Robert B. Parker's the Bitterest Pill

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “This vial will be yours after we discuss the candidates and you make the call.”

  She didn’t argue, but asked for the pill in his palm as a gesture of good faith.

  “No. First we do as I say, then the pills.”

  * * *

  —

  AN HOUR LATER, she had fulfilled her obligations as he had described them. He had chosen the candidate to replace the Grimm boy.

  “Now?” she asked, clicking off the phone and placing it down on the counter.

  “No,” Arakel said, still feeling the rush of his newfound strength. “Come here and get on your knees.”

  She opened her mouth to object, but he shook the vial of pills. When he did, she strode over to him and got down on her knees. She didn’t need to be told what to do. The doctor in Boston had made her do the same. She pulled his zipper down and reached into his pants, but just as she was about to put him in her mouth, he pushed her away. He wasn’t going to become a killer and a rapist on the same night. He tossed the vial into the air and she lunged for it as if it were a newborn baby tossed from a burning window. She clutched the vial to her chest.

  “The other pill,” she said. “The one you put in your pocket. Can I have that one, too?”

  He reached into his pocket and handed it to her. She reached onto the counter, grabbed a homemade pill crusher, and got to work.

  “Remember,” he said, “those pills and those pills only are for you. We have made a very careful inventory of what is in the stash bag. We expect every other pill and package accounted for. Do you understand?”

  But the woman had made fast work of the crushing and had already snorted some of the pulverized Oxy. He walked over to her, grabbed her hair, and put his face very close to hers.

  “Do you understand?”

  She nodded.

  He took out his phone again. “Good, because I would hate to see you in that chair. You get the supply line up and running again in this town within two days and maybe there will be another reward.”

  He let go of her hair and left.

  All that newfound strength of his had seemed to vanish. Now all he wanted was to shower and to sleep.

  Twenty-two

  When Jesse got back to his condo, he found his son in his default position—on the living room couch, watching something from one of the streaming services Cole paid for.

  “Hey,” Jesse said.

  Cole hit pause. “Hey. Late night.”

  “A meeting and then work.”

  “About the dead girl?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Getting anywhere with that?”

  “Yes, but not sure where. Once I find where she got the drugs, I’ll have a direction to pursue. For now, it’s hit and miss. Welcome to police work.”

  Cole laughed. Jesse thought maybe a little too loudly.

  “I say something funny?”

  Cole shook his head. Jesse changed the subject.

  “I’m not spying on you, but I’ve been by Daisy’s. You’ve missed a few days.”

  “With Daisy’s blessing.”

  Jesse held up his palms like he was on traffic duty. “I know. She told me. Also told me if I was curious that I should ask you about it.”

  “Are you asking?”

  “I am.”

  “It’s not like a secret,” Cole said. “But I’d like to tell you in my own time. Okay?”

  Jesse thought about pressing the issue, then remembered what Molly had advised. She’d told him to back off and let the kid come around by himself.

  “All right. When you’re ready to tell me, I’ll be here. Did you eat?”

  “Yeah, but I could eat some more.”

  “Omelet work for you?”

  “Sounds good.”

  Jesse had never been good at small talk, and he was even worse at it with Cole. There always seemed to be an eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room sitting between them that neither of them could quite bring themselves to talk about. Jesse had tried talking baseball, but Cole wasn’t a big fan. No doubt that was part of Cole’s resentment over the father who he had grown up believing had abandoned his mother and him. Cole’s presence made Jesse very conscious of his own limitations. Jesse hated politicians and politics, so they didn’t talk about that. He didn’t drink anymore, so he avoided that as a subject for discussion. Whenever he tried raising the subject of Cole’s life with his mother back in L.A., Cole shut down. And, frankly, Cole’s job at Daisy’s didn’t exactly supply a lot of material. The one thing that Cole seemed genuinely interested in was when Jesse discussed police work. Of course, that was the one subject Jesse wanted to get away from when he was home. But as they sat there eating their omelets, Cole broke the silence.

  “So, are you dating this Maryglenn woman?”

  That took Jesse by complete surprise. He literally sat up from his food. “I guess Daisy must have mentioned it.”

  Cole nodded.

  “Dating? I’m not sure dating is the word.”

  “Sleeping with?”

  “Let’s use the word seeing.”

  “Are you seeing her?”

  “I am. Why do you ask?”

  He hesitated but answered. “I don’t think Daisy likes her very much.”

  “Yeah,” Jesse said, “I got that feeling, too.”

  “Did you ask her about it?”

  “Did you?”

  “Are you kidding me? Daisy would bite my head off.”

  “Any guesses?”

  “This may sound a little weird, but Daisy almost sounds a little jealous.”

  Jesse chewed on that for a minute before saying something. “Maybe protective more than jealous. We’ve always kind of watched out for each other.”

  “I don’t know. You two are close. I get that, but it seemed more like jealousy to me.”

  Jesse wanted to dismiss what Cole was saying, but recalling the looks on Daisy’s face and on Maryglenn’s, he just couldn’t.

  “I’m beat and it’s going to be a long, hard day tomorrow,” Jesse said. “I have to interview the dead girl’s parents.”

  “Good luck with that. I’ve got to get up early. Back to work for me in the morning.”

  Jesse went to wash the dishes, but Cole told Jesse to get to sleep.

  “Old folks need more rest,” he said, smiling at Jesse.

  Jesse laughed and felt closer to his son than he had at any time since he visited him in the hospital after the old meetinghouse explosion. Maybe, he thought, Molly had a point.

  Twenty-three

  Jesse usually liked to catch people he was questioning off guard, but the Mackeys had just buried their daughter and he didn’t suspect either of them of being involved in her death in any way. He had Molly call ahead to let them know he was coming.

  “How did they sound, Molly?” he asked, calling her back as he turned the corner of their street.

  “Not like I expected.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Jesse, this may sound weird, but they almost sounded happy. Well, not happy exactly. Just . . .”

  “Don’t struggle with it. I understand.”

  “What do you understand?”

  “Since the night Heather died, their lives have been filled up with grief, but also with plans and phone conversations, and people dropping by. Now the real mourning starts. Today is the day when it will hit them that they will never see their girl again. Today marks the day she will be dead forever. They’re thankful for anything that takes even a little of that sting away. And they don’t want to feel so helpless. They want to make her life worth something.”

  “For such a self-contained, stoic bastard, Jesse Stone, you do know people.”

  “Hard-learned lessons, Molly. Hard-learned.”

  The Mackeys’ red front door pulled back
even before Jesse had gotten halfway up the walk. He removed his hat before entering. There, Steve Mackey was waiting for him, shook Jesse’s hand, and thanked him for coming to all the services.

  “She was a great girl, Steve. I’m so sorry.”

  Fact was Jesse had barely known her, but this exchange between the selectman and Jesse was more ritual than anything else. What else would Jesse say? What else did a father want to hear? He took Jesse by the elbow and showed him into the kitchen, where Patti Mackey was fussing with the coffee machine. Steve Mackey gestured for Jesse to sit. He did. Mackey sat across from him. Patti offered him coffee.

  “Sure. I’d like that.”

  She put the cup in front of him and sat close to her husband, clutching his hand. She looked a wreck. Her red eyes were the least of it. For his part, Steve Mackey looked like he wanted to crumble but was holding it together for Patti . . . or not. It was just as likely, Jesse thought, Mackey was afraid of what would happen if he let himself go. Jesse understood that. He had let himself crack after Diana’s murder and it had nearly ruined him. He made a show of fixing up his coffee the way he liked it and making a satisfied sigh after taking a sip. Then he got to business.

  “Thank you both for talking to me today.”

  “We want to help,” Patti said, voice brittle.

  “I know you do. Let me say that the best way you can help is to be totally honest with me. Nothing you say to me that might seem to shine a bad light on Heather will ever leave this room. The only thing I want is to not have to repeat this same conversation with someone else’s parents.”

  Both the Mackeys nodded.

  Jesse waited a full thirty seconds. He was curious to see if either Steve or Patti would offer something without prompting before he asked his questions. He got the sense that Patti might have had something to say, but in the end, neither spoke up.

  “Okay. Did either one of you have any idea Heather had a drug problem?”

  The question was greeted by silence. Again, Jesse sensed Patti had something to say. He made a mental note to circle back to Patti and speak to her without Steve present.

  “I didn’t have a clue, Jesse. I swear to God,” Steve said. “I mean, who understands teenage girls? Was she moody sometimes? Sure she was. Could she be a pain? Yeah. But I couldn’t have asked for a better child.”

  Jesse turned to the wife. “That the way you saw it, Patti? You were a teenage girl once.”

  “Once,” she said, “a million years ago, before everyone had a cell phone. Before social media. Before . . .” Her voice drifted off. “It’s hard being a teenage girl, even a pretty one.”

  “I heard Heather hurt her back during a routine at the Holiday Show. Did she see a doctor for treatment?”

  “First we took her to Doc Goldfine,” Steve said. “He’d taken care of her since she was born.”

  “Then he recommended we take her to a spine and back specialist, Dr. Nour at the hospital.”

  “And?”

  Steve Mackey raised his palms to the ceiling and shrugged. “Patti took her and dealt with it.”

  “She did an MRI and found a few compressed vertebrae. She prescribed rest, massage, PT, and gave her something for the pain. Motrin, I think. Eight weeks later she was back at it, dancing, cheerleading, all as if she hadn’t been hurt in the first place.”

  Jesse said, “I know Doc Goldfine, but could you give me a number for Dr. Nour?”

  It went on like that for fifteen or twenty minutes. Everything according to Steve and Patti was fine up until the moment Patti found Heather unresponsive in her bed. Jesse thanked them and gave them the usual line about calling if there was anything else they could remember or if something had slipped their minds. But just as he was about to leave, he stopped.

  “Did Heather ever mention a boy named Chris Grimm?”

  Steve Mackey’s face was blank. It was clear to Jesse he had never heard the name before. “No, sorry. Should I know him?”

  “Not necessarily,” Jesse said. “Patti?”

  “No.”

  Jesse knew she was lying. He also knew this wasn’t the time for accusations or to bring up the things Megan, Darby, and Richie had said about Heather stealing from them. He shook Steve Mackey’s hand, hugged Patti, and left, once again saying how sorry he was.

  At the door of his Explorer he looked over the roof toward the Mackeys’ house and wondered again if Heather’s death would bind Steve and Patti together or blow them apart.

  Twenty-four

  She paced along the worn-out rug of the motel room, tried ignoring the cloying odors of pine-scented ammonia and sex that seemed to seep out of the mattress and the harvest-gold quilt. She managed to deal with the odors, but what she couldn’t deal with were the mirrors—the cheap imitation Deco mirrors on the walls and the heart-shaped mirror above the bed. She couldn’t deal with the mirrors because, for the time being, hers was the only image reflected in them. And she was disgusted by what she saw and what she was about to do.

  Oh, she had seduced men and women before. She had no issue with seduction, per se. She liked it, was good at it, and up until she seduced Chris Grimm, she enjoyed her conquests. Before she got hooked, sex was sometimes the only thing that helped her get through the day. Now only one thing really mattered in her life. It was what she woke up yearning for, spent her days fantasizing about, and went to bed dreaming of. A little green pill. Sex was now a distant afterthought. She still kind of enjoyed it, but only once she was sure she knew where her next high was coming from.

  The thing was, what she had done with Chris, and what she was about to do, was like shooting fish in a barrel. But she was already in too deep to complain about the dirt in the pool she was swimming in. She needed those pills and, as she had proven yesterday with Mr. Sarkassian, she was willing to do just about anything to make sure she wouldn’t get cut off. She remembered what her uncle Ted used to say about people. “You take food, electricity, and warmth away from folks for two days and the façade of civilization and morality is quickly stripped away.”

  Oxy, too, Uncle Ted, she thought. She supposed her sense of right and wrong had gone out the window that first time she was gripped by fear and desperation at the thought of not being able to dose herself. At that moment she knew she would do anything. Forget just fucking for it, or seducing a teenage boy. She knew that she would kill for it if she had to. And that realization shook her to her core. She also knew what would be waiting for her at the end of the road without her connection to Arakel. What waited for all opioid addicts when there were no more doctors willing to write prescriptions because of back pain, or knee pain, or . . . When the pills ran out, there was heroin. That was a step she never wanted to take.

  She considered herself lucky that the last doctor she tried to con into giving her pills saw potential in her and introduced her to Sarkassian. He kept her in pills and, to her shame, she was willing to do whatever he asked to stay in his good graces.

  There was a knock on the door. Now she used the mirror, trying not to look too carefully into her own eyes. She took a deep breath, loosened the knot of her blue satin robe, making sure her cleavage showed. She strode to the door, opened it, smiled a crooked come-and-get-it smile at the girl standing in the doorway.

  “Come on in, Petra,” she said. “I’ve been waiting.”

  Petra was the “everybody’s friend” girl in school. The heavyset girl with the lovely skin and the pretty face who lacked confidence and was always willing to melt into the scenery. Maybe she would have matured beyond that in college and blossomed into a more secure and confident woman. But since she had slipped and broken her femur last fall, she had become a prisoner of those same little green pills. Petra stepped in, closing the door behind her. She started to say something about how she had never done anything like this and how she had been desperate to try and . . .

  “Shhh!” The older w
oman placed her index finger across Petra’s lips, placed a few strands of long black hair behind the girl’s ear. Then she leaned over and pressed her mouth against the girl’s.

  Petra was shaking but soon gave in to the moment, opened her mouth, and let herself be kissed deeply. She kissed back. The woman let her robe fall to the floor.

  An hour later, Petra lay with her head against the woman’s left breast, tucked under her arm. And as insecure teenagers are prone to do, she asked if she was any good at it and wondered if she had been pleasing. The older woman tilted Petra’s head back and kissed her.

  “You were wonderful.”

  Petra smiled so earnestly that the older woman almost threw the girl out. In the end, though, she didn’t. She couldn’t, and continued holding the girl as if this was the first step in a long, true romance. Looking up into the ridiculous heart-shaped mirror, she was horrified at the level to which she had sunk. But as she felt the hunger beginning to gnaw at her, she pushed ahead with the reason any of this had come to pass.

  The woman straddled the girl, stroking her hair, kissing her softly on the lips.

  “Petra, I need you to do something for me,” she said, cooing.

  “Anything. God, anything for you.”

  There they were, the magic words—Anything for you. Chris had said the same.

  “Would you like to be with me again, Petra?”

  The girl tensed, fearing her dreams would collapse like all of her other dreams of the girls and boys she had wanted to be with. She fought back tears.

  “Yes, more than anything. Please don’t hurt me.”

  The woman lied. “Never, baby. Never.” She stroked Petra’s face, stopped, and reached under the bed. When she came back up, she held a vial of pills in her hand. “These are for you.” She gave the vial to Petra. The girl’s eyes lit up. “And you’ll never have to worry about getting them or having me ever again. There’s a new locker number. I’ve written it down for you. The combination will be the same. Do you understand?”