Robert B. Parker's Stone's Throw

by Mike Lupica

  As he got to the patio he saw them to his right, cutting across a neighbor’s lawn, heading back for the street and probably the beach. They had a good head start. There was enough light from the moon for Jesse to see that they were both dressed in dark clothes. Jesse ran hard after them, readying to drop and roll if one of them stopped and turned and took dead aim at him this time.

  He could see them sprinting toward the place where the street dead-ended at the public beach. He knew this area. He often walked it in the night, and wondered if they knew about the wooded area down to their right.

  They ran right, toward the woods.

  But Jesse was gaining ground.

  He saw one of them slowing down now, checking to see where Jesse was, and when he did there was enough light from the moon that Jesse could see it reflecting off what looked like a long handgun.

  He heard the first siren in the distance, from the direction of town. The backup he knew he should have called for in the first place.

  The man fired the gun and missed him. Jesse dropped to the sand and was about to fire back when he saw the couple walking hand in hand down near the water.

  It was then that he heard one shot, and then another, and then another from behind him, like thunderclaps, as the men on the beach disappeared into the woods.

  Jesse rolled over in the sand then and saw Crow standing next to the DEAD END sign, gun in his hand.

  TWENTY-NINE

  A half-hour later, Jesse and Crow and Molly and Suit were still sitting on Neil O’Hara’s front steps. Jesse wanted to tell Molly that the look she was giving him didn’t scare him nearly as much as it used to, but she would have known he was lying.

  “Gee, it’s like an old Western,” Molly said in the voice Suit said had special sauce to it, nodding at Jesse and Crow. “Cowboy and Indian.”

  “That is what is known as an outdated cultural reference,” Jesse said.

  “You’re welcome,” Crow said to Molly.

  “For what?” she said.

  Putting the look on Crow now, who seemed spectacularly unaffected by it.

  “For saving Chief Jesse from maybe getting himself shot up good tonight,” Crow said.

  “Chief Jesse,” Jesse said. “Now he makes me sound like the Indian.”

  “This isn’t funny,” Molly said. “You could have gotten shot.”

  “Saved by my trusty companion,” Jesse said.

  “Getting less funny as you go,” she said.

  “You didn’t ask me, boss, but I’d quit while I was behind,” Suit said.

  Crow said he had been cruising the town, the way he did most nights, mostly out of boredom. Wondering all over again what he was doing here, no matter what Billy Singer had promised him on the back end. He told them it had taken him only one night to figure out a way to get on the PPD radio frequency. So he had heard Jesse’s call for backup. Had been only a few blocks away. Told Jesse he figured he could beat the cavalry.

  Or be the cavalry.

  Everybody was using Old West references tonight, like once you started you couldn’t stop.

  “Looked to me like he had you lined up,” Crow said to Jesse. “He didn’t expect somebody to be covering you from the road.”

  “But you didn’t put him down,” Jesse said.

  “Wasn’t trying to,” Crow said. “And that couple was in my line of fire, too.”

  Suit and Gabe had already been inside the house, dusting it for prints, when Jesse and Crow had walked back up Beach Ave. Jesse said he would do a walk-through to see if he could tell if anything was missing from his last visit.

  “Who do you think they were?” Jesse said to Crow.

  “Had to be the same ones who jumped Molly.”

  “Looking for what they didn’t find at Ben Gage’s house,” Jesse said.

  He turned on the bottom step so he was facing Crow, dressed in black as usual, like he was trying to blend in with the rest of the night.

  “Billy ever mention to you that the kid Gage might have something that threatened the deal?” Jesse said.

  Crow shook his head.

  “You sure?” Jesse said.

  “I’m on your side, remember?” Crow said.

  “You’re on your side,” Molly said, “like always.”

  Crow stared at her until she turned her attention back to Jesse.

  “If you had called for backup we could have covered the back of the house,” she said.

  “I’m working on delegating more,” Jesse said.

  “Work harder,” she said.

  She stood up. Jesse took a closer look at her. Middle of the night, early in the morning, it didn’t matter. There was always something fresh about her, and not just her mouth. As if she couldn’t be anything other than Molly. But as well as Jesse knew her, as close as they were, he knew there were always going to be parts of herself, or places, that the rest of the world couldn’t reach.

  Like the part of her that knew whether or not she still had feelings for Crow.

  “See you at the office,” she said to Jesse.

  To Crow she simply said, “Wilson.”

  “Molly.”

  “Blair Richmond is still out there somewhere,” she said.

  “We hope,” Suit said.

  “More faith than hope,” Molly, the good Catholic girl, said. “Believing what we can’t see.”

  “Amen,” Jesse said.

  “Shut it,” she said, and glared at him one last time, and left.

  THIRTY

  Crow knew that as small as Paradise really was, somehow Barrone had managed to keep a low enough profile even with all the high-profile shit going on around him.

  Only now here was Barrone, big as life, the night after the shots had been fired at Neil O’Hara’s, having dinner at the Gray Gull with one of the two women from the town’s Board Crow had talked to. Morton? Morris? Crow couldn’t remember for sure, and who gave a shit, anyway? Clearly Barrone was like a politician, still grinding away to the end.

  Crow had come into the Gull for a drink, bored out of his ass again, another night in Paradise stretching out ahead of him like whatever road he’d finally take out of town.

  He was drinking Johnnie Walker Blue these days because he could afford it, wondering the same thing he wondered every night he was still in this goddamn town: What was Molly Crane doing right now? He knew her husband was still out there on the ocean somewhere, not sure when he would be coming back. But not back yet. Crow thought about taking a drive past her house, but what good would that do him if he didn’t stop? And he’d promised Stone he’d stay away from her.

  He couldn’t help himself. He did like Stone, even knowing if he ever got sideways with him how hard Jesse Stone would come at him. He didn’t know for sure if he’d actually saved Stone’s life the other night. If he had, Crow felt good about that. About saving a cop’s life. Who knew?

  Maybe that turned out to be his real work here, not being some kind of glorified advance man for Billy Singer. But he hadn’t come here thinking people would die over this piece of land, no matter how valuable it was. But now two were dead and a nice kid, the girl, was missing.

  He drank some Blue Label. He knew by now how much easier it went down than the cheaper stuff.

  He knew why Singer and Barrone were in it. They were both pigs and their blood feud had been going on for a long time, and the thought of losing to the other guy put their balls in a wringer. And he knew why Lawton, the rich boy who owned the land, was in it. Because he was as much a pig as either Billy Singer or Ed Barrone, and wanted to get paid.

  But which one of these bastards would kill to get what they wanted?

  And what did they think Neil O’Hara and the tree hugger had that scared the living shit out of all of them?

  “Fuckety fuck,” he said.

  A Stone expressi
on.

  “Excuse me, sir?” the bartender said.

  “Talking to myself,” Crow said.

  He was deciding whether to have another drink when he saw Barrone calling for his check. Did he have something going with the lady from the Board? She seemed to have some miles on her, but wasn’t bad-looking. Decent figure, he remembered from the time he’d talked to her.

  Crow watched Barrone get up now, go around the table, pull out the Board lady’s chair for her, and he ducked his head until they were out the door. Her car was across the lot. She walked to it now. Barrone had used the valet, handed his ticket to the parking kid, checked his phone while he waited, then put it to his ear and started talking. Crow had given the parking kid twenty bucks. If his rental were any closer to the front door, it would have been parked next to the host stand. Barrone’s Jag, the sweet ride he’d seen at Kate O’Hara’s house, came around. He got in. Crow had kept the keys to the rental after he’d tipped the kid. He left the restaurant, got behind the wheel now, and followed Barrone, for no other reason than he was still bored out of his ass.

  Crow managed to stay far enough behind the Jag as it made its way through the downtown area, making a turn at the top of Beach Ave. He knew from Billy Singer that the house Barrone had rented was over near the harbor. But he wasn’t heading that way, making a couple more turns and then over the bridge to Stiles Island.

  Crow knew his way around now, had taken this route plenty of times since he’d been back in Paradise. Suddenly realized where Barrone was going now, even if he couldn’t believe it.

  Billy Singer’s house.

  THIRTY-ONE

  It was one of those nights when Jesse couldn’t sleep. Just happened that way sometimes, no way for him to anticipate it, not after all the nights when he’d fallen asleep in front of ballgames and sometimes didn’t awaken until three in the morning.

  Different from the times when he’d pass out drunk on the same couch. When he wasn’t waking up so much as coming to.

  Just not tonight. Another day sober. Day at a time. Intellectually, Jesse knew the program worked. But there were times when he wanted to take out his Glock and shoot what they called the Big Book in AA and all the slogans in it full of holes.

  “I got sick and tired of being sick and tired.” You heard that one all the time. Sometimes, not that Jesse would ever admit it to Dix or at a meeting, the thing that made him feel that way was people talking about being sick and tired.

  Maybe he was just tired, even if that meant too tired for sleep.

  The shit you thought about late at night.

  “Let go and let God.” That was another one. But how had God helped Neil O’Hara? Or Ben Gage, who thought he was helping save the world by saving Paradise from developers?

  How was God helping Blair Richmond, who was hiding or—more likely—as dead as her boyfriend?

  Molly, the good Catholic girl, liked to say that God delivering you from evil was only Her part-time job, as far as she could tell.

  Jesse wanted to run it all past Sunny. That’s what he’d always done when he was working on a new case, what she’d done when she was working on a case of her own. He’d call her when he was jammed. She’d call him. Often at this time of the night. They’d start talking, start kicking ideas and theories and possible clues around, and suddenly, out of nowhere, it would be as if one of them had found the light switch in a darkened room.

  Or a way out of a locked one.

  But he knew he wasn’t calling her tonight. Or anytime soon. He had no way of knowing if she was back with Tony Gault just because he was now a client of hers. But he had this feeling she might be. There had been only two relationships of note for her since she and her ex-husband had broken up, apart from the times when she and her ex-husband would get back together. There had been Jesse, and there had been Tony Gault. She’d always described Gault as a Hollywood phony when his name came up. Or was “Hollywood phony” redundant? She’d hooked up with him anyway.

  At least the Hollywood phony hadn’t tried to drink himself out of his career the way Jesse had, insofar as Jesse knew. Maybe bullshitting people was his drug of choice.

  Had nothing to do with where they all were now, whether Sunny was sleeping with Gault again or not. She was a grown-up, as smart about things as Molly was, the way women always seemed to be smarter about things then men, at least in Jesse’s view of the world.

  But as smart as Molly was, she’d ended up in bed with Crow.

  Goddamn, he was tired.

  He had spent the day recanvassing the other four members of the Board of Selectmen who weren’t Gary Armistead, asking them all, all over again, if they had been pressured by either side on the land deal. Or had been offered bribes. He knew they’d all talked to Crow. He knew they’d all talked to Barrone’s lawyer, a headbanger named Steve LaMonica whom Barrone had grown up with in South Boston. A few of them talked about how Gary Armistead, now that he was mayor, sometimes acted as if he wanted the deal to be consummated more than Thomas Lawton did.

  This afternoon Jeannie Morton, the longest-serving member of the Board and someone Jesse had briefly dated after first arriving in Paradise, had said to Jesse, “Gary acts like it’s his land, and not Thomas Lawton’s.”

  “Invested, is he?” Jesse had said.

  “Like the rest of us are invested in oxygen,” Jeannie said.

  “Care to tell me which way you’re going to vote?” Jesse said.

  “A girl still needs her secrets,” she said.

  “Barrone took you to dinner,” Jesse said.

  Jeannie winked at him. “Not a secret when it’s dinner for two at the Gull,” she said. “And, let’s face it, Jesse, a night out at the Gull is way too small to be a bribe.”

  Molly had been making another deep digital dive looking for any possible leads or clues about where Blair Richmond might be. Without success. Still no presence for her, for a couple weeks, on TikTok or Instagram. No cash withdrawals from the bank account she’d shared with Ben Gage. No credit card charges since a diner in Marshport the day before she’d dropped out of sight, and seemingly off the edge of the planet. Maybe both of them had stashed emergency money somewhere, if they had to leave Paradise in a hurry, as if they both thought they were in some kind of spy movie.

  Suit had told Jesse that Neil’s cell phone records were going to be hard to get, because the phone he used had been given to him by the town and was officially public property. Normally on a homicide, the district attorney would fast-track records like these. But when Jesse had asked Ellis Munroe to subpoena Neil’s records, he’d said that the only person who was treating Neil’s death as a homicide was Jesse, and that he needed more than him being a left-handed thrower and the angle of the bullet being curious to go to a judge. And told him to come back if, and when, he did have more. Jesse was sure Munroe was just busting balls here, but was also sure he could do nothing about it. Jesse knew how the game had changed during the pandemic, and how many criminal cases got shot down. Munroe made it clear that he wasn’t going to risk Jesse making a rush to judgment on a case for homicide that would eventually get kicked to the curb.

  “There’s a new sheriff in town,” Munroe had told him. “And it’s not you, Chief.”

  There had been no activity, Suit said, on Blair’s phone number since she’d disappeared.

  “She’s alive,” Molly had just told Jesse on the phone.

  “Because you want to believe that?”

  “Because I can’t not believe it,” Molly said.

  Jesse was at the kitchen table now, having moved from room to room. Restless like that. He knew a cup of coffee was a particularly dumb idea for a guy as smart as the chief of police liked to think that he was.

  But any kind of stimulant had always been a dumb idea for Jesse, particularly at this time of night.

  He didn’t get out his yellow legal pad, t
he way he usually did when he was trying to organize his thoughts. He got out a stack of different-colored index cards, feeling a little anal about doing it, and started writing down names and events, trying to establish a useful timeline, one he could actually see on the table in front of him, not on some computer screen.

  He moved a few of the cards around a bit. At the top of them was Neil O’Hara’s napkin, with NEVER written on it.

  One piece of valuable property. Two men wanting it. Badly. Two people dead. Maybe three. Most of the town wanting the deal to go through, thinking that once again the streets of Paradise would be paved with gold.

  But not everybody in town.

  Certainly not the kids from Save Our Beach.

  Then he was done, at least for tonight. Past one in the morning by now. Still only ten o’clock or so on Sunny Standard Time in Southern California. He reached for his phone. Put it right back down, telling himself that the next time they spoke she would be the one to call him.

  What is this, high school?

  He thought he might be ready to try to sleep again when his phone rang and he saw that it was Molly calling.

  “Maybe shots fired at the house Billy Singer is renting,” she said, and then gave Jesse the address and told him she’d meet him there.

  “If you beat me there, wait,” Jesse said.

  “Yeah,” Molly said. “Like you always wait for me.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Molly was waiting for Jesse out front. Her Cherokee was parked next to another car. Jesse told her that the other car looked an awful lot like Crow’s rental.

  “Only because it is,” she said.

  Jesse said, “And what good could possibly come of that?”

  “Wilson may be under the impression that he is now deputized because he rode to the rescue the other night,” Molly said.

  “I was hoping it was more an implied type thing,” Jesse said.