Gypsy Tears: A Sean O'Brien Novel by Tom Lowe

Author:Tom Lowe [Lowe, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kingsbridge
Published: 2024-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

FORTY-SIX

Wynona was in her back office inside Moments in Time when she heard the jingle. It was the sound of the shop’s front door opening as someone entered. Wynona was alone in the antique store because her part-time employee, a student attending nearby Stetson University, Stephanie, had gone to lunch. Wynona came out of the office and walked to the front right-side area of her store, stepping behind the glass counter and cash register.

Through the aisles and racks of antiques, she couldn’t see who had entered. But she could hear hard sole shoes. Boots probably, she thought. And just by the way the person walked, she knew the customer was a man. Listening to a gait—noting the usual differences between the way an average man and woman walk—was something she learned as an FBI agent.

That lesson had kept Wynona alive in her past profession. She looked out of the shop’s large front window, studying the cars parked along Main Street. She knew the man in her store was in the back right corner near the art, mostly landscape paintings, on display.

She heard the customer walking slowly from the art section toward the antique radios and phonographs, the old floorboards beneath him creaking. Wynona knew it took a weight of more than 180 pounds to cause the cypress planks to groan in that section of the store.

She wasn’t sure why she felt a heightened sense of awareness, listening to the man’s movement around her shop. It’s a feeling she gets sometimes—an awareness in her genes handed down from her Seminole grandmother, who’d been the wife of a medicine man.

Wynona felt a chill and hugged her upper arms for a moment. She has customers—men and women—entering her store every day, with the heaviest traffic on Saturday. Most came to buy. But some stopped in to trade antiques or see if she would buy something they had.

Wynona thought of the teenage girl who’d recently entered the shop, wanting to sell an antique porcelain doll that had been in her grandmother’s collection. “The doll scares me,” the girl had said. “I get a weird feeling looking at her eyes, like she can see into my mind.”

The man moved. Walking slowly. Stopping and starting. There was a gap in the aisles, and as he browsed, Wynona could see his face. But he wasn’t browsing. He wasn’t looking at the old radios or Victrolas. He was studying the corners of the ceiling. Scanning—looking for something not sold. Security cameras. Wynona could tell by the way his head moved. He’d gone to the far section of the shop, turned around, and continued surveying the rest of the area.

Satisfied, he started walking toward the front to where Wynona stood behind the counter. What he couldn’t observe in the shop was not in plain sight. There was a single camera at the register, and it recorded the face of every customer who came up to the counter for a sale or to ask a question. The small lens was

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