JEFFREY WAS sweating under his bulletproof vest. The August heat combined with the weight of the Teflon vest would have felled an elephant by now. He had lost enough water from sweating to make the back of his throat feel like it had been rubbed with sandpaper.
“Good times,” Nick said, using his handkerchief to wipe the back of his neck.
Jeffrey bit back a cutting remark, asking instead, “What time is it?”
Nick checked his watch. “Ten after,” he said. “Don’t sweat it, Chief. Criminals got their own sense of time.”
“Yeah,” Joe Stewart piped up. He was Nick’s perp who had flipped, and from the way he was acting, Jeffrey imagined Nick had let the man do a little blow to keep the edge off. He was as wired as a Las Vegas street corner.
Jeffrey said, “You’re sure you don’t know anything about a missing girl?”
“How young is she?” Joe licked his lips. “You gotta picture of her?”
“Sit down,” Nick ordered, kicking at Joe’s shins with his pointy cowboy boots. Nick had gone all out for the part of a pedophile, and was wearing a pressed black shirt tucked into the tightest pair of blue jeans Jeffrey had ever seen on a man. Nick had even taken off his gold necklace and trimmed his beard for the occasion. Jeffrey imagined Nick lived for this kind of action. Truthfully, so did every cop Jeffrey knew, including himself.
“I tole you to sit,” Nick reminded Joe.
Joe slumped on the bed, scratching his arms as he mumbled something under his breath. He was a skinny kid, probably in his late twenties. Pimples littered his face like spots on a dog, and he had picked at some of them, bringing blood.
Jeffrey looked at Nick. “Did you have to get him pumped up like this?”
“You want him pissing in his pants?” Nick asked.
“Wouldn’t be much of a difference,” Jeffrey pointed out. Joe smelled almost as bad as the musty thirty-dollar-a-night hotel room they were standing in.
Jeffrey asked, “Are you sure the air conditioner isn’t working?”
“We turn it on, we won’t be able to pick up the audio,” Nick reminded him. “Settle down, Chief. It’ll be over soon.”
“What about Atlanta?” Jeffrey asked.
Nick’s eyes darted to Joe. The post office box in Grant that Dottie had used for the credit card was a dummy drop. A forwarding address had been given so that all mail sent to Grant would automatically be forwarded on to a different post office box in Atlanta. Jeffrey had asked Nick to set up a surveillance, hoping Dottie would show up.
“It’s in place,” Nick told him. “As soon as I know something, you’ll know something.”
Jeffrey’s phone vibrated at his side, and he clipped it off his belt. “Yeah?”
“Hey,” Frank said. “Patterson’s been in his trailer since his wife died this morning.”
Jeffrey felt the tension drain from his body. Maybe Patterson had canceled the meeting. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” Frank bristled. “He didn’t even go to the hospital to see his kid.”
“All right,” Jeffrey said. He snapped the phone shut and reported the news to Nick.
“Maybe we’ll be seeing Dottie?” Nick suggested. “Patterson’s no fool. He knows he’s being watched.”
As if on cue, two knocks came at the door, followed by a pause, then another knock.
Jeffrey slipped into the bathroom, leaving the door slightly open so as not to draw attention to it. He grimaced at the smell in the tiny room, which probably had not been ventilated since the Nixon administration.
Joe said, “Hey, man,” and the door squeaked open.
“Who’s this?” a man asked. Jeffrey strained to place the voice. The only thing he was certain of was that it did not belong to Dottie Weaver.
“Friend of mine,” Joe said. “He likes little girls.”
“Little, little girls,” Nick chimed in. “Know what I mean, hoss?”
“Let’s just get this over with,” the man said in a terse voice. “I got the van pulled up on the side of the building. Let’s go.”
Jeffrey waited until they had left the room before walking out of the bathroom. He kept playing the man’s voice in his mind, trying to place it, but no epiphany came. What did come was more sweat, and Jeffrey loosened the belt on his vest, wishing he hadn’t worn it. Sara had asked him to, though, and he had told her that he would. Maybe if she had considered that he might pass out from heat exhaustion, she would not have insisted.
The door was too dirty to lean against, so Jeffrey just stood beside it, sweating his ass off, waiting for Nick to give him the all-clear. To make the case stick, they had to get delivery, and that meant making sure the truck outside was filled with magazines.
To pass the time, Jeffrey counted to a slow one hundred in his head. He was around sixty-five when he heard Nick yelling, “Get down! Get down!”
Jeffrey pushed the door open, his weapon drawn. Nick had already taken down the suspect, and a lanky looking man in a black suit was face-down on the ground with his hands on the back of his head.
“Don’t move, you perverted motherfucker,” Nick told him, frisking for weapons. “Am I gonna find anything that’ll cut me?” he asked.
The man mumbled something, and Nick kicked him. “Am I?” he repeated.
A firm “No” came this time.
There were three other GBI agents covering the perp, so Jeffrey tucked his gun back into his holster as he walked toward the scene.
Nick was still so pumped full of adrenaline from the arrest that when he spoke to Jeffrey he was still yelling. “This your man?” he asked. “This the scumbag motherfucker?”
Jeffrey could tell from the back that it wasn’t Teddy Patterson, never mind the fact that Teddy would have had to have been Superman to get from Grant to Augusta this fast.
“Turn him over,” Jeffrey said, resting his hand on the butt of his gun.
Nick grabbed the guy by his cuffed hands and yanked him around so hard that Jeffrey thought he heard the man’s shoulder popping.
“Hold on,” the man yelled. He gave Nick a dirty look, and started to give one to Jeffrey before recognition came. All the color drained from the man’s face, and his lips parted slightly in surprise.
Jeffrey imagined he looked just as shocked.
Nick asked, “I guess you know him?”
Jeffrey couldn’t find his voice. He cleared his throat a couple of times before he could tell Nick, “His name is Dave Fine.”