evening he would’ve loved spending quietly with Patty.
Kyle watched the froth at the rear of the boat again as the captain expertly revved and then slacked off the engines. He eased the beat-up fishing boat from the dock as the first mate raced to the front of the boat to untie the final line. Once again it was that mixture of smells and the sound of the engine that interested Kyle.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught a movement and started to turn toward the parking lot. Then he felt his world start to spin as he lost his balance and tumbled off the edge of the dock. He kicked his fishing rod as he slipped and saw it tumble to one side toward the water.
One second he saw the water, the next he saw the sky. He spun in midair until he saw the stern of the fishing boat and realized the water was the least of his concerns. He flailed his arms hoping to push himself off the stern away from the churning propellers. His heart fluttered in his chest, but he wasn’t able to call for help. He needed to gulp some air. When he finally had oxygen in his lungs he used it to scream instead of call for help.
Just before he’d struck the water he’d caught a glimpse of someone standing on the dock where he had been. It was a woman. But that was the last rational thought he had as the two propellers spun relentlessly, one striking him just below the knee, the other in his lower back. He even noticed the red in the water and heard the engines sputter as the captain must’ve wondered what he’d struck.
Several things raced through his mind. Specifically the curse of the Tau Upsilon fraternity flashed in his consciousness before his entire world went black.
TWENTY-TWO
Lynn had already made it back to her car by the time she saw the captain and the first mate even bother to walk to the rear of the boat and peer down into the water. It looked like a scene from
It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision to shove Kyle instead of sticking him with her knife. Now she could use the knife later. When she’d seen his precarious position and the blades of the propellers churning the water directly in front of him, it was almost an instinct for her to reach out and give him a little shove. She’d even been rewarded with a pretty good scream. Had water not filled his mouth and muffled his scream it might have even been perfect. But it would have to do for tonight.
She calmly drove out of the parking lot, checking her rearview mirror once as she pulled onto the main road. It didn’t look like either the captain or the first mate had noticed her as she drove off.
Her Nissan picked up speed as she headed west toward town. A smile crept across her face as that satisfied feeling of accomplishment surged through her body. She was glad she never had to explain the feeling to anyone. She wasn’t even sure what it meant to her. It wasn’t exactly joy. It was more of a sense of power. A chance to prove how important she was. A chance to complete the mission she’d given herself.
About three miles from the marina a blue light started to flash in her rearview mirror. She looked over her shoulder to see a police car directly behind her as she swore silently and pulled onto the soft shoulder of the road.
As she heard the cop step out of his car, she reached into her front pocket and pulled out her knife. It wasn’t an intentional act; it just seemed to happen.
Patty had politely refused Ken’s offer for her to come back to his condo. It had been a lovely dinner and he was charming as always, but she just didn’t feel like it tonight. After a quick drink and a few minutes lingering at the table, Patty and Ken had gone their separate ways and she found herself driving around Jacksonville in her Jeep Liberty. She never took a company car anywhere that she might have an alcoholic beverage. She usually refrained from alcohol because she didn’t want any interaction with her prescription meds. But she’d made an exception tonight and shared a bottle of pinot noir with Ken. Of course he knew the exact vineyard and year the wine had been bottled. He sure could pick his wine and food.
As Patty drove near the St. Johns River she realized she was close to Tony Mazzetti’s house. Her instinct was to drive by and say hello. Then she remembered Lisa and how unfair it would be to her if Patty showed up unannounced. Instead she headed back to her town house and her cat, Cornelia.
Tonight would be a two-Ambien night.
Officer Martin Haskell had been with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office for nearly two years. He’d spent almost the whole time in traffic and rarely got an evening off other than his two rotating days off. To keep things more interesting at work, the twenty-five-year-old had made a bet with his roommate, who worked in the Tactical Anti- Crime (TAC) unit, to see who could get the most phone numbers from pretty girls in a three-month time period. So far Martin felt like he was lagging behind. The more glamorous assignment in TAC had to help his roommate. The TAC unit spent a lot of time near Jacksonville Landing, making sure the big shopping and eating attraction was safe for the tourists who’d made the mistake of coming to Jacksonville instead of going to Miami or Orlando. The TAC unit also dressed in plain clothes or slick T-shirts with a cool JSO logo. Their assignment could be anything from following suspected criminals to doing minor stings to catching scam artists who preyed on tourists.
As soon as Martin caught a glimpse of this girl’s face in the rearview mirror of her Nissan Sentra, he realized he had to get her phone number. She had brown hair and an all-American, cheerleader look. He couldn’t see what her body was like, but based on her neck and shoulders he wasn’t worried. He didn’t even bother to call out the vehicle stop on the radio. He had stopped her because she was going eleven miles over the speed limit, but he already knew he wouldn’t write her. It was probably better he had no record of ever stopping her if he intended to ask her for her phone number.
He made sure his gig line was straight and she got a glimpse of his forearms that he worked so hard to make broad and muscular. He didn’t bother to approach the car tactically like he normally would because his best features were his abs and forearms and he needed to face her directly to show them off properly.
Martin hesitated at the door as he leaned down and said, “You were going a little fast, weren’t you, ma’am?” He was rewarded with a very beautiful smile. This was starting out to be a good night.
As he rolled down the highway, Stallings reflexively took his foot off the gas as soon as he saw the blue flashing lights of a JSO patrolman. As he eased past, he saw how the young patrolman leaned in to talk to a female driver and laughed out loud to himself. He knew the ploy uniformed cops used. He was already married by the time he joined JSO, but he had plenty of friends who’d met girlfriends or wives after stopping them for speeding.
Some of the other detectives would recall their time in patrol with fondness and even a certain degree of reverence, but Stallings was more practical. There was no doubt the patrol work could be fun, working with cops who were your friends and enjoyed doing something as interesting as police work. But that didn’t change the fact that with each vehicle stop there was constant stress and the knowledge that a simple speeding ticket could turn into something much worse. Every time a cop stopped someone for a traffic infraction, the cop had no way of knowing if the driver was on his way to work or fleeing some horrible crime. More than a few patrol officers had been shot in the line of duty simply walking up to a window of the driver who had rolled through a stop sign or been going a few miles too fast.
Stallings was aware that patrol officers were often the only contact the general public had with police. Often the public’s view of police work was shaped by TV and they couldn’t understand when the officer who pulled him over was short or irritable, as if they weren’t allowed to have a bad day. No one ever cut a surly patrol officer slack. And no one who was stopped speeding ever thought they deserved the ticket, only that they had been singled out.
After Stallings had passed the busy patrol officer he decided to skip the fishing docks and go directly to the ocean to fill his lungs with the clean, salt air. It was one of the few things he knew he didn’t do enough. He lived a mere fifteen minutes from the ocean but saw it fewer than five times a year.
As he zipped east on the highway, a patrol car with its lights on roared past him, followed by two fire rescue vehicles. He briefly considered following them to see if he could help but realized they didn’t need an older, plainclothes detective interfering with their duties.
