THE DEADLINE CAFÉ EPISODE #14

Jimmy spent his lunch hour with Sam, Oakey’s engineering student, on his laptop in the back room, checking out clues, dates, symbolic numbers and numerological meanings. He thanked the kid, who said, “Anytime, man.”  Then Jimmy tipped his cap to Lissa behind the counter and left the café, his head swimming with a fish bowl of ideas that went nowhere and a case that had gone cold.

Nothing made any sense. And Clash Gordon had come up empty, too. Said he needed special Fed Ex security clearance to get into the system and check the sender’s name. “Anyway,” Clash added as a consolation, “how many Enya fans can there be?”

The cold air was exactly what Jimmy needed to jumpstart his cop brain—that, and a report on his scanner to be on the lookout for a rooster on the lam. I knew the boss was wrong about the chains not using real chickens, Jimmy was thinking when a woman appeared right in front of him, blocking his path back to his cruiser.

Jimmy was still developing the full use of his natural powers of observation and deduction, but now his intuition was struggling with information overload. Here was a stunning beauty looking up at him with goo-goo eyes, short blonde hair under a black ski cap in a red ski parka (Wisconsin lift tickets attached), black ski pants so tight you could read the date on a dime, and knee high black boots. He ran her numbers in his head: 5’-5”, around 135 and maybe 35-36 years-old, 40 tops.

 “Can you give me a jump?” she queried.

 Jimmy D’s mind did a quick double-take.

 “What? Right, ok, sure. Where are you?”

 “Standing right here in front of you, Officer.”

“Good one, ma’am. No, I mean, where’s your vehicle located?”

“Over on Chicago Avenue. Right near that grocery store.”

“You mean ‘Holy Food’?”

 “I guess so. I just went inside for a few minutes to get a few things and when I came out my car wouldn’t start.”

“You leave it running? Lot of people do that.”

“No way. But I might have left my lights on. My ex said I should always put my lights on when the weather’s lousy.”

“Well, he was right about one thing, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“The lights, leaving them on. Not the part about him taking off, if you don’t mind my saying. Any man’d leave a woman like you, well, no offense, ma’am.”

“None taken, Officer.”  She studied his name on the badge and asked, “Can I call you James?”

“Jimmy’s better.”

 “Ok, Jimmy, thank you for the compliment.”

“You’re welcome! What’s your name?”
        

“Call me Leila May Fitzsimmons. But you can call me any time you’d like, Officer.”

By the time they got to the Whole Foods parking lot, they’d swapped a couple more bio bits, but before they got to Leila May’s car, the squawkbox on Jimmy’s shoulder went off. “Burglary on Sherman. Stolen tip jar. That café again. White male. About 18-20. Wearing a purple hoodie. Last seen running south on Sherman toward Church.”

No sooner had he returned his two-way to his shoulder pocket, Jimmy turned to see a man in a purple hoodie fitting the description running right toward him, like he had a football tucked under one arm, doing a skeedaddle down Church Street toward the lake, dodging shoppers and puddles as though they were Big Ten tacklers. Jimmy leaned in and nailed the kid with one shoulder, sending the tip jar into the air and the coins flying everywhere. Then Jimmy wrestled him to the ground like he’d seen a guy on TV grapple with a monster catfish.  He cuffed him.  And then?

And then Jimmy keeled over, lights out.