by Mike Lupica
Crow pulled him off the wall and then slammed him back into it.
“He’s the guy who shot that girl in the head last night,” Crow said. “And shot Stone’s deputy.”
“I swear to God, Crow, I got nothing to do with any of that,” he said. “Like I had nothing to do with those break-ins, whether you believe me or not. Now let me go.”
“After we come to an understanding,” Crow said.
“About what?”
“About how if you call the cops on me after I leave, I’ll come back for you even if you’ve got an army outside,” Crow said. “Understood?”
“Understood,” Singer said.
He looked very old all of a sudden, Crow thought.
Singer said, “How come you’re not rousting Barrone?”
“You’re the only one I know of that brought in some hitters,” Crow said.
“Doesn’t mean he didn’t, for chrissakes,” Singer said.
He was still struggling for breath.
“Barrone’s my next stop,” Crow said.
“Now will you let me go?” Singer said.
Crow grabbed the shirt more firmly, lifting Singer slightly off the ground, getting his face even closer.
“I find out you lied to me and you had something to do with that girl,” Crow said, “I’ll kill you.”
“You got this wrong, Crow, trust me.”
He didn’t look desperate to Crow now. Just defeated.
“Something got out of hand here,” Singer said. “But I swear to God, I’ve got nothing to do with people dying.”
He let go of him then, watched Singer slide down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. Crow went back outside, collected their guns, tossed them in the front seat of his car. Then he popped the trunk again and told them to get out. They did, cursing him all the way, their faces still covered with blood. Santo said they were going to call the cops. Crow said he might think about checking that with his boss first.
He watched them walk back toward the house, looking over their shoulders at him every few yards. Some nights in Paradise were less boring than others, Crow thought.
FIFTY-TWO
Jesse asked Suit the next morning where they were with Neil O’Hara’s phone records.
“Our district attorney says that nothing has changed,” Suit said. “Said he’s not going to change the rules just because you’re still convinced Neil didn’t kill himself.”
“It might be easier to convince him if I could get my hands on those phone records.”
“You talking to me or to Mr. Munroe?” Suit said, grinning.
“Stay on his ass,” Jesse said.
Jesse’s door was open. Molly walked through it, as Suit was heading out.
“I thought I told you to take the day,” Jesse said.
“I already took a day.”
“Half.”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“No,” Jesse said, “you’re not, whether you think you are or not.”
Suit went back to his desk. He always said he hated it when Mom and Dad fought.
When Molly sat down Jesse asked if she wanted coffee. She said yes. He made them each a cup with the Keurig, amazed every time he used it how quickly the coffee got made and how good it was. He still would make up a pot from time to time, but now saw that process as taking longer than a ballgame.
“I’d like you to talk to Dix,” Jesse said.
“We already went over this,” she said. “I don’t need a shrink.”
“You got shot, Molls,” Jesse said. “And when you shot back, the other guy died.”
She stared at him with big and beautiful eyes.
“I went to Mass this morning,” she said. “The seven o’clock. I prayed for Blair. I even prayed for Richie Carr, acknowledging that it might be too late.”
“What about yourself?”
“I maybe might have thrown in one or two requests for me when the priest asked for special intentions,” she said.
“Have you gotten word to Michael?” Jesse asked.
“I’ll tell him all about it when he gets back,” she said. “And in the telling, which you will back up one hundred percent, I will make the hole in my arm sound about as serious as getting stung by a bee.”
“Good that you floated like a butterfly that night,” Jesse said.
“Shut up,” she said.
“It would be better if you spoke with Dix,” Jesse said. “I resisted seeing a shrink back in L.A. the first time I put somebody down like you did. Same deal. Kill or be killed. I told them I didn’t need to lie down on a couch to deal with it. But afterward I knew it helped.”
“In what way?’
“By convincing me that I had no choice,” Jesse said. “The difference is, I didn’t get shot that time. My partner did. We were running down an alley. After my partner was on the ground, the guy squared up on me. He was a beat too late. I knew I might only get one shot and I took it.”
“I remember the first time you told me about it,” Molly said.
“And I’d do it again,” Jesse said. “I did it with Crow’s old boss Jimmy Macklin back in the day. It was just your turn in the barrel this time. You did good.”
“I don’t need to be told that,” she said.
“Good for you to hear, anyway.”
Molly held her mug in both hands and looked at Jesse over it.
“I went over to the hospital last night,” she said. “I knew it was after visiting hours, but they let me in when I showed them my badge and told them who I was. One of the nurses told me I’d just missed the Native American man, that he’d just been sitting there outside Blair’s room.”
She gave a quick shake of her head.
“What is it about her that got to him?” Molly said.
“We might all need Dix, Crow included, to understand that,” Jesse said.
“He’s complicated, but we’ve both always known that.”
“Maybe he really has changed,” Jesse said.
“You think Crow can even remember how many people he’s killed?”
“We know how many he’s taken out just around here,” Jesse said. “The guy he was on that getaway boat with. A couple people in the Amber Francisco thing, including Amber’s old man.”
“Who’d hired him to find his daughter,” Molly said.
“Hiring him hasn’t done Billy Singer much good,” Jesse said. “Crow’s got his own code.”
“A code of getting away with robbery and murder, if you ask me.”
Jesse shrugged. “When you’re good, you’re good.”
“Or bad,” Molly said.
She had finished her coffee. She extended the mug toward Jesse and said, “You want me to rinse this?”
“I got it,” he said.
She said she might take another run over to the hospital to look in on Blair, if that was all right. Jesse told her that of course it was all right. In his mind, she was taking a day. She said she’d let him know when she needed a damn day.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Don’t give me that,” Molly said.
He was still at his desk when she called an hour later. Jesse asked if she was on her way back. Molly said she was still at the hospital, in Blair’s room. It was why she was keeping her voice low.
“You know that guy Darnell Woodson we’ve been talking about? Richie Carr’s partner?” she said. “I went into the system and pulled up an old mug shot.”
Jesse waited.
“I think I just saw him in the parking lot,” Molly said.
FIFTY-THREE
Jesse told Molly to stay inside the hospital until he and Suit got there.
“If it’s the guy,” she said, “he’s not going to try something in broad daylight.”
“Humor me,” Jesse sa
id.
Suit made a sweep of the visitors’ parking lot once they got there, writing down license plate numbers as he did. Jesse went upstairs to Blair’s floor, where he met Molly in the lounge up there.
“First things first,” Jesse said. “How is she?”
“The same,” she said. “I talked to one of the doctors. He said it’s a good thing, this is the best way for her brain to heal. If it’s going to heal.”
When they were back in the lobby Jesse said, “You sure it was him?”
“Her room is only on the third floor,” Molly said. “He was standing next to my car, almost like he wanted me to see him.”
Jesse said they’d check it before they’d dust it with the kit in his car, to see if he’d put some kind of tracking device on it.
“Most likely he just wants you to know he’s here,” Jesse said.
“I shot his partner,” Molly said.
“We don’t know for sure that he was partnered up with Carr on this thing, though,” Jesse said. “But even if he is, or was, it seems like they’ve closed the loop on anybody who might have been a threat to the land deal. Two are dead and one’s upstairs in that room.”
“But still alive,” Molly said.
“Maybe she was the last loose end,” Jesse said.
They were in the parking lot now with Suit. Jesse got his fingerprint kit out of the back of the Explorer and told him to dust Molly’s Cherokee with it. Jesse checked the car himself for any kind of bug, but couldn’t find one. Then he called the chief in Marshport, Captain Mike Pearl, somebody he’d worked with in the past. He asked Pearl if he could put somebody outside Blair Richmond’s room for at least a few days, explaining why. Pearl said he would.
Before Captain Mike Pearl had gotten off the call, he’d told Jesse, “Holler if you need any help with that hot mess you got going on over there.”
Jesse told him he was considering the Marines at this point.
FIFTY-FOUR
It was early in Los Angeles and Jesse knew that his son had adjusted his schedule of law school classes so that he could sleep in a few days a week. Sometimes he slept at his girlfriend’s house, also a law student. Not today. Jesse still had what he thought of as his find-my-kid app on his phone, even on the other side of the country.
He used to have the same thing with Sunny, before she made him disable it.
Jesse knew he should have felt at least somewhat guilty about waking up his son. Even though he had come to fatherhood this late in his life, he was pretty sure rousting your kids out of bed was one of the perks that came with being a parent.
“You in a hostage situation?” Cole mumbled. “If you are, tell them I’ll pay the ransom after I get a couple more hours of sleep.”
“I need a favor,” Jesse said.
“I need a couple more hours of sleep.”
“I’m serious.”
“You never ask me for favors,” Cole said.
He sounded a bit more alert now.
“It’s why I feel I have a strong position with you this morning despite waking you up,” Jesse said.
“I am now up in a sitting position,” Cole said. “What’s the favor?”
“I’d like you to do some financial sleuthing for me in your spare time.”
“This was supposed to be my spare time!” Cole shouted.
“It may take some grunt work, but will play nicely into your current area of legal expertise.”
“Expertise?”
“I’ve seen your grades.”
“So tell me what you need,” Cole said, “now that I can see my afternoon at Venice Beach with Kim actually disappearing into the ocean.”
Jesse caught him up on what had been happening in Paradise as succinctly as he could. Cole knew some of it, admitted he had no idea things had gotten this bad, this quickly.
“Tell me about it,” Jesse said.
“Why don’t you ask that old flame of yours, the one with the flaming red hair and that killer bod?”
They both knew he was referring to Rita Fiore of Cone, Oakes, the top litigator at the biggest and best law firm in Boston.
“I’m out of favors with Rita,” Jesse said, “at least not the kind I’m looking for here. And if she finds out I’m not with Sunny, provided she doesn’t know already, I might find myself being stalked.”
“You dog,” Cole said.
“So can you throw an old one a bone?” Jesse said, and then told him exactly what he needed. He should have asked Cole to do this a week ago, or more, but better late than never.
“How’s that girl?” Cole said.
“Hanging in there.”
“You’ll figure this all out, Pop,” Cole said.
“How do you figure?” Jesse said.
“Because you always do,” Cole said.
Then he said, “Going back to sleep now.”
“Copy that,” Jesse said.
FIFTY-FIVE
The big house, which looked to Jesse as if the pilgrims might have built it, overlooked the water at Paradise Neck, which had once been the fanciest part of town but was no longer, especially now that beach erosion in this area was getting people to think that some of the older homes over there might eventually slide right into the Atlantic and float away.
The driveway leading up to the house was at least a half-mile long. On the way up, Jesse passed a gatehouse bigger than any house Jesse had ever lived in as a kid. Sometimes Jesse thought that there were really just two kinds of rich in Paradise: old money and older.
Jesse pulled the Explorer into the circular driveway in front of the main house. He hadn’t called to say he was coming, feeling as if the worst thing that could happen was him wasting maybe half an hour on the round trip from the station. But there was a Mercedes SUV parked in front of the garage, a lot of lights on inside.
I’m a patient man until I’m not, Jesse had told Dix one time.
“And what happens when you run out of patience?” Dix said.
“Nothing good.”
“At least you don’t take a drink anymore when you reach that point.”
“Not today,” Jesse had said to him.
A floodlight had lit the driveway as soon as Jesse pulled up. It was past ten o’clock by now. Jesse knew what Cole had come up with on Lawton could wait until morning. But this was what happened when he got impatient. On top of that, he didn’t like getting jacked around by old money.
Or older.
Thomas Lawton opened the door before Jesse was halfway up the cobblestone walk. He was wearing a black T-shirt and baggy tennis shorts that came down to his knees, covering half his skinny legs. He was barefoot.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“We need to talk, Thomas,” Jesse said.
“What about?”
“You lying to me,” Jesse said.
FIFTY-SIX
Lawton walked him through the house to the back deck, turning on lights when they got there. They both sat in Adirondack chairs that even Jesse, not an avid consumer, knew were not cheap.
“Now, exactly what is it that I’m supposed to have lied to you about?” Lawton said. “And so you know, I don’t have a lot of time. I’ve got a date coming over in about half an hour, and I’m guessing it would be kind of a mood killer to have the chief of police on the premises when she arrives.”
Jesse smiled.
“You told me you were rich as shit, Thomas,” he said, “when it turns out you’re pretty much the opposite of that, at least until you sell the land.”
Lawton said, “You’re the one who’s full of shit.”
“Thinking no,” Jesse said. “And this is on me, by the way. I did the background work on Billy Singer and money problems that might chase him all the way into jail. And I did the work on Barrone, who still wants people to think he can lick any
man in the house, but might be about to sell off one of his casinos, or both of them, if the banks don’t take them first. So I knew why they need this deal to go through, and the sooner the better.”
“Is there a point to this fascinating presentation?” Lawton said.
“Once you inherited everything from your old man,” Jesse said, “you didn’t want to make money the boring, old-fashioned way. You wanted to open a club in Boston, which you did. Until you closed it last year. You wanted to open restaurants, and buy racehorses, and even get into show business. But the horses ended up either back in the pack or lame. When you wanted to go Hollywood, you burned money on a couple of big box-office losers, right out of the box. I don’t know about you, but I’m detecting a bit of a downward spiral here.”
“Who came up with this?” Lawton said.
“Guy I know who specializes in financial bullshit artists like you,” Jesse said. “See, I was like everybody else in town when I looked at Trust Fund Thomas. Who came from a long line of Lawtons, most of whom had the best interest of the town at heart.”
“I always assumed that there was something written down saying I couldn’t sell it,” Lawton said. “We went over this already. Turns out there wasn’t anything written down.”
“And aren’t you the lucky boy because of that,” Jesse said.
“You’ve got this all wrong,” Lawton said.
“People keep telling me that,” Jesse said. “About almost everything. I’m starting to doubt myself.”
“And I’m telling you that nobody’s ever going to run a benefit for me,” Lawton said. “I mean, wake up, do you have any idea how much this property we’re on right here is worth?”
“No clue,” Jesse said. “But what I do know now is that you’ve quietly had it on the market for over a year. And yet here you are.”
“I don’t even live here full-time,” he said. “I spend most of the week at my place in Boston, near where my club used to be.”
Lawton stood up, walked over to the railing, leaned against it, the water behind him in the night.
