Robert B. Parker's the Bitterest Pill

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Arakel was impatient. “What is it? I have no time for this.”

  Chris hesitated. “The cops tried to grab me today.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Outside of my school.” The kid lied, knowing that if he told the truth, Arakel would lose his mind.

  The lie seemed to placate him, and now it was Arakel who was momentarily silent. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in a place where they won’t find me for a while.”

  “Stay there. I will call you soon. Do not worry. We will fix this.”

  * * *

  —

  ARAKEL DREADED GOING to Mehdi with the problem. Mehdi had always thought his choice of the kid was a mistake—too weak and no toughness. The last thing he wanted to hear was an I-told-you-so. He had no choice, really. He was not an operations type of guy. He was good at taking instruction and following through, but thinking on his feet had never been his forte. He banged his knuckles on Mehdi’s office door.

  “Come.”

  Arakel stepped in.

  Mehdi read his partner’s face as if it were a Times Square billboard. “There is trouble.”

  “In Paradise, yes.”

  “With the kid?”

  “He says the police are after him.”

  Mehdi wagged his finger. “I told you so.” He frowned, gave it some thought, and flipped a set of keys at Arakel. “Go pick him up in the van. Take Stojan and Georgi with you.”

  “Why do I need—”

  “They will know where to go.” Mehdi stood up and patted his partner’s cheek. “Try not to disappoint me more than you already have.”

  “But he is only a boy.”

  “A boy, yes. A boy who can have you spend the rest of your life inside a federal prison. Think of it this way. A hand grenade will kill you no matter who pulls the pin, a child or a monster. The trick is to remove the possibility of explosion. Stojan and Georgi will find out what the boy has said and . . .” Mehdi turned back to his desk, opened the top drawer, and removed a sleek black pistol. He released the magazine into his palm, inspected it, replaced it in the handle, worked the slide, and checked the safety. He handed it to Arakel. “And when they have gathered all there is to know from the boy, you will make sure there is no possibility of the hand grenade exploding.”

  Arakel took the pistol. He handled it awkwardly, shoving it into his jacket pocket. But Mehdi wasn’t finished.

  “Alert everyone in the supply chain in that area. Obviously, we need a new recruit. Make it happen.”

  Arakel turned and left. He prayed silently for the situation to somehow resolve itself without the use of force. He might as well have prayed for peace on earth. Neither was going to happen.

  Nineteen

  The white, unmarked van crunched along the stone-and-dirt service road in the last flicker of sunlight. The kid had assured Arakel that the service road was hardly ever used and that even if they were stopped, they could claim they were lost.

  “It’s easy to screw up. People do it all the time. The roads in the park aren’t very clearly marked.”

  Arakel had already made the calls to the people he had been ordered to alert, and as the van bounced, tires spitting out gravel, his hands shook and the nausea rose up in him. It was all he could do not to have them pull over so he could get out to vomit. Stojan, at the wheel, and Georgi, in the front passenger seat, looked back at Arakel, then at each other. They smirked, shaking their heads.

  Stojan said, “What is wrong, Boss, you are being seasick?”

  The two men in the front seats had a good laugh at that. They exchanged some words in their native tongue and laughed harder still. Arakel knew both men up front as brutal, unfeeling thugs. That was their niche in the organization, but Arakel also suspected one or both of them as plants, spies for the men above Mehdi and himself.

  “Slow down,” Arakel said as they neared the equipment shed. “Stop.”

  The van skidded to a halt on the loose gravel. Stojan turned to face his boss. “Open the door for the kid.”

  Arakel pulled the handle and slid the side door open. Chris Grimm stepped out into the open from the side of the metal shed and hopped into the van. He grinned at the sight of Arakel and slid the door shut behind him. The van started moving almost immediately. The grin slid right off the kid’s face at the sight of the men up front. Arakel noticed.

  “Don’t worry about them,” he said, patting Chris’s shoulder, smiling. “They’re here to protect you. No one will bother us with them around. Come on, once we get out of town, we’ll get you something to eat. You haven’t eaten all day, have you?”

  The kid relaxed. There it was, Arakel’s talent on display. In spite of Chris’s troubles and fear of the men in the front of the van, Arakel had put him at ease.

  “Stojan, stop at a McDonald’s or a place like that once we get out of Paradise.”

  “But—”

  “Do not defy me,” Arakel said, not quite believing he talked to the brute that way. “We have time for the boy to eat.”

  The big man shrugged.

  “So, Chris, where have you left your stash? Will the police find it in your home if they search?”

  The kid smiled at him. “I’m not stupid. No. I have a storage unit that I pay for with some of the money I make.”

  Arakel raised his eyebrows. “Can we stop there and pick up the stash? We do not want to leave anything that might incriminate you here. This way, the police can prove nothing when you come back to town.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “Good. Good. We get your stash and then you eat.”

  * * *

  —

  TWO HOURS LATER, Chris was very grim indeed. He was tied to a chair in a warehouse Stojan and Georgi used for such things. Chris’s face was a bloody, pulpy mess covered in tears and snot. Unconscious, his eyes were already purple and swollen shut. The thugs had first broken all of his fingers, then worked their way up his legs. But Arakel put a stop to that when Stojan took out his knife and threatened to emasculate the boy.

  “No!” he had shouted. “You will not do that.”

  “We will know the truth,” Stojan said, as if he were about to cut the heel off a loaf of bread.

  “We already know the truth. He never spoke with the cops and he’s told us the names of the people who knew he dealt.”

  “You are being a foolish, foolish man, Boss,” Georgi, the quieter of the two enforcers, said. “We have to be knowing if anyone knows people more than him. Is he telling anyone about you? This we must be sure of.”

  Arakel couldn’t argue with Georgi’s logic. If Chris had shared anything with his clients about Arakel, it could be a major problem. “All right, but not that,” he said, pointing at Stojan’s blade. “Not that.”

  Again, Stojan and Georgi shook their heads at him. Stojan closed his knife, and that was when they went to work on the boy’s face. After a half-hour of that, it seemed to Arakel that the two thugs were hurting the kid more for their own amusement than to get anything more out of him.

  “I swear. I swear,” the boy had said a hundred times. “I didn’t tell anybody anything.”

  No matter how they hurt him, he kept repeating it. Arakel believed it the first time he said it. Stojan and Georgi didn’t believe it or didn’t want to believe it regardless.

  Stojan looked at his phone for the time, looked at Chris, then nodded to Georgi. He said something Arakel understood, even if he didn’t speak their language. They were going to wake the kid up and start in on him again. Two thunderous explosions echoed in the cavernous warehouse. It was only after some of the smoke had cleared that Arakel realized the pistol Mehdi had given him was in his shaking hand and that he had ended Chris Grimm’s suffering forever.

  Stojan took the weapon from his hand and thumped him on the back. “You are having more balls than w
e thought, Boss.” He waved to Georgi. “Get the bottle. Someone is needing a drink.”

  Twenty

  After his meeting, Jesse stopped by Gabe Weathers’s stakeout across the street from Chris Grimm’s house.

  “Anything?”

  “Nothing,” Gabe said. “No sign of the kid.”

  “Parents?”

  “Home.” Gabe picked up a pad on the seat next to him. “Mother got home at six-fifteen. The father got in about twenty minutes later. That’s his truck in the driveway.”

  “Good work. Head back to the station, pick up your cruiser, and go back on patrol. Let Perkins know what’s going on.”

  “You taking over here?”

  “I’m going to talk to the parents. I think the kid’s in the wind.”

  “Why’d he split, do you think?”

  “Same reason everybody runs. He has something to hide.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ll know more after I talk to the parents.” Jesse slapped the doorsill on one of Paradise’s two unmarked cars. It was an old Honda Accord the Staties had seized in the process of breaking up a criminal enterprise and sold to the Paradise PD for a pittance. “Get a move on.”

  Jesse waited for Gabe to leave and turn the corner before approaching the Grimms’ house. The darkness covered up the multitude of sins the exterior displayed in the daylight. It was like many of the houses in town: a simple two-story with a detached one-car garage, a small front lawn surrounded by a low picket fence, and a small backyard. When he had stopped by earlier, Jesse noticed the clapboards were five years past needing a new coat of paint, the roof was sagging like the seat of an old chair, the windows rattled in a light breeze, and the garage was already partially collapsed. The lawn was more weeds than grass and more dirt than either. The letters WE were worn out on the front mat, the C, too, so that it read L OME. He got the sense that the original sentiment on the mat was now an afterthought, if even that. There wasn’t much welcoming about the place. He rang the bell twice but didn’t hear it buzz on the inside of the house, so he knocked long and loud.

  A blowsy woman with messy black-and-gray hair answered the door. Dressed in a cut-sleeve sweatshirt and yoga pants, she was forty-five going on sixty. She had fading yellow bruises on her arms. Her face was lined and gaunt. A lit cigarette dangled from the corner of her yellow-stained lips. Her deep blue eyes gave her identity away, as they were the same shade and shape as her son’s. And those eyes got big at the sight of Jesse’s PPD hat, uniform shirt, and jacket. Then, almost unnoticeably, they became sneering and suspicious.

  “What’d Chris do now?” she asked, voice full of resignation.

  But before Jesse could respond, an unseen man called out from inside the house. “Who’s that? Is it your little fucking angel?”

  She turned into the house. “It’s the cops.” When she faced Jesse again, her expression had changed. There was real fear in it. She said, “Well?”

  “I’m Chief Jesse Stone.” He gave her a smile in hopes of keeping things calm. “I just want to talk with Chris, Mrs. Grimm.”

  “Mrs. Walters. Grimm was my first husband’s name, the lousy prick. Chris kept the name just to spite me and his stepfather.”

  “Is Chris in?”

  She shook her head, but it wasn’t a protective gesture. Jesse already got the sense she wasn’t the maternal type who would lie for her kid or throw herself in front on an oncoming car to save his life. “Haven’t seen him. What’s this about?”

  “You’ve heard about Heather Mackey’s death?”

  “She was a little hottie. Too bad, Chris had a thing for her. But what’s this got to do with him?”

  Jesse lied. “Probably nothing. I’m just talking to kids who knew her or were friends of hers.”

  The mother wasn’t buying it. “Well, he ain’t here.”

  There were the sounds of heavy footsteps coming from behind her, and when they did that fearful expression returned. Jesse looked over her shoulder to see a fireplug of a man coming their way. He was in a dirty blue work shirt that had been pulled out of darker blue work pants. He had on blackened work boots, the laces untied. The laces slapped the floor as he walked. He had thick arms, a thick neck, and a nasty face. The main feature of which was a bent nose covered in gin blossoms. As he got close, Jesse could smell sweat and alcohol coming off him in waves. Jesse wasn’t exactly disgusted by the smell of alcohol since he stopped drinking, but he was now very sensitive to its odor coming off other people.

  He said, “This the cop?”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “No, it’s one of those male strippers dressed as a cop, come to give me a birthday greeting from my girlfriends.”

  He snickered an ugly snicker. “Well, shit, it ain’t your birthday and you don’t have any friends, so he must be a real cop.”

  Jesse introduced himself again. That got another ugly snicker out of the stepfather of the year.

  “The kid ain’t here. Didn’t she tell you that already?”

  “She did.”

  “Then what are you still doing here? You,” he said to his wife, grabbing her by the arms where those fading bruises were and shoving her behind him, “go finish doing what you was doing. I’ll handle this.”

  She didn’t protest, about-facing and heading down the hall without acknowledging Jesse.

  The husband leaned against the open front door. “Listen, Chief, she lets the kid get away with murder. Yeah, she’s way too lenient with him and maybe should’ve smacked him around a little more when he was younger, but I’m sure he never did anything serious. He’s weak and too much of a pussy.”

  Jesse was getting angry with him, so pulled a card out and handed it to him. “Please give that to Chris when he gets home and let him know I just want to talk with him about Heather.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” the stepfather said, waving a dismissive hand. He made to shut the door.

  Jesse stopped him, holding his hand against the door. “Do it, because otherwise I’ll be back, and I’d hate to interrupt your drinking every night. Do we understand each other?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cops are all the same.”

  He slammed the door shut. As Jesse walked back to his Explorer, he realized that his chasing Chris through the cemetery probably wasn’t the only reason the kid wasn’t anxious to come home.

  Twenty-one

  Arakel stood at the door, duffel bag in hand, waiting for her to answer. He had called her before killing the boy. In spite of the vodka Stojan and Georgi had practically forced down his throat, his hands were still shaking. He felt, as the English say, legless. Paradoxically, his shooting Chris felt simultaneously unreal and like the most real thing he had ever done. Since squeezing the trigger, he had told himself a thousand times he had done it for the kid’s own good. That the two thugs enjoyed inflicting pain so much, they would have kept him alive if only to keep hurting him. But none of his rationalizations could chase away his guilt or extinguish that little piece of himself that felt perverse exhilaration. He had proven himself, finally. He had done something no one thought him capable of, and while he was mostly disgusted by what he’d done, he was also proud of it. He wanted to rush back to the warehouse and have Stojan and Georgi describe to Mehdi in detail how he had put a bullet into Chris Grimm’s chest and one in his head.

  See, partner, I am not weak like you think. Ask these two pigs. They will tell you. I am strong.

  He was so caught up in his thoughts, he didn’t notice the door had pulled back and that the woman he had come to see was standing just inside the doorway, bathed in darkness.

  “Come up,” she said. “Hurry.”

  Arakel followed her up the stairs, taking note of her pleasing shape and how the grassy fragrance of her perfume filled up his head.

  Once he stepped inside her flat, she quickly closed the door behind him. The apartment w
as dimly lit, but he had been there once before and knew the layout.

  “Please, Mr. Sarkassian—”

  “Arakel. Call me Arakel.”

  “Arakel.” She tried smiling at him but failed. “I can’t do what you ask, not again.”

  He stroked her cheek. “Of course you can. You have already done it once.”

  “But—”

  For the second time that night, he did something he had never done before. He swung his fist into her abdomen. The air went out of her in a rush and she fell to her knees. He grabbed her by the hair and put his lips close to her ear.

  “You will do exactly as you are told.”

  “But the girl,” she said, her voice cracking.

  “Yes, it was a shame about the girl. That was the boy’s fault. We chose badly with him. We must make a better choice with the new person.”

  The woman was sobbing. “I can’t.”

  “You can, darling. And you will. You will do anything I tell you to do.” He got down on his knees next to her, removing his phone from his pocket as he did so. He showed her the picture of Chris Grimm’s battered, bloodied body. “This can just as easily be you.” She tried to stand and run, but he yanked her down and pushed her onto the floor. “But I have no desire to threaten you. There are better reasons for you to do as I wish.”

  He let go of her and reached into the stash bag. He came out with a prescription vial. He shook it. The woman stopped crying, as if a turnoff switch had been thrown and the circuit broken. Arakel removed one of the green pills with 80 stamped into it from the vial and held it in his palm for the woman to see. She grabbed at it, but he snatched it away, closing his fingers around the pill.