Stone's Throw

by Mike Lupica

  “Cannot.”

  “I see you’re as chatty as ever, Chief Stone.”

  “Been a while since we talked,” he said. “I could be out of practice.”

  “It’ll come back to you,” she said. “Like riding a bike.”

  “You sure?” he said.

  Another silence, longer than before.

  “How’s your case going?” Jesse said.

  “They lie a lot out here,” Sunny said.

  “I could have told you,” Jesse said.

  “Listen,” she said, “I’ve got to get back to the table. I’ll call when we have more time.”

  I’ve actually got all the time in the world.

  She ended the call before he did. He shut off the postgame show and the lights in the living room and took one more look out at the ocean, just to make sure it was still there.

  He walked into his second bedroom, the one where Cole slept when he’d stay the night, and opened the middle drawer and pulled out the napkin.

  TWELVE

  The napkin from Daisy Dyke’s had one word written on it, uppercase letters, underlined for emphasis:

  NEVER

  It had been Jesse’s last breakfast with Neil O’Hara the week before he died, and Jesse, looking back, felt badly about it now, because he’d invited Neil only to lobby him to put more money for the department into the upcoming budget, even knowing how the town’s economy was still suffering the aftershocks of COVID-19.

  It was why more people in town than not, a lot more, wanted the land deal to pass the Board with flying colors.

  “Think of this as a soft sell,” Jesse had said that day.

  Neil had grinned and said, “There’s no such thing with you.”

  “I’ve wanted to add a couple more cops for a few years,” Jesse said.

  “And I’d like this thing with The Throw to magically disappear,” he said.

  “Why they pay you the big bucks,” Jesse said.

  Neil had lowered his voice and said, “The big bucks are the ones I’ve been offered by both Singer and Barrone to get behind this in public more than I have. Get more locals on board.”

  “You’re just one vote out of five, correct?” Jesse said. “When it comes time to decide.”

  “Lawton and Singer and Barrone don’t seem to see it that way,” he said. “They think I have more power than I do to influence the other members of the Board.”

  “Because people respect you.”

  Neil grinned again. “You’re not getting the two cops.”

  Jesse remembered now how tired he looked. Kate had talked about him being worn down.

  “I just want it to be over,” Neil said.

  Jesse had leaned forward then, motioning for Neil to do the same, lowering his own voice.

  “I want to ask you a question, even if I think I already know the answer,” he said. “And I won’t quote you.”

  “The last person in town who has to make that assurance is you,” Neil said.

  Keeping his voice low, Jesse said, “I know how you feel about the land in this town, and not just the land we’re talking about. But we both know how the money in this thing, even if we think it’s dirty money, will help stand Paradise up again.”

  “It doesn’t even matter what I think any longer,” Neil said. “It’s a five-person Board. There are three votes in favor locked in, unless somebody changes their mind. The only dissenting vote is Constance Burden, whose family even beat the pilgrims here.”

  Jesse sat at his desk now, remembering all over again what he had said next.

  “You’re going to have to run for reelection one of these days,” Jesse said. “And you know you can’t stop the thing. Any chance you might go along just to get along, just in the interest of self-preservation?”

  Neil had smiled at Jesse then, took a pen out of the inside pocket of his sports jacket, and wrote NEVER on his napkin, slid it across the table to Jesse, then slid out of his seat and told Jesse he’d pay their bill at the register. He didn’t seem depressed that day, Jesse thought to himself now. Just boxed in by events he couldn’t do anything to stop.

  Jesse stared at the napkin again. He’d been doing it a lot, as if he were looking at Neil O’Hara’s last will and testament.

  He didn’t have the power to kill the deal, but somebody had killed him anyway.

  But who?

  And why?

  THIRTEEN

  He was in his office late the next afternoon, having had no success across the day contacting Lawton or Singer or Barrone, when Suit walked in, grinning.

  “There’s an SOB here to see you,” he said.

  “Not the first time,” Jesse said. “Certainly won’t be the last.”

  “I mean one of the tree huggers,” Suit said. “She’s pretty upset. Says her boyfriend has disappeared.”

  “Who’s her boyfriend?”

  “The head hugger.”

  The young woman’s name was Blair Richmond. She was tall and blond and could have been a younger sister to Jesse’s ex-wife, Jenn. Her boyfriend’s name was Ben Gage, whom she said had founded SOB when Thomas Lawton put the land up for sale.

  Blair Richmond said she’d spent the past few days visiting an old friend in Providence. Jesse asked if she had any family. She said no, that she was an only child and both her parents had passed. She said Ben was her family now, but that when she got back to the house in Paradise she shared with him, in a section of town near the Marshport line known as the Lost District, it had been searched, top to bottom.

  “Do you have any idea what might have been taken?” Jesse said. “Or anything Ben might have been hiding?”

  She shook her head.

  “I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” she said. “Everything was everywhere.”

  “And you have no idea where Ben is,” Jesse said.

  “He could be anywhere,” she said.

  He sat behind his desk. She paced, her nervous energy almost having built to being kinetic. She had tattoos up and down both bare arms, ear piercings, a nose ring. Maybe Ben Gage thought it made her more beautiful, and made him start to yearn for exclusivity. Jesse knew it was generational, not understanding tats or the piercings. Just more things on the list of things he didn’t understand about people her age, like preferring text messaging to actual conversation.

  Jesse said, “Do you and Ben work together?”

  “I work with him and believe in him,” she said.

  “Have you actually helped him dig the graves?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Are you going to arrest me if I tell you that I have?”

  “No.”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “My dad was a mason. I made most of the headstones, even the ones we have stored because we haven’t used them yet.”

  “In what way?”

  “Mr. Lawton has security now,” she said. “Not all the time. Sometimes. Last week Ben and I had just finished putting a headstone in place when a man pulled up on the access road in some kind of Jeep. He was too far away for me to get a good look at him. But Ben and I took off when he started running in our direction.”

  “You did get away, though?”

  “We had a good head start, and made our way down through the bluffs to the beach,” she said. “I told Ben that should be our last grave. He said maybe I was right, he was worried that he was being followed lately.”

  She stopped in front of his desk. “You don’t think we’re criminals?”

  He smiled. “I sometimes get the urge to grab a shovel and head over there with you,” Jesse said. “And if you repeat that, I will arrest you.”

  She sat down now.

  “When was the last time you actually did hear from him?” Jesse said.

  “He called me the night Mr. O’Hara died,” she said, “for like a minute. Mayb
e less. I’d just gotten to my friend’s house. He was using another burner phone, which was all he’d been using lately. Said he didn’t have much time. I asked what was going on. He said a lot. He said he’d come up with something that was going to change everything for him and Mr. O’Hara. I asked what. He said he didn’t have enough time to tell me everything he needed to tell me on the phone. And he was worried that somebody might be listening. I love him so much, but sometimes he acts as if we’re in some kind of spy movie.”

  “That was it?”

  “That’s what he told me, pretty much word for word,” she said. “But like I just told you, it was pretty rushed.”

  “He hasn’t tried to reach out since?”

  “That’s what scares me, Mr. Stone,” she said. “If whatever he came up with was so important, I keep thinking he would have reached back out to me, unless something bad has happened to him. The other kids in SOB haven’t heard from him, either. I asked if he’d told any of them anything. He hadn’t. Even though we all helped out, SOB was really Ben in the end. We all got caught up in it because of him. But it was Ben who was the true believer. He was obsessed with doing whatever he had to do to stop this deal from going through.”

  She reached into the bag lying next to her chair and pulled out one of those vape pens and sucked on it like it was a pacifier.

  One more thing to add to the list of things he didn’t understand, to go with the tats and piercings, Jesse thought.

  “Ben hated that I used this,” she said. “It was like he was out of another time. He just loves nature so much. He even likes being called a tree hugger. He wondered what the people calling him that would say if they knew he’d built us this cool treehouse in the backyard, the one in front of their wishing tree. We sit up there at night sometimes and dream about our kids sitting up in it someday.”

  Jesse thought she might cry.

  “There’s such a sweetness about him, as much as he tries to come across as a tough guy,” she said. “He used to leave love letters for me and just wait for me to find them.”

  Bring her back, Jesse told himself.

  “Is there anything else you can remember that he said that night?” he said.

  “He could be dead!” Blair said.

  “Maybe he’s just hiding out until he thinks it’s safe to come back,” Jesse said. “Maybe he really was being followed.”

  “He tries to act as if he’s not afraid of them,” she said, “but he sounded so geeked the night he called.”

  “ ‘Them’ meaning Singer and Barrone?”

  “All of them,” she said. “Mr. Lawton ran into Ben in town last week, after we got chased, and told him that if we didn’t stop trespassing, he’d be sorry. Said that next time his guys would catch us.”

  “He said that?”

  “Word for word,” she said. “He’s no better than the other two, if you ask me.”

  She stared at the vape pen, and sadly shook her head.

  “No blue light,” she said. “Means it’s empty.”

  “Good to know,” Jesse said.

  “Ben should have called by now!”

  He told her he would send a couple of his people over to her house to check it for evidence, and then lock it down until further notice. He asked if there was someone with whom she could stay for a couple days. She said there was another couple in the group who could take her in. Sam and Diane Burrows. They lived over in Marshport.

  “This is all because of what happened to Mr. O’Hara, isn’t it?” she said.

  “It seems to be what we call a ‘precipitating event,’ ” Jesse said.

  “Ben really liked him, Mr. O’Hara. He never came out and said it in public, but Ben felt he was with us one hundred percent. Ben didn’t trust the police anymore, all due respect, because of everything that’s been happening in the country. But he did trust Mr. O’Hara.”

  Jesse told her to contact him immediately if she heard from Ben. She said she would.

  “You have to find him,” she said to Jesse. “Please find him,” she said.

  Jesse asked if she had a car. She said she’d walked here from their house. Jesse said he could have someone drive her back there. She said she wanted to walk, that she used long walks to meditate sometimes.

  “Hey, I forgot one thing,” Blair said after Jesse had walked her through the front room. “Someone else came by the house a few days ago, before Ben disappeared, wanting to talk to him.”

  Jesse waited.

  “He was this kind of scary Native American man,” she said.

  FOURTEEN

  Jesse and Molly and Suit were back in Jesse’s office after Blair Richmond left. Before she had, she’d spent some time talking to Molly at her desk. Molly said she’d given Blair her phone number, and told her to call if she needed anything.

  “I assume you’re going to talk to Crow about him paying a call on those kids,” Molly said.

  “Be practically criminal not to,” Jesse said.

  “You think Crow might have something to do with Ben being in the wind?” Suit said.

  “ ‘In the wind,’ Suit?” Jesse said. “Seriously?”

  “I watch too many cop shows,” he said.

  “What I think,” Jesse said, “is that some do-gooding kids ended up way over their heads, with people even worse than they thought they were coming into this.”

  “I saw that girl walk in,” Molly said. “She could be one of my daughters. All on fire with saving the world.”

  “Like their mother,” Jesse said.

  Jesse had planned on paying a visit to Thomas Lawton, who had stopped returning his calls. Not calling first this time. Just show up at his house and brace him on threatening Ben Gage, who had now disappeared. And ask about his private security chasing people off land that had been protected by his family for years until he was in control of it. Molly once called Lawton the second-biggest asshole in Paradise, Mass. When Jesse asked her why just the second, Molly said she just assumed there was a bigger one they all hadn’t met yet.

  When Jesse was alone in his office he reached into the drawer below his gun drawer and once again pulled out his baseball glove, the one he’d been wearing when his career had ended in Albuquerque. Almost like it was a comforter.

  Cole had somehow found an exact replica of the glove, and given it to him as a gift. But the one on his left hand now was the real thing. Sometimes it helped him clear his head and think.

  Neil O’Hara and Ben Gage, one the mayor, one the official head of the opposition, had been a part of the story from the start. So had Thomas Lawton, who’d started all the action in the first place, when he’d decided to sell the land, and brought Billy Singer and Ed Barrone into it, and into Paradise. Neil O’Hara had now died on that land. Ben Gage had gone missing after telling his girlfriend that he had come up with something that could change everything.

  Jesse snapped the ball into his glove.

  Now Crow kept wandering in and out of the story. He had been at The Throw that night. He admitted to having seen Neil O’Hara’s wife a few hours before. And, as it turned out, had come knocking on Ben Gage’s door wanting to chat before that.

  Jesse put his glove and ball back in the drawer. It took him two phone calls to locate the address of Crow’s Airbnb. It was on Grove Street. Three blocks from where Ben Gage and Blair Richmond lived in the Lost District. Maybe something else that wasn’t a coincidence.

  Time to go have another chat with the scary Native American man.

  Not necessarily going in peace.

  Jesse didn’t really need to put the address in Waze. He did anyway, just so he could go straight to the right house.

  18 Grove.

  Molly’s car was out front when he got there.

  FIFTEEN

  Jesse didn’t slow down, just kept going down Grove to Forest Avenue, where he
made a turn that might have been classified as illegal if the one making it wasn’t the chief of police.

  Then he pulled up at the corner of Grove and Forest with a clear view of 18 Grove and reviewed his limited options, none of which he considered great at the moment.

  He could drive back up the street and do what he’d come over here to do, and question Crow. But if he did that, just walked up and rang the bell or knocked on the front door, Molly would likely think he was checking up on her, like an overprotective father. Or a boss who had specifically told her to stay away from Wilson Cromartie.

  Maybe she was just following up on what Blair Richmond had told Jesse about Crow having come calling. And if Jesse showed up, it would appear, in the best possible light, as if he wasn’t allowing Molly to do her job and handle this on her own.

  Whether he’d told her to stay away from Crow or not.

  He sat in the Explorer and waited. He was good at it. Waiting. It was past six o’clock by now, the time between the end of the afternoon and the beginning of evening, the sky gone dark, the wind suddenly at a howl, announcing the imminent arrival of a storm the way the black clouds over the ocean had done the exact same thing over the past hour, the kind of storm, Jesse knew, that was like a message that there was an occasional bill presented for living in a setting like this, and for everyone to be ready when it came due.

  Then the rain was all around him, followed by explosions of thunder and lightning, the force of the wind already making Jesse worry about power outages and downed trees and wires in the night ahead.

  He turned on his wipers and felt the Explorer shake and thought about Molly Crane, hoping that she was at the rented house only on police business, and not personal. She had sworn to Jesse, every time the subject of Crow had come up over the years, that what had happened between them would never happen again, with him or anybody else, that she would never again cheat on Michael, that she wouldn’t risk her marriage a second time.

  Jesse believed her. Maybe it was because he wanted to believe her. And maybe because there was no other person in his life, not Sunny, not even his own son, about whom he cared more, for whom he wanted only good things.