Night Passage (A Jesse Stone Novel)

psychopaths,” Jesse said.
    “Oh, Jesse,” Jennifer said, “you know what he means.”
    “Well, you murder somebody,” Jesse said, “probably something wrong with you.”
    “Well, I may give you a ringo, soon as I teach this idiot writer I’m working with how to write a screenplay.”
    “He’s never written one?” Jennifer said.
    “No, he’s a damn novelist, you know?”
    “The worst.”
    “You got that right,” Elliott said. “Can’t tell them shit.”
    He sighed thoughtfully for a moment, looking around the room, then he patted his chest over his shirt pocket, and frowned, and took a twenty-dollar bill out of his pants pocket and handed it to his girlfriend.
    “Taffy,” he said, “go get me some cigarettes.”
    Taffy took the money and headed for the bar near the waiting area out front.
    “I like it back here,” Elliott said. “Lotta people like it out front where everyone can see them. Real Hollywood, right? I’m not into that.”
    “Don’t blame you,” Jesse said. He knew Jennifer liked him to talk around industry people.
    “I’m a blue-collar guy, you know, Jesse. I make pictures.”
    Jesse had never heard of any picture that Elliott had made. But he didn’t pay much attention to movies. He thought they were boring, except for westerns. Of which there weren’t many new ones. Taffy came back with the cigarettes. The waitress brought them another round of drinks.
    Elliott said, “Lemme tell you a little more about this picture, Jenn.”
    Jesse took a long pull on his scotch and soda, feeling the cold thrust of it down his throat, waiting for the good feeling to follow…. In Oklahoma City he turned northeast, toward St. Louis. He was in the central time zone now. He could remember listening to Vin Scully broadcasting the games from St. Louis, right at suppertime. It was as if he knew St. Louis, the ballpark glowing in the close summer night, the Mississippi running past. Bob Gibson, past his prime but still ferocious. Bake McBride, Ted Simmons. It was how he knew much of the country: Scully’s effortless voice from Wrigley Field and Three Rivers and Shea and Fulton County Stadium, a kind of panoramic linkage under the dark skies of the Republic. He’d listened to Vin Scully all his life. Vin Scully was authority, containment, certainty. Vin Scully was home. He reached St. Louis in the late afternoon with the rush-hour traffic clogging the interstate. He crossed the Mississippi and pulled off the interstate and found Busch Stadium, near the river. In front, a statue of Stan Musial. Jesse sat in the car for a moment and stared at the statue.
    “Stan Musial,” he said.
    Jennifer would never have understood. Maybe no one could who had not played. The feel of it. The smell of the field, the way the skin of the infield felt under your spikes. The way your hands and arms and upper body felt when you hit the ball square, on the fat part of the bat. Maybe you had to have played to hear the oral poetry of chatter and heckling, the jock humor that lingered at the poles of arrogance and self-effacement, the things umpires said every time they defended a call, the things the first baseman said every time, out of the corner of his mouth, while he watched the pitcher, if you reached first on a lucky blooper. They didn’t know that when you were in the field waiting for the pitcher to throw, or that when you were at bat trying to pick up the spin of a curve ball, you didn’t hear the crowd or the coaches or anyone else. They didn’t know that you were in a place of silence that seemed unregulated by time. Though they were men and they often spent time in the company of men, Jennifer’s friends didn’t have any feel for men in groups. Many of them seemed more at ease with women … after a cocktail party in the interests of Jennifer’s career they had a fight about it.
    “Why were they so boring?” Jennifer said.
    “They don’t know anything that matters,” he said.
    “They are successful people in the business,” Jennifer said.
    “Nobody in the business knows what matters,” Jesse had said.
    “For Christ’s sake, they talked with you about baseball all night.”
    “They don’t know anything about baseball,” Jesse said. “They just knew the names of a bunch of players.”
    “Oh, fuck you,” Jennifer said.
    As he left St. Louis it began to rain, spitting at first, and then more of a steady mist. He stayed the night in a motel in Zanesville, Ohio, and when he came out