He crept around the corner, closer to the flimsy, cracked sliding glass door that looked like it had been cut into the back wall by a third grader. The cement was unpainted and slapped around the sides to fill in the gaps. There was a chunk of wall missing near the handle, and the track looked bent.
The first hard rap at the front door made Stallings jump and freeze in his position. Another hard knock echoed through the house, and he heard Mazzetti yell, “Police, open the door.”
Stallings fought the urge to look in the glass door. Just his head in the door could distract the cops on the entry team not to mention the possibility of drawing fire from either a desperate killer or a cop.
He looked over his shoulder to make sure Ellis was in place and ready.
Then he heard shouting from the front.
Someone unlatched the slider from the inside and it creaked along its uneven tracks, wobbling like a tricycle with a crooked front wheel.
Stallings raised his gun as a teenage girl scampered out the rear with nothing but a floral pattern towel wrapped around her.
She turned and saw the gun, gasped, then froze right in front of the door, as the shouts inside the house grew more urgent. He heard, “Drop the gun.” Then a single gunshot.
Instinctively he dove onto the girl to knock her out of the line of fire the door provided. They fell onto the sandy ground with a hollow thump. The uniformed cop moved past them with his pistol up to protect them in case someone came through the door.
Stallings rolled to the side, looked at the girl, guessing her age to be about thirteen. “Are you okay?”
She was shaking and nodded quickly.
“You’re safe now. Everything is gonna be okay.”
From inside he heard Patty call out, “Clear.”
He stayed on the ground with the frightened girl as Ellis and his patrolman rushed inside.
It didn’t sound like things had gone well, but looking at this young girl, Stallings couldn’t care less if the case was made or not. She was safe. At least he still had his priorities straight.
Twenty-six
Stallings turned on the ground, still shielding the girl, then sprang into a low crouch with his pistol up. After a few seconds one of the young patrolmen leaned out and motioned Stallings inside.
Stallings stood and said in a low voice, “Stay with the girl.”
As he stepped to the door a black cat darted out the open door and shot across the tiny yard toward the cover of a neighbor’s hedge. He recalled the M.E.’s comment about cat hair being present on the victims’ bodies. Things were adding up to look like this might be their man.
Inside, Patty was frantically performing CPR compressions on a man with a bullet hole in his chest. Patty had carefully placed her hands over the wound to make an effort to keep the blood from pumping out onto the grimy tile floor. Mazzetti kneeled over the man and attempted rescue breaths after every thirty compressions Patty completed.
It looked to Stallings as if all they had done was keep the guy alive long enough for his heart to pump a puddle of blood that had spread across the entire front room.
In the corner, Rick Ellis had his arm around Luis Martinez’s shoulder. The big sergeant just nodded to Stallings letting him know it was okay. He knew better than to ask, “What happened?” Things would become clearer to him in the next few minutes. The important points were that the girl was safe, none of his team had been injured, and he was hoping this guy was the Bag Man and their problems were over.
Sirens began to tweak his ear from more than a mile away and from different directions. Stallings saw a pile of clothes that looked like the girl’s from outside. He scooped them up and headed out the open slider. The uniformed cop stood next to her but obviously wanted nothing to do with her. She stood by the house holding the towel and squirming nervously.
He didn’t want her to see the blood inside, so he led her around the front and then stood guard while she climbed in one of the police cars and got dressed. When she was ready he leaned in the window and started to chat with her.
“You okay, sweetheart?” He had patience. She’d tell him what he needed to know soon enough.
The girl nodded but started to sniffle.
“What’s your name?”
“You’re gonna call my parents.”
“Someone will. You can’t avoid that.” He thought about it, then said, “I don’t think you realize how much danger you were in.”
“How?”
“That guy in there could be a killer.”
“My boyfriend?”
“What?”
“My boyfriend.”
“If he was your boyfriend why were you running out the back?”
“Because I’m underage, and I didn’t want him to be in more trouble.”
“More trouble? What kind of trouble was he in?”
“For the pot.”
Stallings felt a lump in his stomach. “What pot?”
“The pot he’s growing in the garage. Isn’t that why you guys came to arrest him?”
Stallings didn’t like the direction this interview was going at all.
Stacey Hines allowed the cool sea breeze to wash over her as she lounged in a low folding chair on the grass above the beach. The wind had been just a little stiff, and she had suffered the stings of the whipping grains of sand earlier, so she’d moved back up to her current spot. Now the Tess Gerritsen novel she’d been reading sat on the grass next to her, and she reminded herself why she wanted to stay in Jacksonville.
She hadn’t called her family this week because she knew, as lonely as she was, they might talk her into coming home. It was the longest she’d ever gone without speaking to her mother. She worried about them and knew they worried about her, but this was the first time in her whole life she felt like she could make it on her own. She’d managed to find the apartment and had a decent job that paid her almost enough to live on. The little savings she had left would be gone by February, then she’d have to leave, but for now she just wanted to feel the ocean breeze, know that all she had to do was show up for work and try not to dwell on missing her family.
She sat up in the chair as two seagulls approached her cautiously. The bag of bread she always brought with her for the pigeons and seagulls was almost empty. She smiled, wondering if the seagulls recognized her from her other visits and the times she had fed them. No one else sitting on the grassy patch was being stalked by birds.
Stacey emptied out the bag so the few flecks left of whole-wheat bread sprinkled onto the ground. The birds pounced, pecking up every fragment; their little hip-hop dance made her smile.
Stacey looked to the side, near her car parked in the front of the small parking lot, and saw someone else feeding a trio of crackles or whatever the brown crow-like birds were really called. It was a man in jeans and a nice button-down shirt. He was even feeding them the same kind of bread she was. He cast it down in three separate piles so the birds didn’t fight over it.
There was almost no one else on the beach or up here at the park. She stayed in her chair, but hoped the man would walk over toward her. She wanted to talk to someone and liked the idea that the man thought enough ahead to bring bread for the birds. After five minutes when he hadn’t looked her way, she pushed up and out of her aluminum chair and headed toward him at a casual pace.
When she was a few feet away from him, Stacey said, “I was just feeding them too, but I ran out of bread.”
The man turned slowly, and it was the nicest surprise of the day.
Stacey smiled. “Hello there, what’re you doing out here?”