“I’m not saying you have to settle down, I was just wondering why you don’t,” his sister started. “I mean you spend most nights away from here anyway, but you never give me any clear idea of whether it’s with one girl or a hundred different ones.”
He didn’t answer directly, but he had to smile about keeping his apartment secret for so long. He’d met his landlord, Lester, at the Wildside when Lester was delivering alcohol from his beverage truck. He’d struck up a mild friendship, and Lester had offered him the detached apartment behind his house for a few hundred dollars a month. He wasn’t nosy and asked no questions, which made him a great landlord.
His sister said, “Mom worries because you live with me. I have no idea why. What happened with you two?”
“Same stuff that happens in all families. She doesn’t approve of some things I do, and I don’t give a shit.”
“She said she had a psychiatrist she wanted me to take him to'-she lowered her voice and nodded toward his nephew watching TV in the next room-'to see about expanding his vocabulary.”
He looked over at the boy and nodded his head. He didn’t talk much either when he was a kid.
His sister continued. “Of course she doesn’t have any money to help with the evaluation.”
“I got some cash if you need it.”
“You already do too much for us now. Let’s see what happens with him in the next few months, and then I’ll decide if we need to be more proactive.” She patted his hand, stood from the stool, and turned to finish making their lunch.
He sat on his stool at the kitchen counter and gazed at his nephew. The sound on the cartoon his nephew was watching was turned down to almost nothing as usual. The boy didn’t like to crowd his senses with unnecessary sights and sounds. It was quiet enough to hear the heavy trucks behind the commercial buildings on Cleveland Street. He saw a movement through the sliding glass door in the backyard. The neighbor’s cat was strolling through as if he owned the place.
He caught his nephew’s eyes tracking the cat. He didn’t move his head or show any interest other than his sharp eyes assessing the cat and the terrain.
The boy was a predator himself.
Forty-three
Yvonne Zuni was utterly exhausted. She’d been called out from her home shortly after Stallings had been involved in a fight outside a club in southeast Jacksonville. At least that’s how she was phrasing it to anyone she talked to today. She grabbed a few hours of sleep in her office because she wanted to head off the inevitable Internal Affairs investigation into the incident. Now, still at the PMB, she sat across from the senior IA investigator, Ronald Bell, in the small snack bar near the main entrance.
The sergeant wanted to stress the point one more time that Stallings had observed what he believed to be a serious crime and acted in the safety of himself and the female with Chad Palmer. She knew Stallings and Bell had a history and realized it had something to do with the disappearance of Stallings’s daughter a few years ago. Personally, she liked the handsome, older detective because he’d never filed an official report when she had to crack Gary Lauer in the head with an ASP. It’d been a stressful time and a stressful night. When Lauer started to scream at his pregnant girlfriend, Yvonne Zuni had snapped. Although she liked to think she’d given him a warning, in reality she popped the ASP and swung it before she or Lauer knew it was coming.
If it hadn’t been for the nine stitches and the hospital visit, she doubted anyone at the sheriff’s office would have ever heard about the incident. Lauer was embarrassed he’d lost control, and he was embarrassed a woman half his size had knocked him off his feet and sent him to the hospital. But cops being cops, stories were told, and rumors ran rampant through the department. Finally Ronald Bell had knocked on her door and asked a few simple questions. He could’ve made it into a big deal but instead wrote it off as a personal conflict and had Lauer moved from his temporary duty assignment in narcotics back to the motor unit where he figured everyone would forget about it and Lauer would have no chance to bother anyone else while he wrote tickets on the expressways headed east from the city or any other direction to somewhere nicer.
Bell looked over his coffee at Yvonne Zuni and said, “We can probably write this whole thing off. Mr. Palmer is not interested in losing his job over distributing samples of a narcotic. We searched his house pretty carefully and all we found were other manufactured pharmaceutical samples. We found no homemade Ecstasy or any signs he ever tried to make it. This incident could be a notch in my belt, but I’m willing to let the whole thing slide for the sake of that crazy son of a bitch you call a detective.”
Yvonne knew not to say anything, but a smile crept over her face.
Bell continued, “I strongly recommend you send that unstable moron home for a few days to cool off. We can’t have him think he can get away with this kind of shit all the time.” He rubbed his eyes and looked at Sergeant Zuni. “Even though he’s been doing it for years.”
She casually reached across and placed her small hand on Bell’s, and said, “You know he’s a hell of a cop and has done a lot of good. He just has some issues.”
“We all have issues.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
Stallings was restless as he contemplated his life at the small, quiet house he’d rented in Lakewood. It was odd being home in the middle of the day. The fact there was no one here gave him a sense of emptiness almost as deep as he felt after Jeanie disappeared. But there was nothing for him to do at this little house. No yard to cut. No dishes to do. He barely lived here except to use the bed every night.
He jumped in his car, not sure what his status was as a police officer, but since no one had told him not to, he decided to use the county car as he always did. He cruised by his mother’s house to make sure she didn’t have any chores he needed to do. He found her as he usually did, sitting on her back porch reading a novel.
“Hey, Mom.”
As usual he had to wait a second until she finished the paragraph she was reading. Finally she looked up and smiled. “What are you doing here in the middle of the day?”
“I, um, took a day off.”
His mother chuckled. “Sometimes you remind me of your father. For all his faults he was a poor liar too.” She closed the hardbound book on her lap and smiled at her son. “I heard you ran into him on Sunday.”
“I figured one of the kids would blab it or Helen would hear about it and tell you.”
“Actually, I heard it from your father.”
Yvonne Zuni had to admit to herself she enjoyed Ronald Bell’s company, and for the second time he’d proven he was a stand-up guy. She realized she was looking for reasons to keep talking to the dapper detective. The red tinge to his face, coupled with his casual but expensive sport coat, made it seem as if he was wind-burned from sailing, but she realized that in fact, as it was with most cops, it probably had a lot more to do with alcohol. Finally she said, “What about your people’s surveillance of Lauer? I haven’t shared with my detectives that we had split the case. I did tell them we’d given Lauer an overtime detail at a soup kitchen near the stadium.”
“Well, it’s partially true he is working the detail at the kitchen, but I’ve had two people keeping tabs on him until we think he’s down for the night. The problem is he knows the roads and the traffic enforcement better than anyone else and drives like a NASCAR champion. The only time he obeys any traffic laws and signals is when he’s in uniform, on that big bike of his. He went by his girlfriend’s apartment, the one where you had the incident last year, but was only inside about ten minutes. It seems like all the guy does is lift weights and eat giant subs. Last night he went straight home from the overtime detail at eleven o’clock and had not left his condo by two when my detectives shut down their surveillance.”
“Seems like you guys have it covered pretty well. Is there anything I can do to help?”
Bell took a moment to consider it, then said, “I’d be happy if you could just keep the muzzle on Stallings. I have no problem with letting the whole thing drop, but he needs to go at least a day without clocking someone.”
“Some of it has to do with stress. And he’s been under a tremendous strain for a long time now.”
Bell said, “I’ve heard that before, but it doesn’t excuse his behavior.”
