Robert B Parker: The Jesse Stone Novels 1-5

by Robert B. Parker

  Crow turned his attention back to Marcy.

  “That’s what keeps him from crashing.”

  “Hey, Crow, maybe you could stop talking about me like I’m a fucking nut case? I know you’re bad, but I’m sort of bad myself and you’re starting to piss me off.”

  Crow smiled at Marcy.

  “See?” he said. “He’s a danger freak.”

  Marcy didn’t say anything. She didn’t dare.

  “You think I’m afraid of you, Crow?” Macklin said.

  “This will go better, Jimmy,” Crow said, “we don’t get to shooting at each other.”

  Macklin poured himself another martini. “You make-um heap good point,” Macklin said and smiled widely at Marcy. “Smart Indian, huh Marce?”

  Marcy nodded very slightly, trying to be noncommittal.

  “You ladies sure you won’t drink something? Loosen up. You got to be here awhile, no reason not to enjoy it.”

  The frizzy-haired blond girl said, “I could have some white wine if you got some.”

  “Sure thing, blondie,” Macklin said. “Step right up here.”

  Still behind the bar, Macklin reached down and got a wine glass and set it on the bar. He took a bottle of California Chardonnay from the refrigerator and pulled the cork and poured the glass three quarters full.

  “There you are, blondie.”

  Marcy knew the girl wished she hadn’t asked. She hadn’t realized she’d have to walk up there and get it. Separation from the group seemed frightening. She would, Marcy knew, feel isolated at the bar.

  “I’ll have a little wine,” Marcy said.

  It was as if she was listening to someone else’s voice.

  “That’s the spirit, Marce,” Macklin said.

  She and Patty stood and walked together to the bar and took their wine.

  “Stay here,” Macklin said.

  For a moment, the false jollity was gone. It wasn’t an invitation. It was an order. Which was how they understood it. Macklin raised his glass.

  “Success,” he said.

  The two women raised theirs and drank. Marcy was grateful for the thrust of the wine. Even one sip made almost immediate contact with the electrical charge of her fear, and she felt it pulse through her. She took another quick drink. Macklin noticed. The bastard seemed to notice everything.

  “Hits the spot,” Macklin said.

  “Happy hour,” Crow said.

  “Feel free to join us,” Macklin said.

  Crow shook his head.

  “I think I’ll go check the perimeter,” he said.

  “Nobody’s gonna do squat while we got these women,” Macklin said. “Hell, we got a hundred more back in town, we use these up.”

  “Nice to have bench strength,” Crow said.

  Macklin looked at his watch.

  “Getting on,” he said. “Crow, I think it’s time for you to go out and see JD and Fran.”

  “There’s a lot of stuff to be carried to the boat,” Crow said. “Maybe better to wait.”

  Macklin smiled.

  “These ladies will help us,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  Crow nodded and went.

  Chapter 61

  Jesse went into the water wearing a black neoprene wet suit and trailing a buoyant equipment bag. There was a Browning 9-mm in the bag and a .38 Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special and a sunbelt. There was also a towel, a police radio, a four-battery Maglite, and a change of clothes. He was a hundred yards offshore on the harbor side of the island, opposite the point on the ocean side where Macklin was holding the hostages. The water was cold, but the wet suit made it tolerable. The shore ahead of him was only a thicker darkness outlined against a paler sky. Above the dark silence of the powerless island, a crescent moon hung faint against the not yet fully gathered darkness. Doc had cut the engines and coasted in as close as he dared. Now he was letting the boat drift away before starting up the engines.

  The rising tide made it easy to swim toward shore. Jesse looked back. He couldn’t see the boat. The water was rougher as he got closer to shore, and the waves began to toss him among the rocks. He maneuvered through them by pushing himself away from them. The rocks were slick with seaweed and rough with barnacles. He couldn’t touch bottom yet. A clump of seaweed brushed his leg, and he felt the panic he’d always felt when he was over his head. It wasn’t drowning. He was terrified of sharks or, even more namelessly, of whatever might be lurking down there in the unfathomable space below, rising slowly toward his disembodied legs dangling against the surface of the water like bait. He felt the frantic impulse for a moment to climb up onto one of the rocks and cling there in useless safety. He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. In, he said to himself as he breathed, out. Be a nice headline. POLICE CHIEF HIDES ON ROCK AS BANDITS LOOT ISLAND. He kept moving, breathing deeply, talking to himself, repelling gently from rock to rock, trying not to bang hard against one. If there’s something down there, it won’t know I’m a cop. There hasn’t been a shark fatality in Massachusetts since 1938. Then he felt bottom and in another moment was able to stand. Still under pressure from the waves, he moved among the rock scatter closer to shore until he reached a sort of V-shaped gully in the rocks, where the seawater churned into a creamy foam. He scrambled up the gully and out of the ocean. At the top of the gully was some scrub pine, and he used it to climb the final few feet onto level ground. He was in a grove of white pine maybe a half mile farther out on the island from the yacht club. He knew where he was. He and Doc had planned for him to come out there because it would shelter him.

  He stripped off the wet suit, toweled himself dry, shivering. It was too late in September to be standing naked at the edge of the water at night. He put on sneakers and jeans and a dark blue tee shirt. He strapped his gun belt on, with the Browning behind his right hip, and the .38 butt forward in front of his left. He clipped on the radio. There were two extra magazines for the Browning on the belt and a metal loop for the flashlight. He put on a blue windbreaker with gray Polartec lining and turned up the collar. The warmth was heartening. He clipped the radio mike to the collar. He took out of the flotation bag a zipper sandwich bag full of .38 special ammunition, stuck it in the side pocket of the windbreaker, and zipped the pocket. He rolled up the wet suit and the flotation bag and tossed them down into the surf at the foot of the rock gully. Then he turned and shrugged his shoulders to loosen them and shook his wrists and breathed deeply like a method actor before a scene.

  Jesse looked at the roadway, thirty yards from the pine grove. There were no street lights. There was no electricity on the island since the bridge blew. The bank had its own generator, so that no one could get trapped in the vault by a power failure. But he wasn’t anywhere near the bank, and he was pretty sure that light wasn’t his friend anyway. If he followed that road for maybe two miles he would reach the restaurant on the other side where the chopper had taken fire. He breathed deep again. In. Out. In. Out. He thought about Marcy. He worked on his breathing. In. Out. In. Out. There was no movement on the roadway. No sound in the pine grove except the sound his heart made pumping too fast. The crescent moon had gone a little higher above the horizon. The sky was a little darker.

  Okay, he thought, here we go.

  Chapter 62

  Suitcase Simpson thought it looked like there was a festival at the Paradise end of the ruined bridge. Five television trucks were jammed in as close as the police would let them, their funny-looking antennas sticking up like the dead limbs of an old evergreen. Five television news people, three male and two female, were fighting for stand-up space in front of the wreckage, while their camera men were jostling each other for a better angle on the twisted ruins of the bridge, and the sound people were trying to get enough ambient noise for authenticity without drowning out the news person. There was a high
volume of crowd hubbub. And the surf rolling up on the bare rocks was loud.

  All three Paradise Police cruisers were parked near the verge of the channel, and half a dozen blue and gray State Police cruisers were scattered behind them. A big State Police mobile operations van sat in the middle of the roadway back of the cars with antennas sticking out of it variously. Both the Paradise fire trucks were there, along with the town ambulance. There were fire trucks and ambulances from three other towns, the crews sitting on their trucks staring at the place where the bridge had been. And there were a number of smaller vans with radio call letters on the sides parked back along the roadway. Much of Paradise was gathered behind the sawhorse barricades, and yellow crime scene tape stretched across the operations scene. A lot of them had Walkman-type radios with ear phones and were listening to the description being broadcast by the half dozen radio reporters, who were less ostentatious than the TV guys.

  Suitcase was walking the perimeter of what he thought of, for lack of something more descriptive, as the crime scene. There was no reason to walk it. But he didn’t know what else to do. Danforth, the SWAT team guy, was in considerable charge in the mobile unit, and some lieutenant commander from the Coast Guard had shown up wearing a pistol belt and side arm and talking about a cutter on the way from Boston. There were several technician types working the radio and phones and a computer that Suitcase didn’t see the need for, and it was crowded, so he took a walk. He could make sure the crowd didn’t push through the barriers and get in the way. Might as well do something.

  “Suit, what happened?”

  “Bridge blew up.”

  “I can see that, for crissake.”

  “So what are you asking me for?”

  “Suit, anyone killed?”

  “Too soon to know.”

  Two guys he played softball with were sitting in a Ford 150, drinking beer.

  “Hey, Suit, looks like a long day, babe. Want one?”

  Suitcase shook his head. “Keep the cans in the truck,” he said.

  He felt bad that Jesse hadn’t taken him when he went to the island. And he was very relieved that he didn’t have to go. Which made him more unhappy because it made him question his courage. In the distance, he could hear more sirens. He wondered what other vehicle could possibly be arriving in a great hurry to sit and wait. He saw the Hopkins boys smirking and jostling on a rock outcropping near the edge of the water. Too bad they weren’t on the fucking bridge when it went. He tried to call Molly Crane on his radio and got the fire dispatcher.

  “She ain’t here,” the dispatcher said. “She told me to take her calls.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “I don’t know, but she was wearing a vest and she was in a big rush.”

  “Shit,” Suitcase said.

  “What’s happening down there, Suit?”

  “I got no idea,” Suitcase said.

  Chapter 63

  It was fully dark now. Inside the restaurant, Macklin had lit some candles. Outside, the only light was the small moon, which made thin bright traces on the dark water. Crow thought he could make out the shape of Freddie Costa’s boat lingering out past the little jut of rock to his right, but it was only an area of thicker darkness and he wasn’t sure. It was forty-eight minutes until Freddie could get in close enough. Crow turned and found JD standing near the back door of the restaurant, holding his shotgun.

  “It’s me, JD,” Crow said as he walked toward him.

  “How much time?”

  “ ’Bout three quarters of an hour,” Crow said.

  “This is fucking spooky,” JD said. “I mean here we are, and they know we’re here and nobody’s doing nothing about it, and we’re just hanging around.”

  “Cops can’t get in touch with us,” Crow said. “Jimmy didn’t give them his cell phone number. They don’t dare fly over because of the hostages.”

  “You don’t think they got boats? Out a ways where we can’t see them?”

  “This ain’t the FBI, JD. This is a small-town police department.”

  “You don’t think the state cops will show up? You don’t think they’ll bring in the Coast Guard?”

  “Sooner or later,” Crow said. He was watching the darkness as he talked.

  “And then what?”

  “Then we got the hostages.”

  “You think we can pull this off, Crow?”

  “Sure.”

  “So why am I so worried, and you’re not?”

  Crow smiled in the darkness.

  “Well, aside from me being me, and you being you—you got to trust the team. You got to trust Freddie to get in here and pick us up and get us out of here, even if they got a boat out there looking for us. You got to trust me to handle trouble if it comes, and Jimmy to think this through.”

  “Jimmy’s fucking crazy,” JD said. “He was great before this thing started to go down. Now he’s fucking coming apart.”

  “Still got to trust him. He’s in charge. You unnerstand? We trusted you on the wiring. We trusted Fran on the boom. Now you got to trust us. Nobody’s any good alone. You trust yourself. You trust your crew.”

  “Why didn’t Jimmy time this closer?” JD said. “Waiting like this is weird.”

  Crow took a Bowie knife from the back of his belt and held it up so JD could look at it.

  “You take a good knife,” Crow said. “You need to grind the edge of it regular, or it gets dull.”

  “What’s that?” JD said. “A fucking Apache slogan or something?”

  “Or something,” Crow said.

  With a movement so quick that JD never saw it, he cut JD’s throat, moving sideways as he did so to avoid the blood. A sigh of escaping air was the only sound JD made before he fell forward facedown on the ground and jerked briefly, like a slaughtered chicken, and was still. Crow put the knife blade into the earth a couple of times to clean it and then wiped the dirt off on his pants leg. He put the knife back and took out his gun.

  “Fran,” he yelled.

  “Yo.”

  “Get over here.”

  Crow could hear Fran’s footsteps as he came on the run. When he came around the corner, Crow shot him in the chest three times. The bullets spun Fran several staggering steps sideways, and the shotgun he had been carrying sailed off into the darkness. Fran fell on his back on top of JD.

  Without looking at the dead men, Crow uncocked the pistol, dropped the magazine from the handle, and put the gun back in its holster. He took some loose ammunition from his pocket and fed three fresh rounds into the magazine. Then he took the gun back out, slid the magazine back into the handle, and holstered the gun again. He paid no attention to the two bodies lying together in the weak moonlight. He looked again out at the water and then walked down to the edge of it where it slid tamely over the stony beach.

  He could see Freddie’s boat now. It had moved past the rock jut and followed the tide in. It was still beyond the boulder that marked the farthest point they could wade. Crow turned and walked back into the restaurant. Macklin looked at him as he came into the romantic glow of candle light. Crow held up two fingers. Macklin nodded and smiled and turned to the hostages.

  “Not to worry, ladies, just a little downsizing,” he said.

  Chapter 64

  Molly Crane was alone at the desk when the call came in. She automatically registered the phone number that flashed up on the caller ID screen.

  “Chief Stone, please,” a woman’s voice said.

  “He’s not here,” Molly said. “This is Sergeant Crane. May I help you?”

  “Where is he?”

  “Official business,” Molly said. “May I have your name, please?”

  “Tell Chief Stone that if he ever wants to see his sweetheart alive, he’ll make sure that
nothing happens to Jimmy Macklin.”

  “And what sweetheart might that be?” Molly said.

  As she talked, she was punching up the phone number index on the computer.

  “Abby Taylor,” the voice said. “Anything happens to Jimmy Macklin, she dies.”

  “Would you like to make some sort of a deal?” Molly said.

  “You let Jimmy go. I let Abby go.”

  The phone number came up on the screen. The woman was calling from Abby’s phone. That was pretty brazen.

  “May I speak with Abby, please?”

  “And don’t try to find me. I see a cop, and I’ll kill her anyway.”

  “How do I know she’s all right?” Molly said.

  The woman didn’t answer and the connection broke.

  “Shit,” Molly said aloud.

  Was she really staying right in Abby’s house? She called the mobile operations truck at the bridge. No answer. She shook her head once, then left the switchboard, went to her locker, and slipped into a bullet-proof vest. Then she went next door to the fire station.

  Buzz Morrow was the only fireman there. Everyone else was at the explosion site.

  “I’m leaving the station,” she said. “Can you cover the switchboard?”

  “I’m supposed to stand by here,” Buzz said.

  “You got no trucks,” Molly said. “What happens if someone does report a fire? You run out and pee on it?”

  “Good point,” Buzz said. “Where you going?”

  She didn’t answer him. She left the fire station at a half run and went to the parking lot behind the station. There were no squad cars. She stopped at her own car, a Honda Accord, took out her service pistol and racked a 9-mm cartridge up into the chamber. She let the hammer back down, put the pistol back in its holster, took a deep breath, and got in her car. She had no siren, but the town was nearly deserted and she was able to go very fast through the empty streets. She went past Abby’s street slowly and looked down it. Nothing unusual. No car in front of Abby’s house. She turned the corner on the next street and circled the block slowly, staying off Abby’s street. Nothing unusual. She saw a dark green Mercedes sedan near the corner. But Mercedes sedans were not unusual in Paradise. She parked on the street behind and a little bit downhill from Abby’s house. Her breath was shallow and coming very fast. When she shut off the engine, she tried to slow down, relax the stomach muscles, breathe in deeply. She let her shoulders sag and closed her eyes for a minute.