water on a fire. The rest of the time they could work out, train, and sleep. Three things he liked to do anyway.
Instead he hunched at his desk, puzzling over the cryptic comment Pudge, the street prophet, had made. When the odd fat man said to look closer rather than farther, did he mean the neighborhood? The drug trade? The fucking Hess Party? He hated riddles like this. Good investigations were logical, direct, and straightforward. That’s why he was in homicide and not narcotics. Shit, he’d rather be in fraud than narcotics. At least he could still identify scumbags and know exactly what the crime was with fraud. In narcotics, victims were other scumbags and the targets were more scumbags trying to make a buck off dope. Usually in his homicide investigations he had forensic information to corroborate witness testimony. It was simple: Someone saw Joe Blow shoot Sam Citizen and the medical examiner pulls a thirty-eight slug out of Sam Citizen. Case fucking closed. But all he had in this triple shooting were nine-millimeter slugs inside bodies and a lot of holes outside the small house. Sure, the forensic weenies could tell that the killers used at least two guns and one of them had to be some kind of automatic weapon. They had fired from the front door and hit all three victims immediately. The only wounds in common were a single nine-millimeter shot to the head. They’d all been riddled with body shots, but each had a bullet in the head. Probably after this occurred, the outside of the house and a Lincoln Navigator parked in the driveway were hit a total of nineteen times. The crime scene guys counted thirty-four shots fired. None by the victims.
Now, for some reason, Mazzetti was concerned about something some crazy street guy had to say. The rumors on the street had all been conflicting. Some people saw a Camaro before the shooting; others saw a Cadillac Escalade with dark windows. Once the rumor about white men started, everyone jumped on board.
Mazzetti stared at his desk hoping some kind of answer would pop into his head. It wasn’t as if he had anything to do other than work right now anyway. Patty was stuck on some kind of bullshit surveillance with Stallings. He didn’t count on seeing her again until late. They said they would eat a very late dinner at her condo. It was kind of nice to look forward to spending time with someone for a change.
Mazzetti muttered a few curse words as he fixed his eyes on the file and thought, I hate open cases.
As soon as Patty told him their subject was on the move, Stallings sat tall in his seat to get a good view of the front door to the club. The parking lot had some cars in it but was by no means packed. He’d already identified Palmer’s BMW and could see both the front door and the car. There was no way the pharmaceutical rep would spot him sitting a couple of rows away in his nondescript Impala.
The door opened, and Palmer, dressed in jeans and an untucked oxford button-down long-sleeved shirt, strolled out arm in arm with a cute, and possibly drunk, young woman. Stallings was good at estimating ages and he put this girl at nineteen, twenty at the most. About right for the college students in this area of town and the clientele of this little club. Now he was faced with the real question of what these surveillances were trying to
