Night Passage (A Jesse Stone Novel)

meant as a kindness. It probably was a kindness at the time, and by the time she dropped the other shoe and talked about Elliott, he had already begun the process of shoring up his self and could hear it. The night she left and he was alone in the house he looked at his service pistol and picked it up and thought about where to shoot himself. A lot of cops shot themselves. They had the means at hand, and they knew how. Put them ahead of the general populace, he thought, in suicide efficiency. Probably putting the muzzle in his mouth and shooting up and back would be the way most likely to take him out instantly. Cops called it eating your gun. He sat on the bed and hefted the gun and felt comforted by it. If he couldn’t stand her leaving, if she didn’t come back, it was always there. It was a comfort to know it was there. Like booze. If it got bad enough he could always drink. He put the gun back in the drawer by his bed and went and looked out the window…. The rain was a constant. Sometimes it intensified as he drove through the north spur of West Virginia. It was never gentle and sometimes it was intense, and Jesse drove mostly by focusing on the taillights of the car ahead. He had a momentary fantasy of a ten-mile-long line of cars, each driver following the taillights ahead of him going one by one over a cliff as the first driver in the long line missed the turn…. After she had left and he decided to at least postpone shooting himself, he found that it was bad enough to drink. At first nobody noticed much. Then his partner, a fifty-two-year-old guy named Ben Romero, talked to him about it. Jesse listened and shrugged and went about his drinking. After an incident at night when Jesse couldn’t seem to get the handcuffs on a perp, Romero asked for a new partner.
    “I got five kids,” Romero said. “Two of them in college. I can’t risk it with you anymore, Jesse.”
    Jesse nodded and shrugged. Romero shook hands with him, opened his mouth to say something, and closed it, and shook his head and walked away. When his new partner quit him in less than a week, Jesse was transferred inside to records. When he started not showing up for work, Cronjager called him in and talked to him and sent him to the police doctor. The doctor got him to AA. He thought the meetings were full of self-satisfied assholes, and he hated the higher power crap. After the second meeting he went home and drank nearly a fifth of scotch and slept through most of the next day. The day after that Cronjager offered him the chance to resign or go through the firing process. Jesse resigned. And went home and sat in his small kitchen with ice and scotch and found himself without connection or purpose. I’ll drink to that. He sat and drank scotch and the tears ran down his face.

8
     
    Her sister had agreed to take the kids for the night, and Carole Genest had the house to herself. Before she went to dinner with Mark she had changed the bed linens. She and Mark had had two margaritas and a bottle of white wine with dinner and they were laughing as Mark pulled the BMW sedan into her driveway and parked under the big maple tree near her side door.
    “You better lock the car,” Carole said when they got out. “I don’t think you’ll be leaving for a while.”
    As Mark beeped the lock button on his key ring, and the power locks clicked in the car, Jo Jo Genest loomed out of the shadows by the side door.
    Carole said, “Jesus.”
    “Where’s the kids?” Jo Jo said.
    “Get out of here, Jo Jo,” Carole said.
    “You gonna fuck this pipsqueak?” Jo Jo said.
    “Watch your mouth, pal,” Mark said. But he didn’t say it with conviction. Hulking before them in the half light, Jo Jo looked like a rhinoceros.
    Jo Jo put his huge hand against Mark’s face and slammed his head back against the roof of the car. Mark’s legs buckled and he staggered but remained upright, leaning on the car, clasping his head with both hands, rocking slowly from one side to another.
    “Get outta here,” Jo Jo said.
    Mark went around the car, still holding his head, got into it, and backed down the driveway, the car running off of one side of the driveway and then the other as he overcorrected, going too fast backward in the dark.
    “You son of a bitch,” Carole said. “I got a court order on you. I’m going to put you in jail, you bastard.”
    “Kids are at your sister’s, aren’t they? You stashed them there so you could come home and fuck that