Stone's Throw

by Mike Lupica

  But perhaps her vow about Crow was easy to make because she never thought she would see him again, that when he’d left Paradise the last time he’d left for good.

  And yet here he was.

  Here she was.

  Here were they all.

  She was Jesse’s best friend. In so many ways, all the big ways, she was the best friend he’d ever had in his life. She had saved his job more than once. And maybe his life. Molly Crane: friend, deputy, wife, mother.

  Somehow the wind was blowing even harder from the east than it was before. More lightning exploded, feeling closer than ever, as if it had targeted Grove Street. More thunder followed, shaking the Explorer again.

  Molly Crane, halfway down the block with Crow.

  He sat there for another half hour and then finally put the Explorer in gear, took a left on Grove, away from the rented house, and headed for home. Thinking this might be one of those nights when he wanted a drink more than others.

  Perfect storm.

  SIXTEEN

  Molly sat curled up at one end of her living room couch, one which she and Michael had sometimes put to rocking good use, on the rare occasions when they’d had the house to themselves when the girls were still around, and then after they weren’t.

  She poured herself a glass of chardonnay.

  She had just been alone with Crow for the first time since she’d slept with him, though without making too fine a point of things, they hadn’t done any sleeping that night.

  “This couldn’t wait?” Crow had said when he opened the door and saw her standing there.

  “No,” Molly had said, walking past and into the small, spare front room without being invited in. Like she was taking the room, even if she didn’t feel that way at all.

  Fake it till you make it.

  “Is this an official visit?” Crow said.

  Molly’s throat was dry, but she didn’t want to clear it, as if even that might be a sign of weakness, or nerves. Or both. One of her guilty pleasures—an innocent one—was country music. And one of her favorite singers was Delbert McClinton, who once sang about old weaknesses, comin’ on strong.

  Crow sat on the sofa. Molly took a chair across from him, facing him across a cheap coffee table trying to look as if it were made of mahogany.

  Crow grinned.

  “So how can I help you?” he said.

  Everything he said to her sounded as if it had subtext. Or just a double meaning.

  He’s enjoying this.

  “Ben Gage has disappeared,” she said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Let’s not,” Molly said.

  Her voice sounded husky to her, nothing she could do about it now.

  “Not what?”

  “Fuck around.”

  She was sorry as soon as she said it.

  Crow grinned again. “You sure about that?”

  “We can do this here,” Molly said. “Or I can call Jesse and have him meet us at the station. Your call.”

  He jerked a thumb in the direction of the tiny kitchen that was like an extension of the room. “Get you something?”

  “I won’t be here long enough,” Molly said.

  “It’s good to see you again,” Crow said.

  “You sure about that?” she said.

  She felt as if the room were shrinking, as if he could reach across the coffee table and have his hands on her before she could do anything to stop him. If she wanted to stop him. She had disabled her phone before she’d left the station. Perhaps the only person who knew where she was at this moment was Crow.

  “Why did you go to Ben Gage’s house?” she said.

  “I wanted to know if he and his little green men were going to continue to bust balls if Billy got the land,” he said.

  “Men and women,” Molly said.

  Crow gave a quick shake of his head. “Whatever,” he said.

  “Why couldn’t you just ask the young woman he lives with?” she said.

  “He’s the boss,” Crow said. “You just spin your wheels talking to someone who’s not the boss.”

  “You feel as if you’re wasting your time not talking to my boss?” Molly said.

  “By now,” Crow said, “I know that talking to you is the same as talking to him.”

  Another bolt of lightning rattled the windows at 18 Grove. It made Molly jump.

  “Don’t worry,” Crow said. “I’ll protect you.”

  Molly smiled. “If you’re lying to us about any of this, you’re the one who will need protection,” she said. “Unless you’ve got another getaway boat waiting.”

  “I got nothing to do with the dead guy,” he said. “I got nothing to do with this Ben Gage disappearing.”

  “So you say.”

  “Let me ask you something,” Crow said to her. “Are we ever going to get past this?”

  “This,” Molly said.

  He made a gesture that seemed to take in the two of them, and the space in between.

  Molly said, “I got past it a long time ago.” She shrugged. “Regrets, I’ve had a few.”

  Crow said, “Now who’s lying?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  Then she said, “Does Billy Singer want this land enough to kill for it?”

  “You mean have me kill for it, don’t you?”

  Molly’s shoulders rose and fell again.

  “He might kill Ed Barrone if he thought he could get away with it,” Crow said. “Not anybody else. But if you and the chief want to treat me like a suspect, have at it.” He grinned again and put up his palm. “Your chief, white woman. Not mine.”

  Molly had left then, feeling the urge to run through the rain to the old Cherokee that she refused to give up or trade in, even though Jesse told her she was entitled to the same kind of Explorer he drove.

  She drove home slowly through some streets that were already flooded. Took a shower. Built the fire. Wondering what it was like for Michael out on the ocean, wherever he was on the ocean, when a storm like this would hit in the night and there was nowhere to hide, nothing between you and the sky. Or God.

  She realized that she had forgotten to turn her phone back on. She grabbed it out of her bag and did now. There was another missed call from Jesse, one that had come in while she was in the shower. He’d also called earlier in the evening.

  She decided she would call him back in the morning. Looked at her glass and realized she had barely touched her wine. She took the glass into the kitchen and poured the wine into the sink. Then she got the keys to the Cherokee out of her bag and headed outside. The rain had stopped.

  She thought about another Delbert song now, the one about some kind of crazy.

  SEVENTEEN

  Molly was late getting to the station the next morning. If she wasn’t on an assignment, she was usually only late for some kind of family situation. But Jesse knew she had no family in town these days. Her daughters were all grown and out of the house, and her husband was still out on the Atlantic Ocean somewhere. He’d asked Michael Crane whether he loved Molly more, or sailing.

  “Molly,” Michael Crane had said. “But it’s a close call.”

  Jesse had tried Molly’s phone the night before, once after he’d gotten home from Crow’s, once later. She had not called him back, something she routinely did, no matter the time of day or night. The last time he had known her whereabouts had been when she was on Grove Street, at Crow’s rented house, before he had driven away.

  When she finally arrived a few minutes after ten, she had her phone in her hand and was waving it at Jesse.

  “I just tried to call Blair Richmond at her friends’ house,” she said. “No answer. Then I called the friends. She never showed up there last night.”

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  “My sent
iments exactly.”

  “Something must have spooked her now,” Jesse said.

  “Or she heard from her boyfriend and went to meet up with him.”

  “We’ve got her phone number,” Jesse said. “We could track her with that.”

  “On it,” Molly said. “But I bet if she was worried about being tracked, she knew how to pull the battery out of the phone and then only put it back when she wanted to use it.”

  “No matter how tech-savvy we think we are, kids are savvier,” Jesse said.

  “I’ll check anything and everything,” Molly said. “And then see about credit cards or debit cards and social media and all that jazz, whether she’s gone to ground or not. But if she wants to go off the grid, maybe she’s smart enough to pay for everything in cash.”

  “I should have checked in with her last night,” Jesse said.

  “One of us should have,” Molly said. “I took a ride over to their house instead, just on the chance somebody might have taken another run at it.”

  “You mean you took a ride over without telling me,” Jesse said.

  “Am I required to?” she said.

  He took off his reading glasses. He was using them more and more, because if he didn’t, he needed to move whatever he was reading farther and farther away. What had they called doing that when he was a kid? Playing the trombone?

  Playing the trombone?

  Jesus, how old am I?

  He knew he wasn’t angry with Molly. He was angry about a lot of things these days. Including Sunny. But Molly was the only one here right now.

  “What time did you go over there?” Jesse said.

  “Are we really going to do this?” she said. “What does it matter?”

  Maybe she was reading his mind, something she did with consistent ease. She got up out of her chair now and walked over to his door and shut it and sat back down.

  “It’s just that I tried to call you last night,” Jesse said. “Usually I hear back when you see a missed call from me.”

  He drank some coffee and decided to stop screwing around.

  “You went to see Crow,” he said.

  They both knew it wasn’t a question. She waited a beat, eyes on him, before answering.

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “He didn’t have to,” Jesse said. “I saw your car in front of his house.”

  “You followed me?” she said. “What the hell, Jesse?”

  “I was following up on what Blair Richmond had told me,” he said.

  “Are we done talking about her?”

  “I’ll get back to her,” Jesse said. “Just taking the circle route.”

  “I was following up on her telling us that Crow had gone to their house,” Molly said. “Did I need a hall pass?”

  “You know better than that.”

  “I was there as a cop,” she said. “Nothing else. Okay?”

  She stepped on the last word.

  “I just want to make sure you’re okay,” he said.

  “Did I ask you if you were okay after you went to see your old girlfriend the night that Neil died?” Molly said.

  “You did not.”

  Molly said, “Then you don’t have to worry about me.”

  “A chronic condition, unfortunately.”

  “Get over it.”

  “Trust me, I’ve tried. I wasn’t following you,” Jesse said before Molly left the office.

  “If you say so.”

  “I say so because I really wasn’t following you. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She stopped at his door, hand on the knob.

  “Change of subject?”

  Jesse said, “I’d be willing to pay big bucks for one.”

  “Why were you so sure it was murder with Neil from the start?” she said.

  “Too many things didn’t add up,” he said. “Him using his off hand. Dev was the first one to say the angle of the bullet, even if he was right-handed, was off.”

  “Now we’ve got two missing kids,” Molly said.

  “Had one of them right here in this office,” Jesse said. “Let her walk right out the door.”

  “But she told you that she didn’t know anything,” Molly said.

  “We know that,” Jesse said. “They don’t.”

  “Whoever they are,” Molly said.

  “She told me to find her boyfriend,” Jesse said. “Now I want you to find her.”

  She managed a smile.

  “You know what you always tell me,” she said.

  “I tell you a lot of things,” he said. “Unfortunately, you seem to remember most of them.”

  “If this shit were easy,” Molly said, “anybody would do it.”

  Jesse said it ought to be a Hallmark card.

  EIGHTEEN

  Billy Singer might not have been the most famous casino owner in Vegas. If he wasn’t, he was definitely in the conversation. It was mostly because of his television commercials for the centerpiece of his gaming empire, one that included casinos in Tahoe and London, simply known as The House.

  “Come to Las Vegas,” Billy would say, looking into the camera, “and see if you can take my money home with you. Everybody thinks they can beat The House. Come see us, and see if you can beat mine.”

  He reminded Jesse of the old actor George Hamilton. But then the only actors Jesse knew were old ones. White hair, perpetually dark tan, admitting to being seventy-two now but older than that according to Internet biographies, looking a lot younger than that up close because of all the expert work he’d clearly had done. Only his veiny hands betrayed him, because they always did. Hands got you every time, Jesse thought. He was frankly amazed that Singer had allowed his hair to go snow white, that he wasn’t one of those aging celebrities with hair the color of one of his baseball mitts.

  Singer had rented a big place on Stiles Island for the duration of his competition with Ed Barrone. Singer said he planned to buy a place of his own, or build one, once he was awarded the land. “When,” he always said, not “if.” Like a guy running for office and saying, when I’m elected. Like it was some kind of sure thing.

  Singer answered the door himself. Lime-green polo shirt, skinny jeans, expensive-looking boat shoes. Firm handshake, as if he’d learned it at Big Guy school.

  “Whatever it is, I didn’t do it,” he said, leading Jesse into a massive living room with high ceilings and lots of windows and a panoramic view of the water, with the Stiles Island Bridge off to his right. Somewhere in the vast distance was Portugal, or The Azores; Jesse could never remember which came first.

  As good as the view was from here, Jesse knew the view from The Throw, up much higher, was even better.

  Billy Singer jerked his head in the direction of an impressively stocked bar.

  “Get you a drink, Chief?” Singer said. He smiled. “It’s five o’clock somewhere, right?”

  “Maybe you haven’t heard,” Jesse said. “I retired with the trophy.”

  One of his stock lines. He didn’t attend many cocktail parties. Rarely attended parties of any kind, really. But when he did, and somebody would offer him a drink, he’d simply say, “I’ve already had enough.”

  “Did I know that?” Singer said. “Shit, I hope it’s not one more thing I forgot. Every time I can’t find the damn remote, I think I’m on my way to getting diagnosed with the big Al.”

  They sat in a sun-splashed area at the end of the room that opened out onto a deck. Singer was working on a Bloody Mary. Jesse idly wondered if it was his first of the day.

  “So how can I help you?” Singer said.

  “You could start by telling me why you thought you needed to bring in Crow to close a real estate transaction,” Jesse said.

  “You know Crow?” Singer said.

  “You know Crow an
d I have history, Billy,” Jesse said. “And you know that I know that you know, because it’s something Crow would have told you before he ever got to town.” Jesse smiled. “This will go a lot easier if you don’t try to bullshit me like you’re one of your casino hosts instead of the guy who owns the place.”

  Singer’s smile held. But by threads.

  “Little aggressive there, am I right?”

  Jesse was still smiling back at him. “Not even close.”

  “You know about casino hosts?” Singer said.

  “And used-car salesmen,” Jesse said. “And guys selling steak knives when I’m up too late watching television.”

  Singer laughed.

  “Not a fan of Vegas, I’m guessing?” Singer said.

  “Not even close,” Jesse said again.

  “I’m not here selling,” Singer said. “Just trying to buy.”

  “Why do you want the land this much?”

  “Now, just for the sake of conversation, what if I were to tell you that my business is none of yours?”

  “Would make me wonder about your business even more,” Jesse said, “and if that had anything to do with the death of Neil O’Hara.”

  “That’s your business,” Singer said.

  “I’m just trying to understand yours,” Jesse said.

  “I want this deal for the same reason I want everything,” he said. “Because I do. Because I already own as much of the Strip as I’m going to own. Because I have been looking to expand to this part of the country for a while, especially now that you don’t have to be in a tribe to own a casino here.”

  Jesse watched him closely as he listened. And despite all the spit-shine to him, all the teeth and hair and what he was certain was killer charm, Jesse could see the predator in the man, like a hawk making a high, slow pass.

  “How much of this has to do with the fact that Ed Barrone wants what you want, too?” Jesse said.

  Singer grabbed the celery stalk out of his drink and ate half of it. “Well,” he said, “there is that.”