said.
“About what?”
“They had some kind of a business deal that went badly.
Hasty blamed Jo Jo.“
“What kind of business deal?”
“I don’t know.”
Cissy turned in against Jesse and put her face into his chest.
It was hard to hear her voice, muffled as it was against him. He could feel her trembling and he patted her shoulder a little. Over her shoulder he looked at his watch.
Whatever was coming was coming slow. Finally she spoke again, her voie muffled against his chest.
“Jo Jo killed Tammy Portugal.”
There, Jesse thought. Cissy kept her face buried in his jacket. She was hanging on to him as if she might blow away if she let go.
“He used to tell me how he did it.”
“How he killed Tammy?”
“Yes.”
She began to sob against him. Big paroxysmal sobs, her body heaving. She said something he couldn’t understand.
“What did you say?”
She shook her head.
“No, you’ve come this far,”
Jesse said, “and we’re still okay. You can say it.
I can hear it.”
“I liked hearing-.about it,” she said,
gasping the words out between sobs. “And he knew I wouldn’t tell anyone because then I’d have to tell how I knew.”
Jesse was silent for a moment, patting her shoulder gen-fly.
He had hold, finally, of the grotesque animal he’d been hunting. And he would have to pull it, snarling and vicious, slowly out of its hole. He didn’t know yet how big an animal it was going to he.
“I’m going to have to ask you to
testify,” Jesse said.
She nodded her head against him, her body shaking. He held her. The sobbing went on for a long time. He patted her gently. He could hear the occasional car go ordinarily by. on Main Street.
Somewhere he could hear a dog bark.
“You were brave to tell me,” Jesse said.
She nodded against him.
“I had to tell you,” she said.
“I couldn’t have those all over town.”
“The next brave thing you are going to have to do is get
‘psychiatric help. Good help. An honest-to-God shrink.“
“I’m sick,” she said into his
chest, “I know I am.”
“You can get well,” Jesse said.
“You know a shrink?”
She shook her head.
“Your family doctor, can refer you,” Jesse said. “This is too hard to do alone. You need to save yourself.”
“My God,” she said. “Jo Jo will
kill me.”
“Jo Jo will be in jail,” Jesse said.
him to arrest Jo Jo. Both men
carried’s‘lotguns. He didn’t know if he could trust them either, but it was time to find out. He didn’t want to have to kill Jo Jo; a show of force usually made an arrest go smoother. They waited in the parking lot in the back of the gym where Jo Jo trained and took him, shotguns leveled, without incident when he came out to his car. They brought him handcuffed to the station.
Molly at the front desk watched in silence as they led him past her and locked him up in one of the holding cells in the back.
DeAngelo and Perkins left. Jesse went back out front.
.“I’ll cover the desk,” Jesse
said to Molly. “You can go home.”
“You sure you don’t mind being alone with him?”
Molly said.
“Be fine,” Jesse said and smiled at Molly.
“Give us a chance to really get to know each other.”
“Won’t that be swell,” Molly
said and got her things and left. Jes’se watched her go down the front steps ‘the station, then he went to his office, got a tape recorder, walked slowly back to the cell area. He pulled up a chair, plugged in the tape recorder, and talked with Jo through the bars.
“That thing on?” Jo Jo said.
“Not yet,” Jesse said.
He held the recorder so that Jo Jo could see that it wasn’t.
“Get used to the cell, Jo Jo,” Jesse said.
“You’re going to be in one the rest of your life.”
“You can’t prove shit” Jo Jo
said.
“Jo Jo, you know you did her, and I know it, and we got a witness who’ll swear you bragged about it.
We’re going over you and everything you own—your car, your house. We’re going to find forensic evidence, Jo Jo.”
“You been out to get me since you come to town,” Jo Jo said.
“When’s the last time you had sex with a woman?”
Jesse said.
Jo Jo stared at him. “Why you want to
know?”
“Because it’s the last time,”
Jesse said.
Jo Jo continued to stare at him.
“Give you a chance to find out how tough you really are, though. Cons always like to test the bodybuilders, you know? See if they can back it up. Some guys at Cedar Junction be real proud to have Mr. Universe punking for them. ‘ ’
Jo Jo had been sitting on his cot. He stood now and walked to the bars.
“What do you want, Stone?”
“I want to help you, Jo Jo. I want to find some sort of deal fo.r you.”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe you shouldn’t have to go down alone for u us -r nrk r this. Maybe if we talked about what kind of business you are doing with Hasty Hathaway. Maybe you might be able to tell me something about Torn Carson’s death, or Lou Burke’s.”
“I don’t know nothing about
that.”
“Too bad,” Jesse said.
Jo Jo walked to the back wall of the cell and turned and walked to the barred door again.
“What kind of deal?”
“Depends what I hear, and how good it is.”
Jo Jo walked to the back wall and turned and leaned on it, looking at Jesse.
“So I spill my guts to you and you don’t promise me nothing.”
Jesse smiled.
“Works for me,” he said.
“No deal,” Jo Jo said.
Jesse waited.
“You can’t even get me for Tammy, no way you can prove it.”
Jesse waited-.
“If I did know something, I’m not going to fink out without something better than you’re offering.”
“You need a little time,” Jesse said,
“run this thing over in your mind, think about how your life is going to go from now on. i’ll come back in a while and see you.”
“I got to know what the deal is,” Jo Jo said.
Jesse turned and left him there standing alone in the dim light at the back of his tiny cell, the tape recorder silently waiting on the floor by the folding chair outside the bars.
away had already mixed the first of their two evening Manhattans.
Hasty went as he always did to the living room and she brought the drinks in, as she always did, on a small silver tray someone had given them at their wedding. She put the tray down on the coffee table.
She felt weak, as if she’d been ill, but steady’enough, quiet inside now that the thing had got out.
Hasty took his drink and sipped some without waiting for her. Then he took a Polaroid picture from his inside pocket and droppec! it faceup on the coffee table.
“Oh God,” she said.
“I got this in the mail this ,morning.”
She nodded.
“Explain it to me, please.”
Her husband’s voice was thin and very tight. His face was white, and there were vertical grooves in his cheeks.
The hand holding the Manhattan was trembling slightly.
She felt the weakness open beneath her and it was as if she would slump into it and disappear. She didn’t want her drink.
R stood
on the tray in front of her with the short thick glass beaded slightly and the amber light showing through it. She shook her head gently. She couldn’t go through it all again.
“Explain.” Her husband finished his drink.
“I need you to explain.”
She stared at her hands folded in her lap. They looked foreign to her. Her knees looked remote and unconnected to her. Her living room, in the house where she had lived for most of her adult life, looked like a museum room. Not hers, not anyone’s. Why would someone make a chair like that? Why would someone sit in it?
Her husband’s voice was so tight it seemed half strangled.
“Now, I want to know now.”
“Jo Jo,” she whispered.
It was so soft he couldn’t hear her. He leaned forward.
“What?”
“Jo Jo. He sent the pictures. I told the police.”
“What police?‘”
“Jesse.”
She was still whispering. He was still leaning forward.
His face was bloodless and there was sweat on his upper lip.
“Did ‘he force you?” Hasty said.
“No.”
Her voice was barely audible.:
“Goddamn you,” Hasty said.
“Jo Jo killed that girl, too,” she
whispered. “I told Jesse.”
Her husband didn’t say anything. He leaned farther forward until he was doubled over and clutched at himself and began to moan. Then he stood and walked to the wall and pounded on it with both fists and began to scream. Then stopped pounding and stopped screaming and turned back toward her.
“You… you don’t
know…”
He shook his head. He couldn’t find words. She was still, staring at the hands folded in her lap.
“I’m sick,” she whispered.
“You have to understand, Hasty. I’m sick.”
“Goddamn you,” he said. “Goddamn
you.”
With the back of his hand her husband knocked a floor lamp over and when it was on the floor he kicked it. Then he turned and ran from the room. After a moment she heard the back door open and after another moment she heard the car start. She sat for a long time in the empty house before she got up finally and walked slowly to the kitchen and closed the back door that her husband had left open. Then she sat and rested her arms on the kitchen table and put her head down onto them, and cried.
house, where they had their weekly meetings; all the Horsemen, in fatigues, with weapons, sitting on folding chairs among the children’s bicycles, and the family garden tools.‘
the wh .eelbarrow, power mower, snowblower, the rakes and hoe, the shovel, and the long-handled three-toothed cultivator, and coiled hoses hanging on the wall.
That had been easy, there was a system in place to assemble the Horsemen. Now it was all on him. He stood in a near trance at the side of the room waiting for the men to settle.
Now everything was in what he would say. He felt simultaneously frenetic and still. He remembered a phrase he read once in college—furious immobility. That’s what he felt like. Furious immobility. Every moment since Cissy told him had been frenzied. If Jesse knew that Jo Jo killed Tammy Portugal, then soon he would know why, and once Jo Jo began to talk—and Hasty had no doubt that under pressure, Jo Jo would talk—he would tell everything.
Tammy, Lou Burke, Torn Carson, the arms deal, every thing, and all that Hasty had built for, all the plans, the mobilization, the slow expansion, all that Hasty was, the Horsemen, the bank, the prominent man in town. He didn’t know how Jo Jo had gotten those pictures, but he knew why he had gone public with them. He should never have fought with him about the aborted weapons deal. He should not have blamed him. The blame goes to the commander.
It had been a moment of weakness and frustration and it had betrayed him as such moments always would betny a man who had the burden of command. Later he could learn from that mistake. Now
‘he must silence it. Stone knew. He didn’t know how much, but Stone knew something about Lou Burke when he suspended him.
He knew something about Jo Jo. Stone was another mistake. Hasty had wanted a pliable drunk. He had been deceived. That mistake had to be silenced too. Once he would simply have used Jo Jo.
But now he could not. Now he had only one instrument, the Horsemen. However he was to save the situation, the Horsemen were what he had available. He had not told them yet of the aborted arms deal. If he could pull this off, the arms deal would fade. They wouldn’t need the arms.
Perhaps he could control the town without them. Enough good men, banded in the right cause… The room was quiet. Hasty walked out in front of the men. His insides felt jagged and unstable.
My God, he thought, I hope I don’t foul myself. He tried to tighten his stomach. He took in a deep breath through his nose so as not to let it show and tried to focus on what he‘ wanted.
“Men,” he said, and paused, and cleared his throat.
“Men, we have been preparing—I think it is fair to say, that many of us have been preparing all our lives—for the moment that has come.”
He could hear the nervous vibrato in his voice. Was he to fail himself in the moment of crisis? Command, he said to himself. Command.
“You all know Jo Jo. He has his ways, but he has been one of us. Now they have him in jail on a manufactured charge and they will force him to incriminate us. He may resist them, but no one can resist long. They use science to pervert us. Injections, hypnosis, sleep deprivation. It will not be long before Jesse Stone knows our every plan.”
They were listening. His voice was stabilized, though his insides were still turbulent.
“I know that many of us have come to like Jesse Stone, but that is part of his way. He is, at the very bottom line, a stooge for the state police.”
From the inside pocket of his field jacket, he took a Polaroid picture of Cissy and held it up.
“He has even circulated this disgusting piece of trash. I don’t know if any of you have received one; it is an obviously doctored picture purporting to be my wife. A man capable of that kind of deceit is capable of anything.”
Several of the men leaned forward trying to make out the picture. Hasty paused, letting his eyes rove slowly over the room, meeting the look of as many. of the men as he could. He let the pause build. After a long moment he put the picture back in his jacket pocket. His insides were set-fling.
He was heartened by his rhetoric. He had felt the satisfaction of revenge as he had held up his wife’s naked picture in front of the men. Bitch. He felt powerful. His voice was strong.
“He has to be stopped,” Hasty said softly.
Hasty paused again, looking slowly around the room.
Some of the men were nodding their heads.
“We will implement our plan to take the town hall.”
Hasty said. “We will take Jo Jo out of
there… and we will eliminate Jesse Stone.” ..
“You mean kill him‘?.” one of
the men said from th back.
“In a war of liberation,” Hasty said,
“we do what w, must. Our forefathers eliminated the British agents of re pression at Lexington and Concord. We’ve done this ex ercise often enough. We know how. Each of you shoul, report to his squad leader now. First squad will disabl telephone service from the town hall. Second squad wi see to the electricity. Third and fourth squad will deploy’t the town hall and establish a perimeter.”
The silence in the room was jagged with excitemen What had been a kind of war game had suddenly becom real and the mca felt frightened and heroic.
“It is our moment,” Hasty said softly.
“Paradise will b ours. Quietly, without fanfare, and without opposition, w can establish a free white Christian community. And bit b bit, community by community, with ever-growing force our communities proliferate and begin to connect, we wi. return this nation to its place of freedom and individu rights which o
ur ancestors dreamed of when they threw of the British yoke.”
Lying on her stomach behind a folded canvas pool cove in the loft of the carriage house, Michell¢ Merchant listen¢
intently. Her father and her brother were both Horseme‘.
She thought that all the rah-rah crap that Mr. Hathaw was spouting was really bogus, but she kind of liked th movement because it was antiestablishment the way sE was. And when her father got on her case she could sa that she was just rebelling the way he did. Her father didn like her knowing anything about the Horsemen, which w why she liked to hide in the loft during meetings and list in. It gave her ammunition when he would yell at her. Iq mother didn’t care.
Micbelle suspected that her moth liked it when Michelle got her father back, like her mother ‘wanted to, but was too wussy.
Below her the men had broken up into four groups. They checked their watches. Then two of the groups went out first. The other men waited. The tension was so strong that it even reached the loft and filtered through Michelle’s nearly impenetrable scorn. She could feel her heartbeat quicken. The men kept checking their watches and after what seemed to Michelle a long time, the last two groups went out and the room was empty.
Michelle could feel her breath coming a little faster.
Were they actually going to attack the town hall and kill Jesse? Did they actually believe that crap about starting a free town, whatever that meant? That was total crap. Even if they killed Jesse and got Jo Jo G-chest out of jail, pretty soon other cops would know and they’d come and put all the dumb Horsemen in jail. Anybody knew that, for cris-sake.
She smiled for a moment at seeing her father and jerkface brother hauled off to jail. She could go visit them, like in th’e movies, and talk to them through the bars. Cool.
She was dying for a cigarette. The barn was empty. She sat up and lit a cigarette and took in a big lungful of smoke.
Her old lady would poop her pants, Michelle thought. She smiled in the dark loft and smoked some more. The only thing that bothered her was Jesse Stone. He was the only adult she’d ever met who hadn’t given her a load of bullshit when he talked to her. She kind of didn’t like him getting killed.
She didn’t want to spoil this thing. It was kind of exciting.
And she wanted to see what her old lady would do when Dad got arrested.
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