Toy Store by Michael Davidson

Author:Michael Davidson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: urn:uuid:00000978-0007-8289-0672-000000000003
Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc
Published: 2019-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Several employees at Trader Joe’s had noticed the two attractive women earlier and according to the cashiers they had not made a purchase. Almost as an afterthought Sgt. Bagley asked if Mark Salatori was working. He was told Mark had stayed late stocking the coffee shelves, but had left for home about the same time the women left the store. The Sergeant asked for an address and settled for a telephone number. After he called the station assigning a unit to find Mark Salatori, he got out his little black telephone book and started calling numbers for Jon Sadler. On the third try he located Jon on his cell phone and was surprised to find that he and Darth were returning from San Diego. It occurred to him vaguely that he, Jon, and Darth were unavailable when the women entered the mall. Next, at Jon’s request, he’d called Larry Radino.

When Eric Delano finally realized that one of the missing women was the Sergeant’s girlfriend he understood the uncommon behavior he witnessed earlier. It was then that he’d taken it upon himself to request a full alert on the location. He, and four other ‘uniforms’ were systematically entering each closed and boarded up shop when something occurred to him. Sgt. Bagley listened stoically to the officer’s account of his first early morning patrol of the mall corridors and his run-in with an assailant. Delano said nothing of his own private hallucinatory fears not sure of what the fall-out would be. Delano was nervous as he fumbled with his lock-pick at the door of the vacant store nearest where he collided with the unidentified man. It was the first time he’d actually used the pick on a real case.

The Sergeant had his face to the glass store front, trying to get a look into the dark interior. There was something about the . . . “this window has been cleaned!”

“Sir?”

“This window, it’s been cleaned recently,” Sgt. Bagley said. “Who the hell cleaned it?”

Somehow the thought of the shop window being cleaned made Officer Delano feel as thought he were going to vomit. He closed his eyes and tried to relax his fingers. That’s when he felt the lock release, and at that same moment the corridor lit up like the old Nevada test site when an atom bomb was set off. As he looked down the hallway he thought about the tunnel people describe in those near-death experiences. Sgt. Bagley pushed by him and entered the store, which was virtually empty except for a few ceiling tiles that lay on the carpet. There was a sawhorse and an empty cardboard box against the wall near the door. Sgt. Bagley walked to the rear of the room, bent down and picked up . . .

“Find something, sir?”

“Just an old toy. It’s broken. He handed the toy truck with a missing wheel to the officer.

“A Tonka. I had one like it when I was a kid.”

“I guess we all did, son.”

“Sergeant?”

Sgt. Bagley’s head snapped up.

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