Night Passage (29 page)

“You can’t bluff us, Stone,” Hasty said. He felt dreadful about stepping back. His face felt hot. He tried to make his voice cut like Jesse’s had. “We have relieved you of duty. Step aside or … step aside … or be killed.”

“I hear one round go up into one chamber,” Jesse said, “and I will shoot you dead, Hasty.”

Hasty didn’t step back this time, but he glanced automatically around at his troops to see that no one put a round up.

“You are a murderer and a goddamned fraud. What you really want is to kill me, and to kill Jo Jo. What were you going to do, rush the jail and shoot him? Claim it was a stray bullet? Poor Jo Jo. You gotta kill him because he knows. You tell your men how you got conned on the arms deal? Jo Jo knows. You tell them how you were sleeping with Tammy Portugal until she wanted to get serious, then you had Jo Jo kill her? You tell them how you had Tom Carson killed? Jo Jo could tell them.”

As Jesse talked the other cops drifted in: John Maguire, Arthur Angstrom, Eddie Cox, Billy Pope, Pat Sears.

“You tell them that when I had some evidence on Lou Burke you had Jo Jo throw him off the top of Indian Hill?”

Something like an inaudible sigh moved through the Horsemen as Jesse talked. Hasty felt it. He looked at the small dark eye of Jesse’s shotgun only five feet away, and he backed away.

In the darkness behind the Horsemen Suitcase Simpson spoke softly to Abby, still standing beside him.

“Go to Peter Perkins’s truck. When you see the lights go on in my car turn them on in the truck.”

Sheltered among his troops, shielded by other Horsemen from the gaze of Jesse’s shotgun, Hasty said in as much voice as he could command, “Third squad marksmen, prepare to fire.”

A set of headlights behind them went on, and then a second set and the Horsemen were bathed in light. Then Simpson’s voice, amplified by a bullhorn, came from the darkness behind the light.

“This is the Paradise Police,” the voice said. “We have you surrounded. Put down your weapons.”

There was a long frozen silence. The Horsemen nearest Hasty turned and looked at him, waiting. Hasty didn’t know what to do. He had not thought of this. He didn’t know what to do. With the shotgun held in his right hand and pointing straight toward the sky, Jesse walked down the steps of the station and shoved past three Horsemen to stand in front of Hasty. His face was right next to Hasty’s.

“You have the right to remain silent,” Jesse said. “You have the right to an attorney.”

Hasty started to back away and Jesse stayed close to him, walking him backward through the Horsemen as he recited the Miranda rights. The battle-dressed Horsemen parted silently as Hasty backed out of the group and into the police perimeter in the darkness beyond the headlights. Behind the headlights Suitcase Simpson stopped him with a hand in his back. Molly came out of the darkness and handed Jesse a pair of handcuffs and Jesse snapped them onto Hasty’s wrists. In the distance, sounding very clearly through the quiet night, came the sound of sirens.

“That’ll be the state cops,” Simpson said.

“You call them?” Jesse said.

“Yes.”

“Good thought.”

The sound of the sirens broke the last resistance among the Horsemen. They began to drop their weapons and move away from the station. As the sirens got louder the Horsemen began to move faster and soon they were running, out of the bright headlights, past the silent policemen who made no attempt to stop them, heading home in the darkness, leaving their rifles and shotguns on the ground where they had stood.

The sky over the harbor was beginning to get light. Jesse felt gray and empty, his mouth dry and bitter, with the flat joyless contumescence of dissipated tension. He was at his desk in his office with Healy, the state police captain.

“How’d it go down?” Healy said.

Jesse’s voice was soft and Healy had to lean forward to hear him.

“Kid named Michelle Merchant. Her father’s a Horseman. She heard the plan and told a woman I know, Abby Taylor.”

“The town attorney,” Healy said.

“Sometimes. Abby called the station, but the phones were dead, so she called Suit—Simpson—one of my cops.”

“Well, now you know whose side your department is on.”

Jesse nodded.

“Good to know,” Healy said.

Jesse nodded again, a movement so small that Healy wasn’t sure he’d made it.

“You talk to Wyoming?” Healy said.

“Yeah. They want Hathaway for blowing up Tom Carson.”

“The prosecutors will work it out,” Healy said. “Genest going to stand up when it’s time to testify?”

Jesse nodded again. “He knows Hathaway was trying to kill him last night,” Jesse said. “He’ll talk until you don’t want to listen.”

“What do you want to do about the rest of the mob?” Healy said.

Jesse didn’t answer for so long that Healy thought maybe Jesse hadn’t heard him. Finally Jesse shrugged slightly.

“I think most of them are harmless,” he said.

“You know who most of them are?”

“I can put together a list of Horsemen. Be harder to prove that any particular one was here last night,” Jesse said.

“Might be some federal charges,” Healy said. “Armed insurrection?”

“I’ll let the Feds worry about that,” Jesse said. “Most of these guys are just guilty of being jerks.”

“Lot of that going around,” Healy said.

“A lot,” Jesse said. “I’ll settle for lifting their gun permits.”

“Probably a way to do that,” Healy said. “You know the kid blew the whistle on them?”

“Yes,” Jesse said.

“Good kid?”

“Kind of a burnout,” Jesse said.

“Well, she saved your ass.”

“I plan to mention that to her,” Jesse said. “Abby Taylor too.”

The light from the east was whiter now, making the electric lights in Jesse’s office look weak.

“You should get out of here,” Healy said. “There’s going to be a lot to do later.”

Jesse nodded and swiveled in his chair and looked out his window. There was a television van with its odd-looking antenna parked next to the police cruisers. Channel Three/Action News was stenciled on the side.

“And the media is always with us,” he said.

“I’m getting too old for this all-night shit,” Healy said. “You got a bottle of whiskey somewhere?”

Jesse took it out of his bottom drawer and put it on the desk in front of Healy.

“Glass on the windowsill,” Jesse said.

“Join me?”

Jesse shook his head. Healy poured about an inch and drank it down. Then he capped the bottle and pushed it back across the desk toward Jesse. Jesse didn’t stir. He was too tired to put it away.

“How long you been on this job?” Healy said.

“About six months.”

“Nice start,” Healy said.

After Healy left, Jesse sat for a while until he got the strength to get up. He walked past the television crew without speaking, and got in his car and went home. He was so tired it was hard to focus on the road. The sun was up by the time he got home and there was a different tone to the black winter water in the harbor. He parked in his slot and walked heavily up the steps to his condominium. When he opened the door he heard the television. He closed the door quietly behind him and took out his gun and walked softly to the living room. Sitting on the sofa with her feet up on the coffee table watching the early-morning news was his ex-wife.

“Jesus Christ, Jenn,” Jesse said.

She stood and smiled at him.

“You’re okay,” she said.

Jesse nodded.

“The janitor let me in,” Jenn said. “I told him I was your wife.”

“You’re not,” Jesse said. “We’re divorced.”

“I saw on the news about last night,” Jenn said.

“It’s over,” Jesse said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I was worried about you. I missed you.”

“Jenn, I don’t know,” Jesse said.

“You still seeing that other woman?”

“No.”

Jenn smiled.

“I don’t know either, Jesse. But here I am. At least you could hug me.”

Jesse realized suddenly that he was still holding his gun. He put it back on his hip, and walked very slowly around the coffee table.

“Yes,” he said. “I could do that.”

First published in the UK in 1999

No Exit Press

an imprint of Oldcastle Books

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This ebook edition first published in 2012

First published in the USA by GB Putnam in hardcover in 1997

All rights reserved

© Robert B. Parker 1997

The right of Robert B. Parker to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN

978-1-84243-521-2 (print)

978-1- 84243-996-8 (epub)

978-1-84243-997-5 (kindle)

978-1-84243-998-2 (pdf)

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