by James Andrus
Stallings flinched and yanked his hands away from Grace as his father walked up, saying a loud voice, “Two of my favorite people sitting at the same table. This calls for a drink.”
Stallings turned his head and stared at his father in disbelief until the old man started to cackle and said, “For a cop, you’re awful gullible.”
Kyle spent a few minutes looking over the meager catch of the fishing boat. There were two wahoo, a snapper, and an amberjack that looked more like bait than a trophy fish. The customers must’ve agreed because none of them wanted to take the fish home with them. One of them was so shit-faced he wobbled across the dock and into the parking lot. Kyle was relieved to see he was only a passenger in a big pickup truck parked near the entrance.
He stood patiently while the first mate cleaned the snapper, cutting it into two small but equal fillets.
The mate looked up at Kyle and said, “You haven’t been out with us in a while. What’s wrong, school getting too tough?”
Kyle smiled and shook his head. “You know how it is during the holidays. I had to go home and visit my folks and school’s been getting real busy.”
“All Thanksgiving meant to me was an extra trip out to sea in the morning. I couldn’t believe how crowded we were. We did so well the captain even smiled for a few minutes on the way back.”
Kyle said, “Looks like a couple of your customers had a little too much beer out in the boat.”
The mate said, “Not my concern once they hit the cement. I don’t care if they drive off the highway into one of the swamps.” He moved fast to wrap up the fish and clean the table. Then he turned and jumped back onto the fishing boat as the captain revved the engine. The mate scurried around, untying lines as he yelled up to Kyle, “See you later, kid.”
TWENTY-ONE
Lynn had slipped next to the dock without anyone ever noticing her. She had waited in the shadow under a burned-out streetlight while the three customers from the fishing boat shuffled toward their cars. One of them look like he had trouble walking until he opened the passenger door of a Dodge 1500 and was able to pull himself in easily.
She noticed Kyle chatting with the older, weather-beaten first mate while the tall, lean man cleaned some fish. Then the man made a graceful leap onto the boat, waving to Kyle as he landed.
She stepped onto the dock toward Kyle. This seemed right. No one was around and he was not paying the least bit of attention. The knife was in her front pocket. She reached down with her right hand and started digging.
Her heart picked up speed as she realized it was time.
Stallings liked Grace Jackson’s idea of a quiet dinner together. The whole concept thrilled him and at the same time made him feel guilty. She was a very special woman, but he hadn’t given up on Maria, who, in an entirely different way, was a very special woman. Still, he felt something was unresolved with Grace. It was a lighter problem than he usually faced, and it made him feel like a little time by himself, down by the beach, might help him get his head on straight. His father had made him laugh tonight with his joke about getting a drink, but mainly it meant he had at least some more time with the lucid James Stallings. The effect of Grace and his father had lifted his spirits more than he could have imagined.
As he headed east, away from the city, he thought about a park with the marina where he used to take Lauren and Jeanie fishing on the big commercial fishing boats. Charlie was too young and he so loved spending a few hours alone with his bright and beautiful daughters. The sharpest memory was how horrified Jeanie had been when she saw the first mate clean a snapper someone had caught. The fish twitched just as the knife cut in behind its gills, and Jeanie screamed in terror and started to cry, instinctively running to her father’s arms and burying her face in his shoulder. She wouldn’t eat fish for almost six months after the incident.
It was little memories like that that could make Stallings appreciate the life he had experienced so far. It was still early and he thought he might get to see one of the boats dock.
That was exactly what he needed.
Tony Mazzetti wasn’t sorry he’d passed up a dinner invitation from Lisa Kurtz. He’d seen her enough over the weekend. Thank God she’d had to work Saturday and left him a full day in peace. He tried to get started on a couple of writing projects, but his recent rejections had his mind wandering in a way that wasn’t conducive to constructive creative writing. Instead, he read a couple of the magazines he normally submitted to, like Civil War Times and History.
He couldn’t help but compare Lisa with Patty, and it made him wonder if Patty had been scarce during their relationship. Because it seemed to him like Lisa was in his face every minute. Was she too available? Should he say anything? The idea of being lonely again terrified the homicide detective. And Lisa certainly had some excellent qualities. She was very pretty, was great in the sack, didn’t mind springing for dinner once in a while, and thought Tony was the greatest thing ever. On the downside, she’d only shut her mouth once while not eating during their entire relationship. And that was when she was focusing on a New England Journal of Medicine article.
Once Tony realized she focused hard on reading, he had supplied her with a number of back issues of magazines, two novels, and a textbook on police work that he told her was interesting. Anything to keep her engaged in reading as opposed to constant and irrelevant chatter.
Still, as he settled into a chair on his back porch and opened the magazine, he realized this was the kind of 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 Jaws, with blood and body parts floating all around the vessel.
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 dro
ve 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.
Before he could even see the ocean, he rolled down the windows and felt the breeze and smelled the salt air.
This had not been a bad evening at all.
Lynn let her hand slip down around the handle of the knife as the patrolman walked along the side of the road from his car to hers. She wasn’t sure exactly what she intended to do, but knew that it wasn’t a good idea to get a ticket so close to the site of the murder. When the cop spoke to her, all she could do was give him a good smile and hope he leaned down closer.
What surprised her was the response to her simple smile. As soon as he leaned closer, showing off muscular arms and a handsome face, the young man returned her smile and somehow conveyed to her that she wasn’t going to get a ticket. Instead he said, “You were going a little fast, weren’t you, ma’am?”
Lynn nodded her head. “I’m sorry.” She patted his hand, which was now resting on her car door.
The cop said, “That’s okay, everyone makes mistakes sometimes.” He looked up and down the highway. Then he smiled and said, “My name’s Martin.”
His friendly manner took her by surprise and she blurted out, “I’m Lynn.”
“Well, Lynn, would you consider letting me take you out to dinner one night and explain the dangers of speeding to you? We could avoid a lot of messy court time.”
He said it as a joke and not as any kind of threat. Lynn was stuck in a tricky position. Right now he didn’t know her last name. But if she refused dinner there was no guarantee he wouldn’t write her an official ticket or at least copy down her tag. She decided to give him her business card instead. All it had was the Thomas Brothers Supply number and not her personal cell.
The young cop looked at the card and said, “Thomas Brothers, that’s a big operation.”
“Biggest in Northeast Florida.” She’d learned to recite the line after the eldest Thomas brother decided to start saying it whether it was true or not.
The young cop was about to say something else when his radio flared to life. Lynn could only catch a few words but recognized “marina” and “fatality.”
The cop stood up and sai
d, “I’ll call you soon, but I’ve got to go to this accident. There’s never a fireman around when you need one.” He hustled back to his car and made a quick U-turn onto the road.
Lynn that let out a long sigh of relief as she saw his taillights fade into the darkness. Just from that brief encounter she knew that the cops already thought Kyle’s death was an accident. She also saw how susceptible they were to flirting.
She would never be caught. Just the idea made her smile.
TWENTY-THREE
Tony Mazzetti felt antsy as he entered the small white administrative building of the Duval County Medical Examiner’s Office. He still wasn’t sure what he was going to say or how he would to say it. The last thing he wanted to do was to hurt Lisa Kurtz’s feelings. That wasn’t entirely accurate. The last thing he wanted to do was be lonely again, but the concept of having to hide from your girlfriend did not make for a particularly positive relationship. He realized it late Sunday night when his ears were ringing slightly from the constant chatter of his new girlfriend. That was reinforced last night when he’d spent the evening alone and decided he preferred it that way.
He nodded to a couple of the administrators and the operations officer, a tall gregarious fellow who never let an opportunity pass to tell Mazzetti he did not hold detectives in high esteem. Maybe that was because the lanky former investigator taught a class on what cops shouldn’t do when they happen on to the scene of a homicide. He’d seen all the mistakes that could be made from trampling evidence to moving the body. He’d even yelled at a young JSO patrolman for placing a blanket over a nude women’s body in her own apartment, thinking that it was a sign of respect. The medical examiners’ operations officer pointed out to him that she had lost her modesty and the most important thing was finding out who’d killed her and left her nude in the middle of her living room.