A small group of onlookers had begun to gather. Sullivan waved them away. “Where’s your partner?”
“Called off sick. Paul didn’t replace him. I’m alone today.” She looked over her shoulder to see if Paul was on his way. She had expected him to show by now. Sharon should have alerted him immediately after calling 9-1-1. “He’ll be here directly.”
“All right.” Sullivan cast his attention to the man between them. “You have a name, sir?”
“John,” he said. “John Doe.”
“Okay, Mr. Doe, we can do it that way. Are you hurt?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, I ain’t moved. Most people would figure that means I’m hurt.”
“Where are you hurt?”
“My knee. My knee hurts something fierce. My chin. I think I cracked my head.”
Ramsey pointed to John Doe’s left knee. “He was limping before he fell. He scraped his chin when he turned his head. He put out his hands to protect himself when he was going down. You can check them out. He might be a crack head, but I sincerely doubt he cracked his head.”
“I’m going to call for an ambulance, just to be safe.”
Ramsey nodded and then almost lost her hunkered balance as Paul Shippensmith’s take-no-prisoners voice thundered from somewhere behind her.
“Nothing to see here, folks!” he told the dawdlers who had been slow to move away when Sullivan waved them off. “If you’re going in, go now. I’m going to lock these doors and you’ll have to use the other entrance. If you were on your way out, then you should go to your car. Officer Day has the situation well in hand.” He flapped his arms, shooing, waving, but mostly just flapping, and the stragglers moved on. He nodded and waved at the employee waiting inside the store for his signal and doors were locked.
Ramsey saw that Todd Lancaster, whose usual job was collecting carts from the parking lot, was now acting as a human signpost, pointing new customers away from the goods and services entrance and directing them toward the doors at the marketplace or lawn and garden.
Paul stepped beside Ramsey. “Are you all right…?”
At first Ramsey thought he was speaking to her, but when he added “sir” she realized the inquiry was meant for the meth head. Under her breath, she said, “Nice, Paul. Real nice.”
“I heard that,” he said, regarding her from under a beetled brow. “I’ll get to you.”
Sullivan drew the manager’s attention to him. “I’m going to call the EMTs, but first…” He pulled out his handcuffs, bent, and fastened the bracelets around Mr. John Doe’s wrists. He noticed that the man’s palms were scraped and skinned, supporting Ramsey’s assertion that he had tried to protect himself from going down too hard. He moved off to one side and tapped the transmitter attached to his uniform’s shoulder. While he spoke to dispatch, he watched Ramsey and her boss step away from Mr. Doe and begin what looked like a heated exchange. Shippensmith’s voice still rumbled but he had turned the volume down. Ramsey spoke through a clenched jaw. Sullivan couldn’t hear a thing either one said.
When he returned, they stopped talking, but he didn’t think they were done. “Ambulance is on its way. Shouldn’t be more than ten minutes. There will be a patrolman waiting for him at the ER. I’m staying here. I need to take your statement.”
“Of course,” Ramsey said.
Paul set his mouth in a flat line and merely nodded.
Except for an aggrieved protest now and again from Mr. Doe, they waited in silence. Sullivan spoke briefly to the EMTs as they rolled their patient into the bus. John Doe had his rights read to him and was now handcuffed to the stretcher. Once the ambulance was off, Sullivan moved his car to a parking space and went to meet Ramsey and Paul in the loss prevention holding room.
He took a chair at the table opposite Ramsey. “Where’s your boss?”
“Coffee run. As much as he drinks, he should take it intravenously. He’s bringing you a cup.”
“Great.” Sullivan shifted his gaze from Ramsey to the closed door and then back to her. “Listen, before he gets here, I need to say it was pretty foolish of you to tangle with that guy.”
“I never touched him. There was no tangling.”
Sullivan heard nothing defensive in her tone. She was simply stating a fact. “All right, no tangling, but you’ve been doing this long enough to at least suspect he was high. And if he’s not a cooker, then he was stealing that stuff for someone who is. The stoves. Lighter fluid. Batteries and bleach.” He glanced at the cart angled in one corner of the room. “I see jeans.”
“Overalls. I watched him pick them out. They’re not his size. Just cover for the stuff he really wanted, or maybe he pinched them on an impulse. He was twitchy.”
“That speaks to my point.”
“It spoke to Paul’s point as well.”
“Ah, so that’s what he was saying to you while I was talking to dispatch.”
