“They check in?”
“Yep.”
“They there now?” Jesse said.
“Nope,” Healy said.
He grinned.
“Toronto cops went there a half hour ago and picked them up,” he
said.
Jesse had the same feeling he’d had with Dix. His chest
expanded. He pulled in a large amount of clean air. He exhaled slowly through his nose. Then he reached across the desk and put his clenched fist out toward Healy. Healy tapped it with his own.
“I think I’ll go up,” Jesse
said. “See how they’re
doing.”
74
Mr and Mrs. Lamont were being held at Division 52 on the west end of Dundas Street, near the lake. Jesse stood outside an interview room with a sergeant of detectives named Gordon. There was a one-way glass window. Behind it Jesse could see the Lamonts sitting at one side of a table, holding hands. There was a uniformed Toronto policeman with them, leaning on the wall.
“They give you any trouble when you picked them up?” Jesse
said.
“Nope. Peaceful and innocent,” Gordon said. “Officer, there
must be some mistake.”
“They killed five people in my
town,” Jesse
said.
“Lotta pressure on you,” Gordon said.
“One of them was a woman I went out with.”
“Lotta pressure,”
Gordon said.
“Find any weapons?”
“Two twenty-two long target pistols,”
Gordon said. “Unloaded and
disassembled and packed away in their luggage. You been looking for those?”
“I have.”
They stood silently looking through the window at the man and woman holding hands.
“I’ll talk to them alone,” Jesse
said. “Though it’s possible
that the man may assault me and I’ll have to defend myself.”
Gordon was a short thick bald man with enough stomach to make the buttons pull a little on his shirt. He nodded thoughtfully.
“You got a right to defend yourself,” he said.
Jesse nodded. Gordon unlocked the door and went in and nodded his head to the uniform to leave.
“A visitor,” he said to the man and woman.
Jesse came into the interview room. Gordon went out and closed the door behind him. Jesse stood and looked at them.
“Jesse,” the man said.
“We’re so glad to see you,” the
woman said.
Jesse didn’t say anything. He stood motionless on the other side
of the table, looking down at them.
“Jesse,” the man said,
“what’s going on? They didn’t even tell us why they arrested us, just that we were wanted in the States.”
Jesse looked straight down at them and didn’t say anything.
“Wanted for what?” the man said.
“Jesse, what is it?” the woman said.
Jesse gestured with one hand at the man to stand up. When the man was standing Jesse called him closer with his crooked forefinger. The man was compliant. He walked closer. Jesse put up both hands to tell him to stop, then Jesse stepped in closer to him and drove his knee into the man’s groin. The man screamed and staggered backward, bent over, and fell on the floor. He brought his knees to his chest and lay with his hands between his legs and moaned. The woman jumped up and ran around the table toward him and Jesse hit her, a full swing, across the face, with the flat of his open hand. She staggered backward and bumped the wall and slid down and sat hard on the floor, with her face pressed into her hands, and began to cry. Jesse looked at both of them for a moment and then turned and looked at the opaque one-way window and jerked his thumb toward the door. In a moment Gordon came in.
“Lucky to escape with your life,” Gordon said.
“Eh?”
75
It was snowing softly. Jesse had parked his Explorer at the town
beach, and he and Jenn sat in the front seat looking at the ocean through the clear quarter circle made on the windshield by the sweep of the wipers. A hundred yards out the snow and the ocean became indistinct. There was no one else in the parking lot, no one on the beach. Jesse could feel how isolated the car would look from a far distance, alone in the snow at the edge of the sea.
“You all right?” Jenn said.
“Yes.”
“You’d say that even if you
weren’t,” Jenn said.
“I know.”
“This has been an especially difficult time for you.”
“It’s why I get the big bucks,”
Jesse said.
Behind them a plow clattered across the causeway toward Paradise
Neck. When it had passed, the silence was broken only by the sound of the wipers and the low fan sound of the heater.
“Did they tell you why they did it?” Jenn asked.
“No.”
“Did you ask?”
“No.”
Jenn put her hand out, and Jesse took it. Holding hands, they looked silently at the snow and the ocean.
“I have not really been happy,” Jenn said,
“since the first time
I cheated on you.”
Jesse didn’t say anything. He looked straight ahead at the snow
and the water.
“You haven’t either,” Jenn said.
Jesse nodded. The snow was falling faster. It was harder to see
the ocean. He could hear Jenn take a deep breath.
“I think we should try again,” she said.
Jesse didn’t look at her. The sentence hung in the silence.
“Why,” he said after a time,
“would it work better this
time?”
“We want it to,” Jenn said.
“We’ve changed. We’re older.
We’ve
had some therapy. We know that no one else will quite do.”
Jesse was silent.
“We could be on a trial basis.” Jenn was talking faster now.
“You know? Like a trial separation, only the reverse.”
Jesse’s throat felt thick. He cleared it.
“How would this work?” Jesse said.
“We wouldn’t have to even live together.
In fact it might work
better if we didn’t. We’d keep doing what we do, and see each other
on weekends, maybe some night during the week, you know, like a date.”
The lady or the tiger, Jesse thought.
“We wouldn’t have to get married again, or at least not right
away, we could see how this worked.”
She held his hand tightly.
“I need to get out of the car,” Jesse said.
Jenn nodded and let go of his hand and they got out. They walked
together through the snow to the little roofed pavilion at the edge of the beach. In its shelter they stood together, holding each other’s hand again. There wasn’t much wind and it wasn’t very cold.
All around the pavilion the snow fell straight down. The smell of the ocean was strong.
“We love each other, Jesse.”
Jesse nodded.
“I was learning to be without you,” he said.
“We love each other.”
Jesse nodded again. Jenn put her head against his shoulder.
The
only sound was the movement of the water. He cleared his throat again.
“I met a lot of women I liked,” Jesse said.
Jenn kept her head against his shoulder. The beach was snow-covered except at the margin where the waves rolled in and out, washing the snow.
“What about that?” Jesse said.
Jenn shook her head slowly against his shoulder.
“No other people?” Jesse said.
“Monogamous,” Jenn
said softly.
Still holding her hand, Jesse turned toward her. She pressed her
face against his neck.
“The magic word,” he said.
“I know.”
“The one condition,” Jesse said.
“Yes.”
He continued to hold her hand with his. He put his free arm around her shoulders. Under the sea smell, her perfume was gently determined.
“Okay,” Jesse said.
“Let’s give it another try.”
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Stone Cold - Parker
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FB2 document info
Document ID: b33dd776-3dfc-456b-b988-4bcc57bf45fa
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 6.8.2011
Created using: calibre 0.8.10 software
Document authors :
Robert B Parker
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