Stop Me (Last Stand #2)(27)
Author: Brenda Novak

I tell her she was speeding, ask to see her driver’s license and, of course, the tears start. She doesn’t have it. It’s not in her purse, at any rate. She blubbers through the usual excuses, telling me she recently lost her purse. I smile but keep writing the ticket. So she switches tactics and asks me, in a sultry voice, “Is there anything I can do to get you off, Officer? I mean, to get you to let me off? I don’t have the money for a ticket. And my boyfriend will absolutely kill me if my insurance goes up again.”

Her boyfriend is paying her insurance bill? At this point I have to ask myself if he’s even dumber than she is. What some guys will do for a good lay, huh?

That was it—the end of the account.

Why had he chosen to write about a fairly routine traffic stop?

Jasmine checked the date of his other entries. He’d posted this out of the blue, after he hadn’t written for three weeks, and he didn’t follow it up with anything else for another ten days. It was the only entry that didn’t deal with blood and guts and a Sherlock Holmes style of unraveling the mysterious. The next blog referred to the Blond Bimbo, too, as if his meeting up with her had been really out of the ordinary.

Surely, there had to be more interesting incidents in the life of a cop than getting propositioned by a woman with no morals. That had to happen occasionally, didn’t it? Especially if a cop seemed susceptible—by staring at cle**age down to a woman’s knees, for instance? After all, contact with desperate women of low character pretty much came with the job.

Jasmine read the entry again. What some guys will do for a good lay… How did he know the blonde was a good lay?

Suddenly, Jasmine rocked back. Could he have taken her up on her offer?

Something had happened, something more than he’d spelled out.

She looks like some kind of  p**n  star, you know? The kind of woman who makes you roll your eyes and adjust yourself at the same time. He liked what he’d gotten that night. Liked the perks that sometimes went with being a cop.

“Is anything wrong?”

Jasmine glanced over her shoulder to see Mr. Cabanis’s daughter watching her from the front desk. “No, why?”

“You have this…sort of disgusted expression on your face.”

With good reason. She was sickened that a man like Black had ever been allowed to wear a badge. Was he the one who’d leaked the information about the illegal search? And, if so, what did he get out of it? After reading Pearson Black’s online journal she guessed he never did anything that didn’t benefit him in some way.

Jasmine was sure it was Black, although he’d lost a few pounds since the picture on his blog was taken. He’d converted that fat into muscle. At least that was how it looked to her. As she drove by him, she couldn’t see any evidence of the rounded paunch he’d had or the double chin. He was a tall, thick-necked man who wore his security jacket unzipped despite the cold and obviously took weight lifting very seriously. With his build, his face shadowed by stubble and hair rumpled enough to make Jasmine wonder if he’d bothered to run a comb through it before going to work, he looked mean in the way some pit bulls look mean. As if he should be wearing a spiked collar.

He leaned against his sedan in the dim light of the parking lot and put out one cigarette only to light another.

The lounge Kozlowski had mentioned was called Shooters. It was nestled between a liquor store and a bargain remnant store just down from Big Louie’s.

Jasmine frowned when she saw the name, hoping it’d been inspired by shot glasses of booze and not by the number of drive-by slayings in the area.

Finding an empty parking stall between the bar and the supermarket, she made sure she had her Mace, turned off the engine and got out. It was unlikely the ex-cop would be dangerous; he had no record of violence. But he wasn’t her only concern.

The lounge had iron bars on the doors and windows and graffiti on the walls, and so did the supermarket and almost every other house or retail establishment within three blocks. This wasn’t the kind of neighborhood in which she really wanted to be alone.

She wasn’t all that confident Black would risk himself to protect her, despite those muscles and the security emblem on his car.

As she crossed the section of parking lot between them, she tried to get a feel for the safety of the situation and the man she was approaching. But she felt nothing that gave her any real guidance, except a general anxiety—what anyone else would feel, she supposed. It wasn’t as if she could use her gift on demand. Occasionally, she suspected it might be possible to develop her psychic powers to that point, but there were too many drawbacks. Growing more sensitive to such input meant constantly having thoughts and feelings that were not her own, and she didn’t want to live that way. It was difficult enough when she had to explore what she could pick up on the cases she worked.

Her boot heels clattered on the pavement as she walked. Noticing her coming toward him, Black straightened and blew the smoke from his cigarette off to one side. “You must be lost,” he said, giving her the once-over.

She waited until his focus reached her face. “I look that out of place?”

“Have you seen the women in this part of town?”

She’d actually seen more men than women. Several were hanging around outside the door of the lounge, talking to each other and watching her. One had whistled when she got out of her car, another was currently indulging in a few catcalls that included commentary on how well she fit into her jeans. “Are those women you mentioned the type who make you roll your eyes—and adjust yourself at the same time?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow at him.

One eyetooth had grown in like a fang, and it showed as Black laughed. “No, they’re whores and crack addicts. Not half as pretty as you. No temptation to me at all.”

She ignored his allusion to her appearance. “The blonde was a temptation, though, right? Lola? The one you pulled over for speeding a year ago?”

“She was a temptation, all right. Until I found out that she was a he.”

Jasmine didn’t know how to respond. “You’re kidding, right?”

He chuckled softly. “No.”

“How’d you find out?”

“When I insisted I wouldn’t accept the driver’s license she—he eventually provided, which gave his name as Henry Hovell, he decided to show me proof.”

“Why didn’t you add that to your blog? It would’ve made for a great twist at the end.”