Night Passage (28 page)

“Men,” he said, and paused, and cleared his throat. “Men, we have been preparing—I think it is fair to say, that many of us have been preparing all our lives—for the moment that has come.”

He could hear the nervous vibrato in his voice. Was he to fail himself in the moment of crisis? Command, he said to himself. Command.

“You all know Jo Jo. He has his ways, but he has been one of us. Now they have him in jail on a manufactured charge and they will force him to incriminate us. He may resist them, but no one can resist long. They use science to pervert us. Injections, hypnosis, sleep deprivation. It will not be long before Jesse Stone knows our every plan.”

They were listening. His voice was stabilized, though his insides were still turbulent.

“I know that many of us have come to like Jesse Stone, but that is part of his way. He is, at the very bottom line, a stooge for the state police.”

From the inside pocket of his field jacket, he took a Polaroid picture of Cissy and held it up.

“He has even circulated this disgusting piece of trash. I don’t know if any of you have received one; it is an obviously doctored picture purporting to be my wife. A man capable of that kind of deceit is capable of anything.”

Several of the men leaned forward trying to make out the picture. Hasty paused, letting his eyes rove slowly over the room, meeting the look of as many of the men as he could. He let the pause build. After a long moment he put the picture back in his jacket pocket. His insides were settling. He was heartened by his rhetoric. He had felt the satisfaction of revenge as he had held up his wife’s naked picture in front of the men. Bitch. He felt powerful. His voice was strong.

“He has to be stopped,” Hasty said softly.

Hasty paused again, looking slowly around the room. Some of the men were nodding their heads.

“We will implement our plan to take the town hall,” Hasty said. “We will take Jo Jo out of there … and we will eliminate Jesse Stone.”

“You mean kill him?” one of the men said from the back.

“In a war of liberation,” Hasty said, “we do what we must. Our forefathers eliminated the British agents of repression at Lexington and Concord. We’ve done this exercise often enough. We know how. Each of you should report to his squad leader now. First squad will disable telephone service from the town hall. Second squad will see to the electricity. Third and fourth squad will deploy to the town hall and establish a perimeter.”

The silence in the room was jagged with excitement. What had been a kind of war game had suddenly become real and the men felt frightened and heroic.

“It is our moment,” Hasty said softly. “Paradise will be ours. Quietly, without fanfare, and without opposition, we can establish a free white Christian community. And bit by bit, community by community, with ever-growing force as our communities proliferate and begin to connect, we will return this nation to its place of freedom and individual rights which our ancestors dreamed of when they threw off the British yoke.”

Lying on her stomach behind a folded canvas pool cover in the loft of the carriage house, Michelle Merchant listened intently. Her father and her brother were both Horsemen. She thought that all the rah-rah crap that Mr. Hathaway was spouting was really bogus, but she kind of liked the movement because it was antiestablishment the way she was. And when her father got on her case she could say that she was just rebelling the way he did. Her father didn’t like her knowing anything about the Horsemen, which was why she liked to hide in the loft during meetings and listen in. It gave her ammunition when he would yell at her. Her mother didn’t care. Michelle suspected that her mother liked it when Michelle got her father back, like her mother wanted to, but was too wussy.

Below her the men had broken up into four groups. They checked their watches. Then two of the groups went out first. The other men waited. The tension was so strong that it even reached the loft and filtered through Michelle’s nearly impenetrable scorn. She could feel her heartbeat quicken. The men kept checking their watches and, after what seemed to Michelle a long time, the last two groups went out and the room was empty.

Michelle could feel her breath coming a little faster. Were they actually going to attack the town hall and kill Jesse? Did they actually believe that crap about starting a free town, whatever that meant? That was total crap. Even if they killed Jesse and got Jo Jo Genest out of jail, pretty soon other cops would know and they’d come and put all the dumb Horsemen in jail. Anybody knew that, for crissake. She smiled for a moment at seeing her father and jerkface brother hauled off to jail. She could go visit them, like in the movies, and talk to them through the bars. Cool. She was dying for a cigarette. The barn was empty. She sat up and lit a cigarette and took in a big lungful of smoke. Her old lady would poop her pants, Michelle thought. She smiled in the dark loft and smoked some more. The only thing that bothered her was Jesse Stone. He was the only adult she’d ever met who hadn’t given her a load of bullshit when he talked to her. She kind of didn’t like him getting killed. She didn’t want to spoil this thing. It was kind of exciting. And she wanted to see what her old lady would do when Dad got arrested. What kind of lecture would they give Michelle then, she wondered. She kind of liked Jesse, though. She finished her cigarette and lit another one. With the tiny red glow of the freshly lit Camel Light bobbing from the corner of her mouth, she slid out the hay loft door and climbed down the back ladder and set off across her backyard.

“I don’t know exactly what it was Tom Carson did,” Jo Jo said. “Maybe found out about Hasty laundering cash for Gino.”

“You were the go-between?” Jesse said.

“Yeah. I set it up.”

It was late, and Jesse was tired. He and Jo Jo were on their respective sides of the barred door to Jo Jo’s cell. Jesse had a tape recorder. There was a single overhead light in the cell corridor with no shade.

“Hasty’d get a couple percent of what he laundered, and I guess he was using that money to finance the Horsemen.”

“How did he launder it?”

“Just didn’t fill out the cash deposit forms, I guess,” Jo Jo said. “It was his freakin’ bank, you know? Then he’d deduct his two percent, put it in the Horsemen’s account, and wire-transfer the rest to checking accounts in other banks. Now it’s in the banking system nice and legitimate. Gino would write checks on the new accounts. No nasty CTRs pile up on some treasury agent’s desk in Washington.”

“And you think Chief Carson got wind of this?”

“My guess, yeah. And he wouldn’t go with it. Everybody knows it’s drug money. And I heard that Tom said he couldn’t let that slide.”

“And?”

“So they got him to resign, and set him up in a town out in Wyoming. Some Posse group out there fixed it. And after he was out there a while, they sent Lou out to blow him up. They wanted the local Posse guys to do it, but that didn’t work out.”

“Why didn’t they just kill him right away?”

“We talked about it. Decided it would draw too much attention to kill a police chief. Figured an ex-police chief out in the freakin’ boondocks someplace would go down easier. I think they thought the bomb would pulverize him and they’d never be able to get an I.D.”

“Wyoming cops I.D.’d him,” Jesse said. “How about Tammy?”

“Hasty was tapping her,” Jo Jo said. “She wanted him to leave his wife and marry her. You know Hasty. He thinks he’s a leading freakin’ citizen. Can’t have that. So he told me to dump her.”

“Did he tell you to make it part of the pattern of the painted police car and the dead cat?”

“No, my idea. I had it in for you ever since you suckered me, in front of my ex.”

“I know. I knew you were pulling the ‘slut’ stuff and I knew why.”

“But you couldn’t prove it. I thought it would be cool to do her in a way made you look bad.”

“How about Lou Burke?” Jesse said.

Jo Jo smiled.

“Hasty wrote the damn suicide note. Didn’t trust me to.”

“Why’d you kill him?”

“Hasty said to. Said you were getting too close. Said Lou would talk eventually. So I got him to meet me up on Indian Hill. Told him it was Horsemen business. And I threw him over.”

Jesse was silent for a moment. Jo Jo was finally getting a chance to brag. He was telling the stories almost eagerly, as if they were interesting things that he’d done on vacation.

“I knew about Hasty and Tammy,” Jesse said. “It was in her diary.”

Jo Jo shrugged.

“And Lou’s suicide note was typewritten.”

“Couldn’t handwrite it,” Jo Jo said. “Be too easy to see it wasn’t Burke’s writing.”

“Except Lou didn’t have a typewriter,” Jesse said.

“Coulda typed it here.”

“Nope. We’re all computerized.”

Jo Jo made a disgusted sound.

“Freakin’ Hasty is so stupid, you know. He thinks he’s Napoleon or something with his freakin’ Horsemen.”

“So how come you sent the picture of Cissy to her minister?” Jesse said.

Jo Jo smiled broadly. “Sent it to a lot of people,” he said. “Sent one to Hasty too.”

“I’ll bet he was pleased,” Jesse said. “You take it?”

“Yeah. Her idea. She liked being tied up. Spanked. Weird broad—big time. Had a lot of poon tang with that broad, and you know how most broads are—all the time moaning about love—she wasn’t like that, she liked the sex, but she was always like mad while we was doing it. She liked to pretend I was forcing her, you know? Grim.”

Jesse nodded.

“She was banging one of your cops too, you know.”

“Probably pretended he was rescuing her,” Jesse said. “How come you decided to go public?”

“With the pictures? I was, ah, brokering an arms deal for Hasty. Gino was supposed to get him some heavy weapons—you know Gino?”

Jesse shook his head.

“Major dude in Boston,” Jo Jo said. “Queer as a square donut, but really wired.”

“And you know him through the money laundering,” Jesse said. He was stroking Jo Jo’s ego.

“Yeah, I know Gino. Hasty’s a big deal in town here maybe, but on the street, he’s nowhere. He had problems, he always had to come to me.”

“So he asked you to get him heavy weapons?”

“Yeah. Machine guns, mortars, some kind of anti-aircraft missiles. I’m telling you, he thinks he’s going to take over the town and, you know, defy the freaking government.”

Jo Jo laughed. Jesse laughed along with him. Couple of good old boys, Jesse thought, chewing the fat in the back room.

“So I set him up with Gino and Hasty gets high and mighty with him when they have a meeting and when the time comes for the guns, they take his money and stiff him.”

“No guns,” Jesse said.

“None, and he blames me. Freaking twerp. Says it’s my fault. Says I better get the money back or else. He’s actually threatening me. Well, first I thought maybe I’d just break his scrawny neck for him, wring it like he was a chicken, you know? But then I think no, be smart, Jo Jo. Don’t get mad. Get even. So I got some of the pictures of his old lady and I sent them out. I sent one to his minister and one to him and one to the president of the Paradise Garden Club that Cissy belonged to. Ought to freak them out. I was going to send a few out every day. Drive Hasty crazy.”

Jo Jo laughed again. Jesse felt like he’d bathed in dirty water. He shut off the tape recorder.

“Think about something, Jo Jo,” Jesse said. “When I suspended Lou Burke Hasty was so worried about what Burke might say that he had you kill him.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve actually arrested you, and you know more than Burke.”

“You think he’ll try for me?”

“He’ll have to,” Jesse said. “Or he’s a goner.”

“How’s he gonna get me in here?” Jo Jo said.

“My guess is he’ll try to get you out of here, one way or another.”

“And?”

“And kill you,” Jesse said. “You know the Horsemen. Do they believe in him?”

“Yeah. Assholes. They think he’s freakin’ George Washington.”

Jesse nodded.

“You think he’ll try to kill me?”

“I think he’ll try to kill us both,” Jesse said.

When Suitcase Simpson pulled up in his own car behind the men in battle dress fatigues gathered around the station, he could see Jesse on the front steps with a shotgun. There were no lights showing at the station, but several men in the crowd had flashlights focused on Jesse. Simpson parked quietly on the street and got out. He was in uniform, wearing a bulletproof vest. He carried a shotgun and his service pistol. He stood silently in the shadows the Horsemen.

Two steps forward of the other Horsemen, Hasty Hathaway stood very straight in front of Jesse.

“We’re relieving you of your duties,” he said to Jesse. “And we are coming to take your prisoner.”

Simpson felt someone move up beside him. It was Abby Taylor. She had on something that looked like a navy pea coat and the collar was high up around her head so that Simpson could barely see her face. Her hands were deep in her pockets. She looked briefly at Simpson and then looked at Jesse on the station steps. Neither of them spoke.

On the steps Jesse worked the pump on his shotgun and jacked a shell up into the chamber. The sound of the action was very sharp in the quiet night. Jesse was wearing a vest too, Simpson noted.

“Couple of things, Hasty,” Jesse said.

His voice wasn’t loud but it carried and the men were very still, nearly trancelike, confronting the stunning thing they were about to do.

“First,” Jesse said. “Anything happens here and I’ll kill you.”

As he spoke Jesse raised the shotgun slowly and aimed it directly at Hasty. Before he could stop himself, Hasty took a step back.

“Second,” Jesse said. “I’m arresting you for the murders of Tom Carson, Tammy Portugal, and Lou Burke.”

Peter Perkins’s Mazda pickup pulled in beside Simpson’s car, and Perkins and Anthony DeAngelo got out, with shotguns and vests. They looked at Simpson. Silently Simpson gestured that they should spread out behind the Horsemen. Molly Crane arrived on foot. She was wearing sweats and sneakers and her service pistol. Her badge was pinned to the sweatshirt. Simpson pointed her to the left and she nodded and went.