Stone's Throw

by Mike Lupica

  It had to mean that Carr, and maybe his partner, had hired out to either Barrone or Lawton.

  No other players in the game, at least that Jesse and Crow knew about.

  Seller or buyer?

  Both of them, and Billy, too, geeked out to get this thing done. Were Barrone and Lawton more desperate than Billy? Who the hell knew?

  Crow had driven past Barrone’s house first tonight. No lights on. No car in the driveway. Then Crow, restless again, had gone over to Stiles Island and done a drive-by at Billy Singer’s rented house.

  Also dark.

  The Sonata Santo and Baldelli had been driving around town wasn’t in the driveway. Maybe everybody was standing down now, just waiting until the vote, trying to run out the clock, making sure to stay out of Stone’s way. And Crow’s. Crow grinned at the mirror again. No I in team, he thought. But there were two in Wilson Cromartie. He’d have to remember to tell Stone that one.

  He sat on Singer’s street and called the bartender at the Scupper and asked if Santo and Baldelli had been in tonight. Bartender said no.

  Crow turned the car around and went back over the bridge and headed for Lawton’s house over there at Paradise Neck. The third stooge. Crow had started thinking of him and Billy and Barrone as the Three Stooges. Lawton was just the one Crow hadn’t met. Stone said Crow wasn’t missing anything.

  Crow sat at the end of Lawton’s drive for more than an hour. Nothing better to do. The lights were on in the house, upstairs and downstairs. Nobody in or out from the time Crow had showed up.

  What am I?

  Neighborhood watch?

  He stayed for a few more minutes, knowing that all that was left after this was going back to the empty house and drinking from the flask and trying to get some sleep for a change.

  Maybe I’m the one running out the clock, Crow thought.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Jesse was asleep when his cell phone blared at him from his bedside table at a little after two in the morning. It had taken him longer than usual to get to sleep tonight, thinking about how whoever was behind the killing had panicked, and the kids had panicked, and how it had maybe turned all of Paradise, Mass, into Stupidville.

  He always turned up the ringer volume on the phone when he finally turned in, because he didn’t want to miss some kind of emergency call.

  Even though everything was starting to feel to him like a state of emergency, now he was running out of time before the vote, at which point everybody involved would likely scatter, at least in the short run.

  The screen lit up when he grabbed the phone.

  Unknown Caller

  “This is Chief Stone,” he said.

  “Wasn’t calling to get your damn name, rank, and serial number,” he heard Tony Marcus say.

  Jesse sat up now, rubbing his face hard, like he was trying to rub the grogginess away.

  “I come across a couple things for you on my boy Darnell Woodson,” Tony said, “might help you out.”

  “He’s pretty much still a ghost,” Jesse said.

  He heard Marcus chuckle. “Least you didn’t call him no spook.”

  Jesse waited.

  “I talked to Sunny Randall herself about you,” Tony said.

  Means he’s had more contact with her than I have.

  Marcus said, “Girl told me if I could find it in my heart to do a favor for you, she might do another one for me one of these days.”

  “I could owe you one,” Jesse said.

  “Nah,” Tony said. “You might say you would. But you wouldn’t give it up in the end.”

  “No way for you to know that,” Jesse said.

  “She does, though,” Marcus said. “Said you was the last Boy Scout.”

  “I still came to you,” Jesse said.

  “Anyway, here’s what I come up with for you,” Marcus said. “Turns out Darnell was down here the other night, one of the clubs I got a piece of, buying drinks for people, telling them he was about to cash out.”

  Jesse waited.

  “You with me?” Marcus said.

  “I’m here.”

  “He said his shit had finally come in,” Marcus said. “Said he got himself one of those whales they talk about in Vegas.”

  “Did he mention Billy Singer’s name when he was talking about whales?” Jesse said. “Or Ed Barrone’s?”

  “Think it was more like a figger of speech,” Tony Marcus said.

  “What about Thomas Lawton?” Jesse said.

  “I had a name, I would have given it up,” Tony Marcus said. “Who the fuck knows? Maybe Darnell got with all of them. He always was a transactional sumbitch.”

  “Thank you for this,” Jesse said.

  First I’m in business with Crow. Now Tony Marcus. Maybe I’m not the last Boy Scout after all.

  Marcus said, “Darnell made it sound like he was taking early retirement for real this time, sooner rather than later.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have an address for Woodson,” Jesse said.

  “Boy’s address is usually wherever he’s shacked up and getting his damn ashes hauled,” Marcus said.

  Jesse said, “You said you had something else.”

  “So I did,” Marcus said.

  He waited again.

  “Darnell also might have said he had some unfinished business with the cops up there,” Tony Marcus said, “on account of what happened with his boy Richie.”

  Then Tony Marcus said, “Adios,” and was gone.

  SIXTY-SIX

  Thomas Lawton and Billy Singer and Ed Barrone were all in Jesse’s office the next morning.

  They weren’t happy about being summoned. Lawton was threatening to call the mayor. Jesse didn’t expect to accomplish much, or learn anything. He had just awakened with the urge to bounce them around a little bit. And look them all in the eyes again.

  Lawton had told Jesse the same thing he’d told him after Molly shot Richie Carr, that he didn’t know Carr, had never done business with Carr.

  Jesse turned to Billy Singer and Barrone.

  “I’ve already asked Mr. Lawton this,” he said to them. “But is there any chance I might discover that one of you boys has a connection to Carr or Darnell Woodson or both?”

  “Billy’s the one who brought hired thugs into this,” Barrone said. “I didn’t play it that way.”

  “Didn’t play it that way this time, you mean,” Singer said.

  “Fuck off,” Barrone said.

  “Moving right along,” Jesse said.

  “Did the girl wake up yet?” Lawton said to Jesse.

  “Not yet,” Jesse said. “And maybe not ever.”

  “You mind explaining why we’re all here?” Barrone said.

  “Is that an existential question?” Jesse said.

  “Huh?” Barrone said.

  “At least one of you sent somebody to Neil O’Hara’s house looking for something, and then to Ben Gage’s,” Jesse said. “Finally to Kate O’Hara’s. I was just wondering why.”

  “You got no proof of that,” Barrone said. “You got no proof tying anybody in this room to what happened to the mayor and those kids. All’s I can see here is you busting chops.”

  Lawton said, “Everybody’s got to be good at something.”

  Jesse smiled. “What are you good at, Thomas?”

  “Listen,” Lawton said, leaning forward in his chair. “I had no use for that kid. For any of those kids, truth be told. But I liked Neil, whether you want to believe that or not, and even though he was on the wrong side of this.”

  “He was just a small-town guy who couldn’t think big enough,” Billy Singer said.

  “You mean he wasn’t like the big thinkers I’ve got sitting across from me,” Jesse said.

  “Listen,” Singer said, “because I’m going to s
ay this for the last time. None of us in this room are saints.” He threw a derisive nod at Jesse. “Excepting you, of course. And even though Barrone or me is going to end up a loser on this thing, nobody this close to closing a sweetheart deal like this is going to be enough of a dumbass to kill people before we do.”

  “And on that note,” Lawton said, checking his phone, “and if you’re done wasting our time, I call this meeting adjourned.”

  Jesse smiled again.

  “One of you knows exactly what’s going on here,” Jesse said. “I just wonder why the other two aren’t more worried about that. Or wonder what the threat might be to this deal getting locked down.”

  Ed Barrone stood.

  “Your problem, Chief,” he said, “not ours. And by the way? Your Indian friend ever comes near me again, I’m not calling you to complain, I’m calling my friend the governor.”

  “I’ll give him a stern talking-to,” Jesse said.

  Thomas Lawton stood. So did Singer.

  “Thanks for wasting our time,” Singer said.

  “A meeting about nothing,” Lawton said, “because you’ve got nothing.”

  “You sure about that?” Jesse said.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  Because of what Tony Marcus had said about Darnell Woodson, whom Jesse believed was on his way back to Paradise if not here already, he had told Crow to keep an eye on Molly.

  When Jesse told Molly about it, realizing what kind of plague she’d wish on Jesse if she found out on her own, there was hardly any pushback at her end of the line.

  “He was talking about money and about revenge, Molls,” Jesse said. “Not a good combination, from my experience.”

  “Not anybody’s experience,” she said.

  “I can’t do what I have to do, whatever the hell I’m doing right now,” Jesse said, “and be worrying about you when you’re not at the station.”

  “Got it,” she said.

  “So you’re really not going to fight me on this?” he said.

  “I already told you I wouldn’t,” Molly said. “Take the win.”

  She said she was going to spend the rest of her day under the watchful eye of Crow, obsessing a little more about Blair Richmond.

  “And you can go try to catch bad guys,” she said.

  “I’d settle for catching a break at this point,” Jesse said.

  She was calling him from home.

  “Crow out front?” Jesse said.

  “You know he is.”

  “You could invite him in for breakfast,” Jesse said.

  “You’re aware you keep sending me mixed messages on that guy,” she said.

  “Keeps the spark in the relationship.”

  Molly said, “Yours with me or yours with him?”

  Jesse got a call then from Terry Harvey, asking if there’d been any new developments.

  “I wish,” Jesse said. “Some new information has come in, but none of it applies to you, at least not yet.”

  “I’ll pray that you get some help from the spirit world,” Harvey said.

  “Send all the spirits you can,” Jesse said.

  He heard the tribal leader laugh.

  “When you say it like that, it sounds like what we used to call fire water,” Harvey said.

  Gabe Weathers, Jesse knew, was into Richie Carr’s Land Cruiser over at the impound lot in Marshport, had been there since seven in the morning. Gabe said he’d call if he came up with anything useful.

  Jesse sat at his desk for a long time, studying his case notes on both Neil O’Hara and Ben Gage. Sketching out one more timeline that made sense to him. He knew exactly when Neil had died. It was less clear with Ben Gage. Jesse wondered if they’d died the same night. And if Ben Gage hadn’t died that night, where had he gone? What made him run, and hide, at least until somebody found him? And if he had things to hide, where had he hidden them?

  Had Blair met up with him before he was beaten and shot and buried over in Marshport?

  Jesse felt the sudden need to move now, put himself in motion, maybe search the houses again, go bother Lawton, or Singer, or Barrone. Crow was watching Molly. He would bet everything in his wallet that they would take a ride over to the hospital to look in on Blair Richmond, because both of them had been over there every day.

  What would she be able to tell them when she woke up, if she ever did?

  He would start at Neil’s house. He kept being drawn back there, still thinking he’d missed something, that there might be a clue hiding in plain sight. That the walls might still talk to him. Or Neil’s spirit might talk, now that Terry Harvey had talked about putting the spirit world into play.

  When he pulled up now in front of the house on Beach Avenue, he saw that Gabe Weathers was waiting for him

  “Got a question,” he said, “and an observation.”

  Jesse told him that if it was a hard question, Gabe was frankly wasting his time.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  Gabe’s observation to Jesse had been that Richie Carr’s navigation system had turned into a dead end. There had been one in the SUV, but Carr—or someone—had removed it.

  “So he was a punk,” Gabe said, “but a punk smart enough of a tech guy not to leave a trail.”

  “Not that it did him much good in the end,” Jesse said.

  “I wish there had been a trail to a car wash once in a while,” Gabe said. “Man was a pig.”

  “That’s the observation,” Jesse said. “What’s the question?”

  “How come we never checked Neil’s car?” Gabe said.

  “Suit and Pete Perkins went over it, top to bottom, two or three times,” Jesse said.

  “I meant the car’s computer,” Gabe said.

  “I was in that car with him,” Jesse said. “It’s a heap.”

  “It’s actually newer than it looks,” Gabe said. “A ’17 Chevy Volt.”

  “Neil used to call it a Chevy Dolt,” Jesse said, “and kept threatening to get a new one with more bells and whistles.”

  “I looked it up,” Gabe said. “This one happens to have bells and whistles.”

  Jesse stared at him.

  “We should have checked the car’s computer,” Gabe said.

  “But I didn’t tell you to.”

  “And nobody stopped me from bringing it up before this.”

  “I just missed it,” Jesse said.

  “Happens to the best of us.” Gabe grinned. “Reason I know that is because you are the best of us.”

  They went inside Neil O’Hara’s garage. Jesse stood next to Neil’s Chevy. Gabe got behind the wheel, Gabe having gotten his tool kit out of his own car, prepared to take apart as much of the dashboard as he could.

  “We needed a subpoena for Carr’s ride,” Gabe said. “Not this one?”

  “Not today we don’t,” Jesse said.

  “What if we find something we can use?”

  Jesse said, “Let’s find something we can use first and worry about the rest of it with our friend the district attorney later.”

  “You’re the chief,” Gabe said.

  “Aren’t I, though,” Jesse said.

  Gabe had his laptop next to him on the passenger seat. He was on the phone with an ex-cop he’d once partnered with in the old days, now working for a company in Boston that specialized in reconstructing car accidents. Gabe had him on speaker. Jesse was no idiot when it came to gadgets, but they had lost him about five minutes into their conversation about data transparency and special software and circuit boards and GM versus Ford, and even vehicle AI.

  The guy’s name was Jim Silliman.

  At one point Jesse heard Silliman say, “Unfortunately the computer for this baby is buried deep under the dash.”

  Gabe told him he’d had already figured that out on his own.

  “So pr
epare yourself for a lot of prying and unscrewing that still may turn out to be a wild-goose chase,” Silliman said over the speaker. “By the way? Is the guy whose car this is ever gonna want to use it again?”

  “The guy died,” Jesse said.

  “Who’s that?” Jim said.

  “My boss,” Gabe said.

  “The old ballplayer you told me about?” Jim said.

  “Just old,” Jesse said.

  “This could be slightly illegal even if the person is deceased,” Jim said.

  “We’re all going to look the other way a little bit for the time being,” Jesse said.

  “I can do that,” Silliman said.

  “Jim,” Jesse said, “if we get lucky, can this system maybe tell us where the car has been lately?”

  “Maybe. Depends on what was activated and what wasn’t.”

  There was a pause.

  Silliman said, “No shit, I know you’re the chief, Chief, but there really could be privacy statutes that come into play here.”

  “Fuck ’em,” Jesse said.

  “How come I never got to work for somebody like you?” Silliman said.

  “It’s truly a blessing,” Gabe said, winking at Jesse.

  Gabe Weathers was as cool as anybody Jesse had. And as good a cop. Maybe a better cop than anybody he had. Long hair, beard, his latest bomber jacket, cowboy boots of his own. And a pit bull on any case he was working, or on any problem he was trying to solve.

  “This could take a whole day,” Jim Silliman said over the speaker. “Or more.”

  Jesse said, “We’ll pay you for your time.”

  “If it helps you catch whoever did it,” Jim said, “it’s on me. Once a cop, always a cop.”

  Gabe went to work. He told Jesse there was no point in him hanging around.

  “You’re sure I can’t help?” Jesse said, and Gabe said, “Very sure.” Then he told Jesse he would work on this as long as his own bad back let him and call it a night and if he hadn’t gotten anywhere, he would be back first thing in the morning, and for as long as it took.