The Perfect Prey

Thirty-nine

Tony Mazzetti sat with Pudge in front of the fried chicken place for more than an hour. If nothing else, the little guy was entertaining.

Pudge said, “The word on the street is the shooters you’re looking for are, in fact, Caucasian. That would mean this could be the start of the race war I have foreseen for quite some time.”

“You don’t think it could just be a squabble over money or drugs?”

“You just assume that since young black men were shot they were involved in the drug trade. Is that what you’re saying?”

Mazzetti stared at the corpulent little man. “Yeah, Pudge, that’s exactly what I’m assuming. We did find a half a kilo of cocaine under one of the mattresses and thirty thousand dollars in cash.”

“I see you are skilled in the lessons of rhetoric and are prepared to debate me on the subject.”

“Actually I’m not prepared to debate you at all. I bought you dinner to see if you had any new information. Come on, Pudge, you see what’s going on here. No one benefits from an unsolved homicide. If you know something, now would be a good time to spill it.”

Pudge took a moment and turned to look Mazzetti in the eyes. “In this case it might not hurt to think the killers came from outside the neighborhood. White men are a convenient excuse to avoid the truth. Also you found cocaine and money. Wouldn’t successful drug dealers like those three dead boys have more cash than that?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Your search for the killers might be too wide. Perhaps you need to focus more on why those boys were shot than on who shot them. I don’t know anything firsthand, I just hear rumors. I still think the lovely Miss Brison might help you if you caught her in the right mood.”

Mazzetti was about to pull out a small notepad when he heard a sharp voice say, “Pudge, why you talkin’ to the po-po?”

Mazzetti’s head snapped up to see a thick young man in shorts riding low on his hips and no shirt standing a few feet away. Mazzetti stood up and faced the young man, his hand dropping to his right hip in case he needed to go for a gun. He wasn’t sure what to say to the allegation. He turned to see what Pudge’s reaction was, but the bench was empty and there was no sign of the street prophet.

A two-person surveillance team wasn’t very effective against seasoned drug dealers or the slick white-collar fraud guys who expected cops to be following them. But Stallings hoped he and Patty would be enough to keep a loose tail on a dumb shit like Chad Palmer. They had done all right following Lauer but backed off when they realized IA had their own ideas. Stallings didn’t care who solved the Ecstasy mystery as long as it was cleared up and out of his brain.

He’d slipped a portable tracker under the wheel well of Palmer’s BMW, and Patty was using a laptop computer in her car to keep up with the signal. The tricky part was getting close enough to see what Palmer did once he was inside another building. They had followed him from his office and waited while he worked out at a high-end gym downtown near the river. Then waited while he had eaten at a Panera Bread.

Stallings was surprised when Palmer rolled into the parking lot of the dance club south of the city. It was still early for the dance club crowd, but maybe he tried to maintain some kind of schedule. They waited about twenty minutes. Patty was dressed very casually, in jeans and a cute blouse with her hair up in a ponytail, and was wearing glasses in an attempt to be harder to recognize. It sounded lame when she told Stallings what she was going to do until he saw her and realized a guy like Palmer might not even pick up on her in the club. She looked entirely different from the way she had on Monday morning when they interviewed him in his office. She never failed to surprise the veteran detective.

After about half an hour Patty came out from the club and slipped into the front seat with Stallings.

“He’s in there talking to a very young blond girl at the end of the bar. It looked as if he knew her and she might’ve been expecting him. If we’ve got his car covered out here all we have to do is wait.”

“I don’t see any other choice. But if a girl gets in a car with him, I’m not sure I can let him drive away considering what we suspect him of.”

Patty looked concerned and said, “We’re probably not gonna have any PC. She was at least eighteen, and he wasn’t forcing her into anything that I could see.”

“I’ll find the PC if I have to.”

“I was afraid you might say that.”

He checked for Ann as soon as he walked in the club. She knew that he’d be there early, and he hoped that would be enough incentive for her to show up alone. He’d gone so far as to tell her he’d only be there for about an hour and certainly be gone by nine.

The best he could do was try to develop a new target who had joined him at the end of the bar. But the girl had used her cell phone too many times in the hour that he had spent with her to try and separate her from the herd. If she couldn’t sit there with him, downing Stolies on the rocks, and not have to chat with nine different friends, then there was no way he could slip away with her quietly.

She was pretty to look at and had a breezy manner, but it was mainly that light hair and pale blue eyes that held his attention.

Even the best predators went home hungry now and then.