Night Passage (A Jesse Stone Novel)

be her friend and nothing more. In the early days of his dismay he had thought maybe he could share her. He had, after all, in the last year or so of their marriage been sharing her involuntarily. But in a while he understood that he could not. And so he sat one evening in their kitchen, on one of their high stools at the breakfast counter, with a United States road atlas, a police help-wanted listing, and a bottle of scotch, and decided where he would go to look for peace. He had to work and all he knew was cop. Of the possible jobs the one in Paradise, Massachusetts, was the farthest away. With a lot of scotch inside him, which made him ironic rather than sad, he imagined the salt spray and the snowy streets at Christmastime and the cheery New Englanders going steadfastly about their business and decided to try Paradise first. Now as he approached the George Washington Bridge he was maybe two hundred miles away from it and he felt as remote and unconnected as if he were adrift in space. There were other ways to get to New England, but he wanted to do it this way. He wanted to drive over the Hudson River across the George Washington Bridge. New York City stretched along the river to his right looking the way it did in all the pictures. Not to be confused with Los Angeles, he thought. He’d been in Chicago once looking for a guy who’d killed a process server in Gardena, and again for the Paradise job interview. He’d arranged several at a law enforcement convention in the Palmer House. But he assumed he wasn’t getting a glowing recommendation from the LAPD, and Paradise was the only one to offer him a job. He remembered the march of Chicago cityscape along the lake front, but the New York skyline was different. Chicago had been exuberant. This congregation of spires was far too reserved for exuberance. There was nothing exultant in their massed height. There was something like contempt in the brute grace of the skyscrapers standing above the river.
    The memory of the interview embarrassed him. He had been drinking scotch in the bar downstairs and his memory was the embarrassing memory of all drunks, he thought, the struggle to seem sober undercut by the half-suppressed knowledge that you were slurring your words. What bothered him even more was that he had needed to drink even though he knew it would jeopardize the job. His face felt hot at the memory. But they hadn’t noticed. The two interviewers, Hathaway, the selectman, and a Paradise police captain named Burke, seemed oblivious of the times when he couldn’t stop slushing the s’s in Los Angeles. It was late afternoon. Maybe they’d had a couple before the interview themselves. They’d talked in a one-bedroom suite that Hathaway was in. The police captain had a single room down the hall. Jesse remembered the room being too hot And he remembered that Burke hardly spoke at all, and that Hathaway didn’t seem to be asking the right questions. He’d had to excuse himself twice to go to the bathroom, and each time he had splashed cold water on his face from the sink. But drunk is drunk, as he well knew, and cold water didn’t change anything. Hathaway had sat in front of the window eleven stories above the loop with a manila folder in his lap, to which he occasionally referred. Hathaway asked about his education, his experience, his marital status.
    “Divorced,” Jesse said.
    He didn’t like saying it. It still seemed to him somehow a shameful thing to admit. It made him feel less.
    Hathaway, if he thought it shameful, made no sign. Burke was silent in the shadow near the window to Hathaway’s left.
    “What do you think, Jesse,” Hathaway said, about fifteen minutes into the interview, “about the right to keep and bear arms?”
    “Constitution’s clear on that, I think.” Jesse had trouble with all the t’s in constitution .
    “Yes,” Hathaway said, “I think so too.”
    They talked a bit about Jesse’s life in the minor leagues and how it was too bad that he couldn’t make the throw anymore. They talked of how many cases he had cleared in L.A.
    “Nobody clears them all,” Jesse said with a smile, trying to enlist Burke, who remained silent, his arms folded. Clears came out clearth .
    “We talked with your Captain Cronjager,” Hathaway said, referring to his folder.
    Jesse waited. Cronjager was a decent enough guy, but he believed in police work and he might not recommend a cop who drank on duty.
    “He speaks very well of you,