Night Passage (11 page)

“Doesn’t he scare you?” Abby said softly.

Jesse shrugged.

“Like hell,” Abby said. “No shrugging. I asked you a question I want you to answer.”

Jesse didn’t like her tone and it showed in the look he gave her. But Abby held his look.

“Talk about yourself, Jesse. I want to know you.”

“What’s to know?” Jesse said.

“Well, for instance, are you scared of Jo Jo Genest?”

Through his nose Jesse took a long inhale and a long exhale, and pursed his lips. His right hand rested on the tabletop and he tapped it several times, as if listening to music that Abby couldn’t hear. She waited.

“On the one hand,” Jesse said, “Jo Jo’s big and strong and stupid and mean and he’s mad at me. I’d be an idiot not to be scared of him. On the other hand, if I have to, I can shoot him just as easy as if he were small and weak and smart and kindly.”

“And you’d be willing to do that?” Abby said.

“I’d be willing,” Jesse said.

“You ever shoot anyone?”

“Yes.”

“Kill him?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell me about it?”

Jesse shifted uncomfortably.

“He had a machete,” Jesse said. “Nine years ago.”

“You would have been, what? Twenty-six?”

Jesse nodded. Abby waited. Jesse didn’t continue.

“So you shot him dead?” Abby said.

“Yes.”

“Did you mean to?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t try to wound him, you know, shoot him in the leg or something?”

“You shoot, you always shoot to kill. It’s not the movies. You’re in a crisis situation, you got about a half second to do what needs to be done. Your heart’s pounding, you can’t swallow. It feels like you can’t get your breath and you got some guy with a machete. You aim for the middle of the mass and you try to remember not to jerk the trigger.”

Abby nodded slowly as she watched his face.

“Listening to you talk,” Abby said. “It’s in there.”

“What exactly?” Jesse said.

“I don’t know exactly. I sensed it when we made love. I guess I thought of it as, you know, ‘My he’s strong,’ ” Abby said. “But that wasn’t really it.”

“Jenn said I was very fierce.”

Abby nodded. “Something like that. I suppose you need to be that way if you’re a policeman.”

“Maybe I’m a policeman because I’m that way,” Jesse said.

“And that’s why you’re not scared of Jo Jo.”

Jesse smiled.

“It is prudent to be scared of Jo Jo. It would also be prudent of Jo Jo to be scared of me.”

Pat swears he found Captain Cat when he got off the eleven-to-seven shift and parked the cruiser out front and went in to log off. There were three steps up to the front door of the police station. The cat was on the bottom step, dead, with a small sign hanging around its neck. On the sign was written slut in black Magic Marker. By the time Jesse got there most of the police had heard about Captain Cat and several of them had come in, though they weren’t on duty. Nobody said much. He was after all, only a cat. But he had been their cat and they liked him and they all could see that his death was about them.

“I find the little punk asshole that did this,” Suitcase Simpson said, and realized he didn’t quite know what he’d do and so didn’t finish the sentence. But his round face was bright with anger.

“What the hell does ‘slut’ mean?” Pat Sears said. “For crissake he’s a male cat.”

Jesse picked up the cat and his head flopped loosely.

“I’d say his neck is broken,” Jesse said.

He put the cat back down.

“Peter,” Jesse said to the evidence officer, “when you’ve done what you can do here, take the cat down to the vet and see what he died of. And dust that tag on him.”

Perkins nodded. Jesse stood and went into the police station. He closed his office door and sat in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. “Slut” again, he thought. It didn’t fit with spray painting the cruiser, and it doesn’t fit with killing the cat. But of course it was not about the cruiser, Jesse knew that, or about the cat. It was about the police department and about somebody’s private connection to the word “slut.” Is it the whole department? Is it one cop? Is it me? Jesse laced his hands behind his head and let his mind go empty, letting the problem drift at the periphery of his consciousness, looking at it obliquely. He was still sitting, hands behind his head, feet up on the desk, lips pursed slightly, when Peter Perkins knocked on the door.

“Vet says the cat’s neck is broken,” Perkins said. “Says he would have died immediately.”

Jesse nodded.

“There’s a little trace of dried blood on the cat’s claws,” Perkins said. “Not enough really to do me much good, but I figure Captain scratched the guy.”

“Can you get a blood type?”

“Not enough,” Perkins said. “It’s microscopic.”

“How about state forensic?”

“For what,” Perkins said. “A felinicide?”

Jesse smiled slightly.

“Might be a little embarrassing, I guess.”

Perkins stood without speaking in front of Jesse’s desk.

“You find anything else?” Jesse said.

“No.”

Jesse waited.

“I,” Perkins started and stopped, looking for what he wanted to say. “I don’t like this thing, Jesse.”

“What thing?”

“The slut thing. The cruiser, now the cat. It’s an escalation.”

“Yes,” Jesse said. “It is.”

“Maybe this isn’t some kid.”

“Maybe not,” Jesse said.

“Maybe it’s serious,” Perkins said.

“Maybe you need to take the microscopic blood samples into state forensic,” Jesse said.

“It’s still on the cat’s claws,” Perkins said.

“So take the cat.”

“Jesus, Jesse.”

“I’ll call over there,” Jesse said. “Sort of smooth the way for you.”

Perkins nodded. He was not happy.

“You think it could be important, Jesse?”

“I got no idea, Pete. I’m just trying to accumulate data.”

Perkins nodded. He wanted to say something else. But there wasn’t anything else to say. He hesitated another minute, then turned to leave.

“I’ll get right on it, Jesse.”

Perkins went out and closed the door quietly behind him. Jesse leaned back again with his feet up and his lips pursed and his mind relaxed and laced his hands behind his head.

Freedom’s Horsemen were practicing squad maneuvers in the wooded area along the railroad tracks in back of the high school.

In full battle dress, camouflage fatigues with a white-handled .45 revolver in a shoulder holster, Hasty Hathaway directed his troops through a bullhorn.

“I want first squad along the track embankments to the right.”

His voice amplified by the bullhorn had lost its human sound.

“I want second squad on the high ground back here under those trees.”

The mechanized voice sounded odd in the leafy margin where the tracks went out through a low salt marsh.

“You spread out,” the voice boomed, “under the trees so the helicopters can’t see you, and you lay your field of fire down, so it’ll intersect with first squad, the way we laid it out. Noncoms stand by your men, and await my command.”

The late-summer afternoon buzzed with the low hum of locusts, and the sound of a bird’s odd cry which was more like hiccup than song. The salt marsh supported a large number of flying insects with big translucent wings who hovered close to the surface of the brackish water between the salt hay hummocks. Bobbing on the water among the clumps of sea grass were several bright beach balls.

The mechanical voice over the bullhorn spoke again.

“Commence firing.”

And a fusillade of small-arms fire snarled over the salt marsh. The beach balls exploded as the bullets tore through them, and the water between the clumps of marshland spurted and roiled as the bullets sloshed into it. The gunfire was mixed. There was the crack of pistols and the harder sound of rifle fire and the big hollow sound of shotguns.

After a few moments of sustained fire, the mechanical voice boomed, “Cease firing,” and the marsh, ringing with the memory of sound, was now entirely silent, devoid even of the odd hiccupping song and the locust buzz. No insects flew over the surface of the marsh, and the beach balls had vanished from the waterways. Only the bright scrap of one clinging to a reed remained as evidence that they had been there.

“Assemble on me,” the bullhorn voice said. And the men dressed up like soldiers came out of the woods and from behind the railroad embankment and gathered around Hathaway, who stood on a pile of railroad ties, a hundred yards down the track from the football field behind the high school. He put the bullhorn to his mouth again and the voice spoke.

“Fellows, first let me congratulate you. Had this been the real thing, and not an exercise, we would have prevailed entirely. The fields of fire interlocked, the firing discipline was maintained, each of you did his job and I’m proud of every one of you.”

The men stood in a semicircle around him, thirty-one of them, carrying a variety of shotguns, hunting rifles, modified military weapons, and side arms.

“And make no mistake about it, men, one day it will be the real thing. And men like us will be what stands between the one-worlders and this White Christian Nation. We who have remained true. We who abide by the constitutional mandate for a well-regulated militia. We who exercise our constitutional right to keep and bear arms. We will keep safe the heritage of this country. And if someday we must die to serve this cause, well, then, it will be a good day to die.”

Hathaway handed the bullhorn to Lou Burke, who was standing on the ground beside the pile of ties. Then he turned back toward the assembled men and came to attention and saluted them. They returned the salute and Hathaway yelled, his voice much smaller without the bullhorn.

“Dismissed!”

The men broke their ranks and wandered down the tracks toward the parking lot near the commuter station off Main Street. They stowed their guns in trunks and backseats and drove home in their Toyota sedans and Plymouth Voyagers to take off their uniforms and watch television until bedtime.

The parking lot had been empty for several minutes and the insect buzz and birdsong had resumed around the salt marsh and along the railroad tracks when Jesse Stone walked out of the woods, cut through the high-school football field, and walked back toward the town hall in the lavender twilight.

Cissy Hathaway lay facedown on the bed, her face buried in the pillow, holding on to the white iron headboard, while Jo Jo Genest spanked her naked backside quite gently with a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. Each time he struck her she made noise into the pillow and her body twisted as if trying to get her grip loose from the headboard.

The room was small and spotless. The walls were white. The floor was polished oak. There was no rug. Opposite the foot of the bed was a chest of drawers painted white, and on the wall beside it was a full-length mirror with a white plastic frame. There was no night table, no lamp. The overhead light was very bright above them. Jo Jo’s naked body under the bright overhead glistened with sweat. The muscles and veins were so prominent, stretched so tight against his white skin, that he seemed an anatomy specimen as he sat beside her on the edge of the bed, hitting her gently while she sobbed and moaned into the muffling pillow.

Finally she twisted, releasing her hold on the headboard for a moment as she rolled onto her back, her body arching toward him. She gripped the headboard again and raised her knees and he eased his huge body onto her.

“You’ve got me now,” she gasped. “You’ve really got me.”

Later, standing on a chair at the foot of the bed, Jo Jo aimed carefully through the Polaroid camera at Cissy Hathaway, naked on the bed. Jo Jo snapped six pictures and placed them carefully on the top of the dresser while they took form. He stared at himself for a moment in the mirror. Then he brought the pictures to the bed and held them up for Cissy to see. She looked at them intently.

“Take more,” she said and assumed a different pose. “Different.”

“Boy, you are some sick bitch,” Jo Jo said.

His pale body seethed with muscles, the veins in his arms distended from steroids. He crouched at the foot of the bed and took some pictures. Then he stood, and reloaded the camera, and went to the far side and took some pictures. He continued to move around her, snapping pictures and letting them cure on the bureau top while he took more. As he snapped, Cissy arched her body into different positions. Finally he ran out of film. He went and stared down at the twenty-four pictures of Cissy that lay faceup on the top of the dresser. He picked one up and touched it to see if it was dry. It wasn’t quite, so he blew on it and put it back down.

Behind him on the bed, Cissy said, “Show me.”

Jo Jo turned and looked at her for a moment, and shook his head, and brought the pictures to the bed. Sitting on it while she lay back against the pillows, he held the pictures up one at a time. She studied each one carefully, her eyes shiny, her breathing shallow.

“Hard to figure,” Jo Jo said, “how you ended up marrying a geek like Hasty.”

“I don’t feel comfortable,” she said, “that you have those.”

“You want to keep them at your house?” Jo Jo said.

“No, you know I don’t dare do that.”

“Want me to burn them?” Jo Jo said.

“No.”

“Then I guess you’ll just have to be uncomfortable, huh?”

Cissy nodded. She seemed disoriented. Her manner was vague. Her eyes were wide and her pupils were so dilated that she seemed almost to have no irises. She got off the bed and began to dress while he carefully stowed the pictures of her in the top drawer of the dresser.

“See you next Thursday,” he said.

She didn’t answer.

“Your old man ever wonder where you go on Thursday nights?” Jo Jo said.

“No,” Cissy said. “Hasty always conducts field training on Thursday nights. I’m home before he is.”

“He ever wonder why your ass looks so red?”

Cissy hated it when Jo Jo talked so coarsely. But she tried not to show it. If she showed it she knew he’d just do it more.