Stone's Throw

by Mike Lupica

  “Why do you hate him so much?”

  “That bindle stiff isn’t important enough to hate,” Singer said. “He’s just somebody in the way before you win and he loses.”

  “I read he made a run at you a year or two after you first opened your casino,” Jesse said.

  “I’d hit a rough patch,” Singer said. “I came out of it, despite the fake news on that.” He shrugged. “It’s what I do. But before I did, he came at me with friends of his who were enemies of mine.”

  “Guessing that’s not something that would be easy to forget.”

  “When I’m dead,” Billy Singer said. “And maybe not even then.”

  “This land worth killing for?” Jesse said.

  “You asking about him, or me?”

  “Either way.”

  “Him,” Singer said. “Not me. That was the old Vegas. Like the one in the movies. Not mine.”

  Jesse got up and walked to the window and stared out at the ocean. When he turned around he said, “A couple of kids who’ve been digging those graves at The Throw have disappeared. Any chance you know anything about that?”

  “I’ve got nothing to do with any of that,” he said. “That’s Lawton’s problem, for as long as it’s still his land. When it’s mine, I’ll deal with them if they keep it up.”

  “Crow went to see one of the kids,” Jesse said. “Any idea why?”

  “Ask Crow,” Singer said. He smiled and showed Jesse a lot of teeth even whiter than his hair. “Listen, here’s all you have to know about me. I’m just a guy trying to buy some prime real estate. You don’t need to treat me like some grifter on the hustle.”

  “Your words,” Jesse said, “not mine.”

  “I got a gift for reading people,” Singer said.

  When they got to the door, he shook Jesse’s hand again, even more firmly than before. Jesse waited until he was behind the wheel of the Explorer before counting his fingers.

  He was on his way back to the station when Suit called and told him Molly was at Urgent Care.

  “Why?” Jesse said.

  “Somebody knocked her out over at the tree huggers’ house,” Suit said. He paused. “One punch.”

  He paused and said, “She’s with the doctor now.”

  Jesse knew how much force was required to knock someone unconscious with a single punch. He told Suit he was on his way.

  He used the siren and the flasher.

  NINETEEN

  Jesse and Molly and Suit sat in Molly’s living room. Jesse and Suit had finally stopped taking turns asking how she was feeling until she finally told them that if they didn’t stop she was going to pistol-whip Jesse and then Suit and then Jesse again.

  “You’re certain the doctor told you that you didn’t suffer a concussion?” Jesse said.

  “What is this, an interrogation?” she said. “I already told you he said no. Twice.”

  “And you wouldn’t lie to a fellow officer of the law about any of this, correct?” Jesse said.

  She smiled then. Just like that, she was Molly, if a little worse for wear at the moment, with bruising on one side of her face that was already turning the color of one of her purple orchids.

  “A thought like that would never occur to me,” she said.

  “You look as if you could use a drink,” Suit said.

  “You know something, you’re right,” she said. “Michael’s scotch is in the cupboard. Over the drawer where I keep the silverware.”

  “I don’t know where you keep your silverware,” Suit said.

  “You’re a detective,” Molly said. “Figure it out.”

  “Make it a double,” Jesse said. “It’ll be like you’re having one for me.”

  “Wait,” Suit called from the kitchen. “Is it okay for you to drink if you’re taking pain pills?”

  “Not taking them,” she called back.

  “That’s my girl,” Jesse said.

  “I can play hurt,” she said. When she smiled this time, she immediately made a face. “Ow,” she said.

  Suit came back with a tumbler filled nearly to the top with scotch. Jesse stared at the color of it and watched his deputy chief take a big swallow, and felt as if he could taste it right along with her.

  “Well,” Molly said, “that hit the spot.”

  Every single time, Jesse thought.

  All the spots.

  He asked her to take him through it again, in case she’d missed something in her first telling.

  “I keep thinking I might have missed something,” she said. “Like you keep going back to The Throw in case you might have missed something. It’s what we do, right?”

  Jesse grinned. “Well done, grasshopper.”

  “Wish I’d known some kung fu today,” Molly said. “Not that it would have done me much good once they jumped me.”

  “Just remember you did get jumped,” Jesse said. “Nothing anybody can do about that.”

  Molly said, “I know I keep coming back to this. Shoot me, I’m a mom. She does remind me of my daughters.”

  Molly said there was still crime scene tape stripped across the front door when she got there, as Jesse had mandated. But Molly had walked around the house, checking windows, until she got to the back door, which was locked. Then she’d gone back to the front and opened the door with the key she’d picked up at the station.

  “I had it in my head that whoever had searched the house might have done the same thing I was doing,” she said.

  “Another one of your hunches,” Jesse said.

  “Like you always say,” Molly said. “I can’t stop them, I can only hope to contain them.”

  She said she’d planned to start in the kitchen, and then work her way across the first floor. She had just walked down the narrow hallway past the stairs that took you to the second floor when she was grabbed from behind, a bear hug so powerful it took the breath out of her.

  The second guy pulled her PPD baseball hat down over her eyes, nothing Molly could do to stop him. In the moment, she was trying to breathe as the guy holding her whispered in her ear, “Did she tell you where it is?”

  Molly had managed to squeeze out “Where what is?” at the moment she managed to take a small step forward, create enough space for herself, and kick her right heel into the man’s groin.

  She heard him cry out in pain, and she had just broken free when she said she walked into the hardest blow to the head she had ever taken in her life, a closed-fist punch she did not see coming, and that put her down and out.

  “They had to know we weren’t watching the house,” Suit said.

  “Because they were watching the house,” Jesse said. “And because Deputy Chief Crane, being a cowboy, had gone there alone.”

  “Takes one to know one, cowboy,” Molly said.

  She drank more scotch and sighed contentedly. Jesse knew the feeling the way he knew his badge number, the first one and then the next one after that, the warmth beginning to spread like a river running through you, reaching all of your synapses, trying to fill in as many of the junctures between nerve cells as possible.

  “Whatever they’re looking for must be pretty valuable to somebody,” Suit said.

  Jesse looked at Molly and nodded. “That’s the kind of analytical thinking that made him a detective.”

  “That and being a kiss-up to the chief,” Molly said.

  “Takes one to know one,” Suit said to her.

  “He wishes,” Molly said to him.

  “So somebody, Ben Gage in this case, discovers something that he says could be a game-changer in the land deal, at least according to the message he left for Blair,” Jesse said. “Maybe he turned up some kind of old easement saying the rights to the land really belong to the town.”

  “Easement?” Suit said.

  “The chief does
more reading than you think,” Molly said.

  “Wouldn’t Neil have known about something like that?” Suit said.

  “Maybe the kid had been doing more than one kind of digging,” Jesse said.

  “Whatever it is, it was important enough for these guys to risk going back to the house,” Molly said, “and assault a police officer.”

  “But what?” Suit said.

  Jesse shrugged. “As one of my old watch commanders at Robbery Homicide used to say, there’s the rub.”

  “Watch Commander Shakespeare?” Molly said.

  She was nearly finished with her drink. The first one always went down like that, at least with him.

  Even stopping thinking about drinking was hard.

  “If whatever Ben Gage found was that important, it had to be important to the two guys who want the land,” Molly said. “And the one trying to sell it.”

  “Maybe one guy had the house searched first,” Jesse said, “and the other guy sent his people over to re-toss the place.”

  “Or sent Crow,” Suit said.

  In a quiet voice, Molly said, “Crow wouldn’t hit me.”

  They sat there in silence then until Suit asked if Molly wanted him to get her another drink. She winked at Jesse and said, “As a wise man likes to say, I’ve had enough.”

  Jesse said, “What if Neil O’Hara died because he knew what they were looking for, too?”

  “Whatever it is they’re looking for,” Molly said.

  “You’re saying that Ben Gage might have told Neil before he got the chance to tell Blair what it was?” Suit said.

  “Maybe by then they really were on the same side,” Jesse said, “and the kid wanted to share the good news. Or wasn’t sure what he had and wanted Neil to look at it.”

  “Now it may have gotten him and Blair killed,” Molly said.

  “Did Kate mention anything like that?” Suit said.

  Jesse shook his head.

  “My Irish grandmother used to call a mess like this praiseach,” Molly said.

  “Showing all signs of being an even worse hairball than I thought,” Jesse said.

  He told Suit it was time for him to go home to Elena. He then informed Molly that he’d be sleeping on her couch tonight. Before she could respond he held up a hand and said, “That’s an order.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Finally,” he said.

  Molly said, “You can take one of the girls’ rooms.”

  “I don’t see why they’d take another run at you,” Jesse said. “But if they do, I’d rather be downstairs when they do.”

  “Even with an alarm?” Molly said.

  “Ben Gage and Blair Richmond had an alarm, too,” Jesse said.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Molly said.

  “A good old-fashioned land war,” Jesse said.

  TWENTY

  The next afternoon Jesse was having lunch with Vinnie Morris, who was sitting with his back to the wall—“What you might call your force a habit,” Vinnie said when he sat down—at a corner table of the Gray Gull, now fully owned by Sunny’s friend Spike.

  “Your” with Vinnie often came out “you-ah.”

  Vinnie wore a cream-colored suit, a blue shirt the color of a robin’s egg, and a silk pocket square the same color as the shirt. If there was a Best-Dressed List for guys in Vinnie’s line of work, whatever that was these days, Jesse just assumed Vinnie won it every year. His hair was as dark as it had been since Jesse had first met him. Jesse knew he would never ask if it was the result of genetics or a good colorist, because Vinnie was a much better shot than he was.

  Or anyone Jesse had ever known, for that matter.

  They both had plates of fried clams in front of them. Vinnie was drinking Coke out of a small bottle. Jesse was having iced tea. Vinnie was a bit behind the news with Jesse and Sunny. Jesse caught him up.

  “Idiot,” Vinnie said.

  Jesse told him that seemed to be the prevailing theory.

  “Fuckin’ ay,” Vinnie said.

  Vinnie forked a clam, dipped it in his tartar sauce, every moment as precise as a surgeon with a scalpel, as little wasted motion with him as ever, even when chewing.

  “Hear Crow is back,” Vinnie said.

  “Working for Billy Singer.”

  “Heard that, too.”

  “You think I need to worry about him?” Jesse said.

  “Crow ain’t your problem,” Vinnie said. “He ain’t been a problem for you for a long time. Your problem is the other guy.”

  “Singer?”

  Vinnie shook his head.

  “Barrone?” Jesse said.

  “Yeah,” Vinnie said.

  “Suit asked me before I came over here who I thought was worse,” Jesse said, “Singer or Barrone.”

  Vinnie ate another clam. Now that Jesse thought about it, he wasn’t even sure he could tell if Vinnie was chewing.

  “Spoiler alert?” Vinnie said. “It ain’t close. It’s Barrone. Guy’s a stone gangster, no offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “I go back with him to when I was working with Gino,” Vinnie said. “God rest.”

  Gino Fish. Vinnie’s old boss. Before him Vinnie had been with Joe Broz, Jesse knew, who’d once been the biggest crime boss in Boston, even bigger than Desmond Burke, Sunny’s former father-in-law. It was before Tony Marcus became more powerful than all of them. Jesse had immersed himself in Boston’s mob history after he had met Sunny. Sometimes he imagined all of the old bosses having their own baseball cards. Even their own Hall of Fame.

  “I know this will sound like an oxymoron,” Jesse said, “but I was under the impression that Barrone is a legit businessman.”

  Vinnie smirked. “What he wants people to think.”

  “Wasn’t he going to run for governor once?” Jesse said.

  Vinnie made a sound that was as close to laughter as he ever got. “You mean that legit business?” he said.

  Also with Vinnie, “that” occasionally slid into “dat.”

  Vinnie said, “Put it this way: People who used to cross Ed Barrone on his way up had a way of disappearing. And when somebody would ask him about that, he’d order another round of drinks and say about the guy disappeared, ‘Did he leave a forwarding address?’ ”

  “Would he kill somebody to get this land?” Jesse said.

  “And then kill his dog,” Vinnie said.

  Vinnie had finished his lunch. Jesse had barely touched his. They were at the Gull because Vinnie had called him. Vinnie gave a small nod at Jesse’s plate now, and Jesse slid it across the table to him.

  “Before this is over,” Vinnie said, “you might be needing Crow to watch your back.”

  “Why would I do something like that when I have you?” Jesse said.

  “Not right now,” Vinnie said. “There’s a guy from Vegas needs me on a thing. He’s made it worth my while. So’s I could be there awhile.”

  “You hear anything interesting about Billy Singer while you’re out there,” Jesse said, “let me know.”

  “ ’Course,” Vinnie said.

  “Until then,” Jesse said, “I can take care of myself.”

  “Listen to me on this,” Vinnie said. “Barrone don’t care whether you’re a cop or not. Or if Molly is one. He might smile his ass off, he’s with you. But he’s used to getting what he wants. Or needs. Either way.”

  “I will consider myself warned,” Jesse said.

  “You know Crow,” Vinnie said. “What he’s capable of, what he’s not. What lines he’d cross, which ones he won’t. He’s like us in the sense that he’s got a code. If Barrone ever had a code, he forgot it. Or just doesn’t give a shit anymore.”

  He pushed his chair back.

  “It gets bad here, I can come back,�
� Vinnie said.

  He dropped a fifty-dollar bill that looked as crisp and clean as he was on the table.

  “One more thing,” Vinnie said. “You find out who punched Molly and you can’t take care of it, I will.”

  “Trust me,” Jesse said, “if I find out, I won’t need anybody else to take care of it.”

  “Between two mutts like Singer and Barrone is not anywhere you want to be,” Vinnie said.

  Jesse smiled and reminded him that everybody had to be someplace.

  “Sure,” Vinnie said.

  It came out “shoo-ah.”

  Vinnie walked through the crowded room as easily as a smooth rock skimming across water.

  Jesse was in the parking lot when Thomas Lawton called him.

  “Get over here,” he said.

  “Over where?”

  “Where do you think?” Lawton said. “My graveyard.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Crow knew he should have gone back to check the kids’ house the day before; that was just sloppy.

  If he had, maybe he could have gotten there before Molly. And before Barrone’s guys. Because if they hadn’t been Barrone’s guys, then whose were they?

  Unless of course Billy Singer, who had hired him, had brought in muscle that he hadn’t told Crow about. Billy was Vegas, after all, through and through. Maybe Billy Singer, who was who he was, was simply hedging his bets.

  Crow was no longer sure why he’d taken this job. He didn’t need the money. Unless he got stupid, or careless, or both, he wasn’t going to need money ever again, because of what he’d scored off the Jimmy Macklin job. But then he’d come back the first time, after the statute of limitations—ten years—had run out on the stolen money. Then he’d come back again looking for a missing kid, liking the idea of being a tracker again, and because he needed some action. He’d ended up finding the kid, Amber Francisco, and as much of a pain in the ass as she was, he couldn’t bring himself to take her back to her father, who in the end only got what he deserved, not the kid.

  Now he’d gone to work for Billy Singer. He’d done some work for him a long time ago, when Crow still needed money, even though he didn’t have much use for the man. But then Crow had ended up in Vegas a few months ago, shacking up with a dealer he knew from the old days named Bonnie. Or Bunny. Bored again. He didn’t care much more for Vegas than he did Billy Singer. But Bonnie or Bunny was working a blackjack table at The House. Crow had run into Billy there one night. Or maybe Billy had seen him on the monitors and run into him.