Night Passage js-1

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Night Passage js-1 Page 6

by Robert B. Parker

“Yes, sir,” Jesse said. “I

  know.”

  “I go to court with my lawyer. They issue a new rcstraining order. I walk out of court twenty minutes later.”

  “That‘’s how it usually works,

  sir,” Jesse said pleasantly,

  “especially if you’ve got some

  money.”

  “Which I do,” Jo Jo said. “And

  some clout and I can come in here and grab her crotch, or whatever else I want to grab, anytime I goddamned want to.”

  “Is that tight.‘?” Carole said

  to Jesse.

  Jesse shook his head.

  “Oh7” Jo Jo said. “You just

  admired you couldn’t do shit about it.”

  “No, sir,” Jesse said. “I said

  the restraining order probably wouldn’t work.”

  “Same thing,” Jo Jo said.

  “Not really,” Jesse said, and kicked JoJo in the groin.

  The movement seemed casual. But it was a very quick movement.

  And hard. Jo Jo gasped and doubled up and fell over and lay on the pale blue flowered carpet of the den and moaned. Jesse bent over him with a look of blank disinterest and grasped Jo Jo’s hair with his left hand and held his head up and put his face very close to Jo Jo’s and spoke to him.

  “You’re all mouth and show

  muscle,” Jesse said gently.

  “If you come-near this woman again, or if anything happens to her or her kids, no matter what, and no matter whose fault it is, I will kick you around town until you look like roadkill. And if you are annoying, like you were today, maybe VII shoot you.”

  Jesse tapped Jo Jo on the bridge of the nose with the muzzle of his revolver. “Right here… capeesh?”

  Jo Jo was still moaning.

  “Answer me, Jo Jo,” Jesse said.

  “Or I will kick you in the balls again. Capeesh?”

  Jo Jo squeezed the word “capeesh” out

  between moans.

  Jesse let Jo Jo’s head go and it thumped on the rug.

  Jesse stood up.

  “Suitcase, you and Anthony stay here until Mr.

  Genest has gone,” Jesse said. “Ma’am, you should probably get those kids to a shrink.”

  Carole’s eyes were wide and bright. There was a flush of color on her cheekbones, as if she had a fever.

  “What if he comes back,” she said.

  “I don’t think he’ll come

  back,” Jesse said.

  He turned and walked out of the house and down the driveway to his car.

  Behind him he heard Suitcase Simpson say, “Jesus Christ!”

  Taylor.

  “The selectmen have asked me to talk with you,” she said.

  “Good,” Jesse said.

  She was wearing a black suit with a long jacket and a shot skirt. At least she didn’t have on oe of those frilly neck pieces that some professional women wore like a pretend necktie; her white blouse was open at the neck. Her briefcase was on the floor leaning against the leg of her chair. She wore black high-heeled shoes.

  Jesse thought her ankles were very nice.

  “I’m speaking now as town

  counsel,” Abby Taylor said carefully.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “May I call you Jesse?”

  “Of course, Abby.”

  She smiled automatically.

  “Now, I know,” she said, “that

  you are new not only to this job, but to this environment.”

  Jesse smiled helpfully.

  “But whatever the circumstances of your police work in Los Angeles, this is a town in which everyone’s civil liberties are important.”

  Jesse nodded. He seemed interested.

  “May I be frank with you?” Abby Taylor

  said.

  “You cannot go about beating people up,”

  she said. “It leaves the town vulnerable to lawsuit. I understand the provocation. And I certainly am sympathetic to Carole Ge-nest’s situation. But we cannot permit you to take the law into your own hands. It is not only illegal. ‘It simply is not right.”

  Jesse nodded thoughtfully.

  “Let me ask you a question,‘ ”

  he said.

  “Of course.”

  “You asked me if you could call me Jesse, and I said you could. But you did/C.t.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You never used my name.”

  “What the hell has that got to do with you brutalizing Mr. Genest?”

  “Just seemed odd to me,” Jesse said.

  “Well, if it does, it does,” Abby Taylor said. “I’m not going to be sidetracked.”

  “Course not, Abby.”

  “Do you have anything to say about the matter of your assault on Mr. Genest?”

  “Not really,” Jesse said.

  ‘Tva afraid there has to be more than

  that,“ Abby Taylor said.

  “The restraining order wasn’t

  working,” Jesse said.

  “Think of me as implementing it.”

  “You really have to take this seriously,”

  Abby Taylor said.

  “‘You have to take this more seriously, Jesse,’” he said.

  Abby Taylor smiled.

  “You have to take this more seriously,

  Jesse.”

  “No I don’t, Abby.”

  “You don’t make it easy.. ·

  Jesse.”

  He nodded and leaned back a little in his chair. His blue uniform shirt was tailored and carefully pressed. He had nice eyes, she noticed, with small wrinkles at the corners as if he had spent a lot of time squinting into the sun

  “Jo Jo Genest should be kicked in the balls once a day,” lesse said. “He’s terrorizing his ex-wife. He’s frightening his children. When Anthony went up there the youngest two were under the bed. There’s a restraining order in place. He paid no attention to it. It was necessary to get his attention.‘ ’

  Abby was silent for a time, frowning, as she thought about his answer: He watched her think. He liked the way the small vertical wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows when she frowned.

  “The selectmen are aware of the

  provocation,” Abby said. “And they are prepared to go forward from here. But they would like your assurance that sometng like this will not occur in the future.”

  “It might,” Jesse said.

  “God,” Abby said. ‘You

  don’t give a damn inch, do you?“

  Jesse smiled.

  “Siuce you drew it up,” Jesse said,

  “you know that my

  7°

  J— . contract here provides recourse to the selectmen if they are dissatisfied with my performance.“

  “So, you’re saying the ball is in their court.”

  “Yes.”

  They looked at each other. Abby held his look, feeling challenged by it. Then she smiled.

  “God, you are so much harder than you

  look.”

  Jesse smiled again.

  “And what’s my name?”

  “Jesse.”

  They laughed. Abby sat back in her chair and crossed her legs.

  “I mean you look like a history teacher,”

  she said.

  “Who might coach tennis on the side.”

  Jesse didn’t say anything. He was looking at her legs.

  “And yet you handled Jo Jo Genest.”

  “Experience is helpful,” Jesse said.

  “Have you had that much experience with people like Genest?”

  “In L.A. I worked South Central,” Jesse said. “People in South Central would keep ‘Jo Jo for a pet.”

  “No one ever confronted him before like that.”

  “Guess it was time,” Jesse said.

  “You won, but don’t misjudge him. He can he very dangerous.”

  “Anybody can be very dangerous, Abby.”

  “I believe he has mob connec
tions.”

  “‘Jesse.’”

  She smiled.

  “Jesse,” she said.

  “Good. You married?”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with the issue before us,” she said.

  “Me either,” Jesse said.

  “I’m happily divorced,” Abby

  said. “Five years.”

  “Taylor your own name?”

  “Yes.”

  They were silent again. Outside his office he could hear the sporadic murmur of the dispatcher’s voice. The occasional sound of a door opening and closing. It was a lulling sound, it went with quiet summer nights and green space in the center of a small town.

  The office itself was very spare. Jesse’s desk was bare except for the phone and a pair of gold-tinted Oakley sunglasses. There was a window behind his chair which looked out at the driveway of the fire station. A green metal file cabinet stood to the right of the window. There was no rug on the floor. No pictures of anyone.

  “Have you ever been married?” Abby said.

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re not married now.”

  “No.‘?

  “Divorced?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesse, one of the rules of con. versation is that when asked a question you don’t give a one-word answer.”

  Jesse looked at his watch.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s

  suppertime, want to have dinner with me?”

  Abby opened her mouth and closed it. She had come in to reprimand this man and he didn’t seem reprimanded.

  “I… I don’t…

  certainly,” she said. ;‘I’d love

  to.“

  yoming, Torn Carson felt alien in the rolling landscape.

  Pronghorn antelope appeared here and there in the hills, grazing in herds, strung out along a stream drinking. Buffalo grazed too in the gently undulant pastures. They weren’t wild herds, he“knew. They were ranch buffalo, healthful, destined to be slaughtered and sold in specialty stores. He’d never been anywhere very much until he moved to Wyoming. Lived all his life in Paradise, and his parents too. His mother taught seventh grade at Paradise Junior High. His father ran the Gulf station. The only gas station in the downtown area. He had no military experience.

  He hadn’t gone to college. He’d joined the cops after working three years for his father. The complete townie, he’d married a girl from his high-school class and lived with her in a house his parents helped him buy, near Hawthorne Park on the hill above the harbor. Along the empty roadway, he saw several mule deer, nervous and gangly as they grazed and looked up. More skittish than the prong horns, he thought. Always looking over their shoulder.

  Now he was marooned here, vastly alone with his family in an emptiness of grass and rolling hills over which the huge blank sky hovered comfortless. He’d been proud to be a policeman, proud of the right to carry a gun. It hadn’t been very hard. Life in Paradise had been largely law-abiding.

  He had been polite to the selectmen, and firm with the high-school kids who used to congregate on the stone wall around the historic cemetery across from the common.

  He had taken courses in criminal justice at Northeastern University in the evening, and he had practiced regularly at the pistol range, in case he ever had to use the gun, which he hadn’t.

  He wasn’t spectacular, maybe, but he hadn’t done anything wrong either and when he was appointed chief he felt it an achievement which he had earned. He wasn’t much with budgets and finance, but Lou Burke was able to take care of that end of things for him, and he got along well with the men in the department. The townspeople liked him. He was genial and nonthreatening, and he looked pretty good in dress uniform at the Memorial Day parade. He liked the weekly RoT Club meetings, where he got to fine people for various violations of Rotary procedure, and to participate in the general bonhomie. He collected the fines every week in a chamber pot. Now that was over. His wife was neither understanding nor forgiving of the move to Wyoming. His children went miserably to a regional grammar school with the children of plainsmen and miners. He could not explain to an.¥ of them why they were here and they badgered him angrily about it nearly all the time. He was ashamed to have been sent away, ashamed that he hadn’t stood firm and seen justice done.

  Often he thought of going to the FBI office in Cheyenne. It was the closest one. He’d looked it up in the phone book. But he was afraid to. Afraid for his wife and children, and, he had to admit it, afraid for himself. But every day here became more bitter.

  ‘He missed the ocean, the faces on the evening news, the closeness of the horizons back home where you could only see as far as your neighbor’s house across the street. He missed the sense that he was enveloped by the civilization as old as the country. Out here he felt vulnerable and exposed. He felt skittish. He was afraid to act, but he hated his inaction and he hated the life he was leading.

  He hadn’t found a job yet in this wilderness and he was running out of the money they gave him. He didn’t dare ask them for more. There was something about the steeliness in Hasty’s prissy eyes… But he couldn’t go on like this, his family miserable, all of them lonely, himself frightened in addition. He spoke aloud in the cab of the new Dodge pickup they’d provided.

  “Sooner or later,” he said.

  “Sooner or damn later.”

  He drove on toward Gillette, alone in the big prairie, no one else in sight on the narrow road. The only other car, a maroon Buick behind him, had turned off at Bill. He felt exhilarated by the thought that he might do something to change things. As long as he could think about it without actually doing it, he felt excited, and possible.

  He’d felt it before, but he was not introspective and he didn’t think much about the difference between thinking it and doing it, or how often he’d thought it before without doing it.

  When he actually began to imagine doing it, what be would say to the FBI agent in Cheyenne, what he might do if he had to go back to Paradise and testify, the bottom of himself got watery and loose, and his throat narrowed so it was difficult to swallow. But he wasn’t thinking of that now, he was thinking about how he would face the problem someday, and he was feeling as good as he was able to feel in his exile when the Dodge exploded beneath him. The hood of the truck, and part of the dashboard, and some bits of Torn Carson, went a hundred feet in the air and landed thirty yards from the roadway, sending two mule deer into a terrified run. The remainder of the truck, and of Torn Carson, was an impenetrable ball of flame in the empty roadway that burned unobserved as the deer, their white tails flashing, disappeared over the hillcrest.

  overlooking the harbor. Abby had an Absolut martini, up, with several olives. Jesse had a beer. He didn’t look like the beer type to her. Her father had been a beer drinker, burly, red-faced, tending to fat as he got older. He always said he didn’t have a prbblem as long as he drank beer. But he had drank a lot of beer, and she knew he had a problem.

  She wondered sometimes if she did. Originally she had switched from white wine to martinis because she liked white wine too much and felt that martinis would be something she could sip through an evening.

  She smiled to herself with some sadness as she sipped this one. She had learned to like martinis very much and, sometimes, if her self-control slipped, would sip four or five during an evening.

  “What’s a lobster roll?” Jesse

  said as they looked at the menus.

  “A lobster roll?”

  “Yes. Is it a kind of sushi or what?”

  Abby smiled.

  “God, you California kids,” she said.

  “A lobster roll is lobster salad in a hot dog roll.”

  “Oh,” Jesse said. “Actually I

  wasn’t a Cal’ffornia kid.

  Didn’t move there until I was fifteen.“

  “Where’d you grow up before

  then?”

  “Around Tucson. My father was with the Pima County Sheriff’s Depa
rtment.“

  “Ah,” Abby said. “Second

  geheration.”

  “Un huh.”

  “Why’d you move?”

  “My father was working paid detail with a film crew in

  Tucson, and he got friendly with one of the stars and took a job as the star’s driver, personal assistant, bodyguard, whatever. So we moved.“

  “So do you know a lot of famous movie

  people?”

  “Nope, my father lasted about a month and got fired and took a job at Hughes.”

  “Oh my,” Abby said. “who was the

  star?”

  Jesse shook his head.

  “Why not?” Abby said.

  “Old news,” Jesse said.

  “Well, aren’t you private,” Abby

  said. “Your folks still alive?”

  “Brothers? Sisters?”

  “Brother.”

  “where is he?”

  “I don’t know. He and my father

  didn’t get along. He took off.”

  “And you don’t know where he

  went?”

  She drank the rest of her martini. The waitress stopped by at once. The profit here was on drinks. Abby nodded 78

  Ierff e. Ps.t‘ yes, she’d have another

  one, and she noticed that Jesse had another beer.

  “I wouldn’t have figured you for a beer drinker,” Abby said.

  “I’m not. I’m a scotch on the

  rocks drinker, but I didn’t want to get drunk, on our first date.”

  “Do you get drank?”

  “I have some trouble stopping when I

  start,” Jesse said.

  “You’re open about it,” Abby

  said.

  Jesse shrugged.

  · “I have Ixouble too,” she

  said.

  “Stopping?”

  “Un huh. My father was a boozer.” She

  smiled. “Drank only beer.”

  “In my house it was my mother.”

  “What did she drink?”

  “Port,” Jesse said.

  Abby wrinkled her nose.

  “Ugh,” she said.

  The waitress came back and took food orders. It was a noisy crowd out Oh“the deck. Young men and women, many of them from the same condo complex where Jesse was renting, single, well employed, affluent, stylish, and loud. They were drinking things like Long Island iced teas and tequila sunrises. As Abby looked across the table at him, Jesse seemed to her a figure of stillness in the midst of turbulence, as if he were the only boat with an anchor.

 

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