Delta Stevens 2: Storm Shelter Read Free Page B

picked up the mike and answered that they were less than two minutes away.
    Flipping on the lights, but no siren, Delta whipped a U-turn and barreled down 15th Street. Delta hated prowler calls. Inevitably they painfully would remind her of the steep darkness of the inside of the warehouse, where she had tried to escape from a man sent to murder her.A man whose light she snuffed out with two shotgun blasts and that still woke her up at night. The same asshole who had blown Miles’s head off a lifetime ago. Since then, Delta regarded 603s as dangerous as “possible shots fired” or “officer down” calls.
    As they drove up, Delta remembered that 91 North Hemingway was a tiny drugstore called Troy’s. It was a regular drugstore with signs in the window announcing that it was going out of business. Like so many small businesses, Troy’s had been unable to keep up with the larger franchises.
    As they pulled into the darkened parking lot, Delta noticed that the orange neon “Closed” sign was lit, but the interior lights were on and pouring out into the barren parking lot.
    Delta reached over and pulled the shotgun free from its stand. The shotgun had saved her life once, and every time she grabbed its cold barrel, she remembered the blast that propelled her assassin away from her that night in the warehouse. Since then, the shotgun had become her best friend.
    “Call for back-up,” Delta whispered.
    After issuing their back-up request, Jan and Delta slowly and quietly made their way to the back door of the drugstore, which flapped open like a flag in a strong breeze. The call was no longer a “simple” prowler call, but a possible burglary-in-progress, and Jan quietly relayed this information back to dispatch.
    Unlatching the safety on the shotgun, Delta motioned for Jan to go in as the low shot. Delta would be over her with the shotgun. Jan nodded and pulled her sidearm from her holster. Unlike Delta, who carried the powerful .357 magnum, Jan carried a 9-millimeter automatic, newly adopted by the department. Most officers liked the automatics because they could squeeze off more rounds than the revolvers. Delta carried a 9-millimeter weapon while off-duty, but she liked the solid feel of the .357 and the way it kicked. She felt that the .357 required more thought when shooting, thus lowering the possibility of injuring innocent people. With the automatic, the rounds were shot so rapidly, that once the trigger was squeezed, you were committed.
    Still, she favored the shotgun.
    Jan carefully propped the door open with a brick before entering the room, her automatic sweeping the room. In her effort to see beyond her, Jan nearly stumbled on the dead body lying in the entrance.
    “Shit!” Jan gasped, crouching behind the corpse for cover.
    “Dead?” Delta asked, shotgun resting on her left shoulder and finger poised to stroke the trigger.
    Jan looked down at the open eyes, felt for a pulse, and then nodded. “Let’s see if our killer is still hanging around.”
    Five minutes later, after a thorough search turned up no suspect, Delta went to the car and called for Homicide and the coroner before returning to find Jan staring down at the corpse. Real death didn’t look like it did in the movies. Corpses often looked like wax mannequins or large ventriloquist dolls.
    For a moment, Delta gazed down at the open eyes and wondered why it was that some people died with their eyes open and some with their eyes closed. Was there something voluntarily happening with the nervous system that prompted most victims of murder to die with their eyes open. The thought brought goosebumps to Delta’s arms.
    “What are you staring at?” Delta asked Jan, who was now squatting and looking intently at the knife protruding from the victim’s back.
    “Get a load of the handle on that knife.”
    Delta knelt next to Jan, as she listened for sirens in the background which would announce the arrival of the homicide unit and