Mazzetti shook his head, “I doubt it, but I can’t discount him as a suspect. By Monday night he’ll be spilling his guts to me.”
Patty reached over and patted Mazzetti on the head. “That’s my bulldog. Now take me to the restaurant. Beating poor defenseless construction workers worked up an appetite.”
She caught Mazzetti’s smile as he turned toward Gi-Gi’s Italian restaurant.
John Stallings used all the tricks he’d learned looking for fugitives to try and locate his own father. So far he’d had no luck. The priest at the community center shared Stallings’s concern when he came by and explained that his father had not been by his room all day. They both immediately came to the same conclusion. The confusion James Stallings had been suffering was clearly an indicator of something much more serious. The fact that he had no car made it more ominous he was missing. He was out of the area and no one had seen him. That meant he had walked a long way or could be on public transportation anywhere in the largest city in the country.
From there Stallings stopped at soup kitchens where his father worked and ate. One kitchen was only open on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and no one at the second soup kitchen, located north of the municipal football stadium, had seen Stallings’s father all day. The kitchen was jammed with clean-cut young people busy at every section of the room.
A volunteer, older than most of the others, maybe in her early thirties, said, “What do you want?”
“That how you talk to everyone?”
“Only to cops that might scare our diners.”
Stallings smiled and held up his hands. “I’m just looking for my dad.” He explained the situation. He knew her name was Grace Jackson and she was well known in the Jacksonville area for her work with the homeless and as an outstanding teacher at a charter school in a rough section of the city. She had the determined voice and mannerisms of a woman on a mission.
Grace looked him up and down. “You got a good reputation as a cop.”
“You have a good reputation too.” He liked the smile on the plump, pretty black woman’s face.
“Your dad makes me laugh.”
“My dad?”
“I got similar issues with my father. I’m sure he’s a riot to people whose childhoods he didn’t screw up.”
Stallings laughed and realized why this woman was so effective. He slipped onto a stool and took a moment to clear his head.
Yvonne Zuni liked wearing a nice dress for dinner. She spent so much of her time in a profession dominated by men, having to act tough and having to dress professionally but also tactically, she sometimes felt like she was playing dress-up when she was able to actually wear a dress. She raced home, changed, put on some makeup, and brushed out her hair instead of the more drab, simple hairstyle she wore around the office. Now she wore it straight with a few curls on the side.
She didn’t even bother to drive her county-issued car; instead she grabbed her BMW M3. She’d been shocked no one had pulled her over on her way to Deerwood Park, with her treating J. Turner Butler Boulevard like the racetrack at Indy. There was definitely a different feel to the BMW from any of the American cars issued by the sheriff’s office.
For some reason, the southern end of the county didn’t feel like part of JSO’s jurisdiction and she started to relax immediately. The idea of a secret, but almost normal, date with a handsome man and no restrictions made her smile. Although the sheriff’s office would not approve of their relationship, she was confident no one she knew would possibly run into them at an intimate restaurant like Gi-Gi’s.
As she pulled in the parking lot she saw Ronald Bell standing by the valet and couldn’t resist squealing the tires when she brought the car to a precision stop. She appreciated his smile at the sight of her and threw caution to the wind as she watched the valet pull away in her car, embracing her date and planting a wet kiss on his lips.
She could sense Bell was a little nervous at the open display of affection.
Bell said, “It’ll be two minutes before they set up our table. We can go into the bar or just enjoy the night breeze for a few minutes. The choice is entirely yours.”
She loved the idea of not hiding. She also liked the idea she didn’t have to answer him. Instead she turned and planted another kiss on his lips.
She was so involved with the kiss she barely noticed the dark Crown Vic as it pulled into the parking lot.
TWENTY-FOUR
Sitting in the passenger seat of Mazzetti’s immaculate Ford Crown Victoria, issued by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, Patty Levine imagined she was in a limousine taking her on her first date. She couldn’t explain the feeling she was experiencing, but it was something near pride. The biggest of the seven sins. The one that brought down Lucifer. She didn’t really care. She was sitting in the front seat across from her attractive boyfriend, dressed in an expensive if slightly dusty suit, working in an exciting and interesting job, and she’d just kicked four guys’ asses. The University of Florida could not have prepared her for such an accomplishment. No drug could give her the kind of rush she had felt wading into the construction workers who had threatened her boyfriend. She’d felt her entire body get into each swing of her ASP and hadn’t been afraid to enjoy connecting with the beefy legs and bony arms. The way she felt right now, looking at Tony, she could skip dinner and drag him right to bed. Maybe this was the primal feeling that made men act the way they did around women.
Tony had recognized he’d been in deep shit and had liked having a tough girlfriend who could rescue him. Looking across at him now, Patty wondered how many women hit on him in the course of a normal day. She knew from her long professional association with cops that a certain type of woman was attracted to the excitement and mystery of police. Sometimes it was the uniform. Sometimes it was the plainclothes narcotics agent who could lay down a line of shit. Sometimes it was the romanticized image of the dogged homicide detective. Whatever the reason, there were women who were attracted to police officers. And her boyfriend was an educated, well-spoken, and good-looking police officer. Patty wasn’t prone to jealousy but a thought crossed her mind: maybe they were ready to move to the next level.
The outside of Gi-Gi’s Italian restaurant was ornate and busy. Cars were parked up and down the street as well as jammed into the small parking lot on the west side of the building. There was a circular drive with an overhang where well-dressed people were waiting for their fancy cars to be brought from the valet lot. Tony didn’t hesitate to pull in his county-issued Ford.
When the valet approached him, Tony didn’t pull out his sheriff’s ID. He gave him a good police look and said, “Sorry, pal, I can’t let you drive it, it’s a police car. Let me pull it in where it won’t be in the way.” He slapped five dollars into the valet’s hand and turned to Patty. “You get out and I’ll be back in one minute.”
Patty leaned across, kissed him on the cheek, and slipped out of the car. She watched him pull away slowly to where the valet was pointing at an empty space. Patty turned around and was shocked to see Sergeant Yvonne Zuni in a beautiful dress with her hair down in a much sexier style than she wore to work every day. Even more surprising was seeing the tough sergeant kiss Ronald Bell squarely on the lips. When Sergeant Zuni turned and saw Patty, she immediately whispered something to Bell, who quickly walked inside the restaurant.
Patty said, “Wasn’t that …?” She could read a slight appearance of panic on the sergeant’s face.
“Who was driving the Crown Vic?”
Patty let a slight smile wash across her face and saw the sergeant smile at the same time. They were two women bonded together in a profession dominated by men. Now they had a secret. There was no promise or oath. They each knew the other would keep her mouth shut.