Night Passage (A Jesse Stone Novel)

tucked into his shirt pocket and the slender cord ran up under his chin. He looked as if he’d just come from a shower and a shave and his cologne came into the bar ahead of him. Clubman, maybe. Jesse watched him. There was nothing particularly interesting about him except that Jesse watched everything. The cowboy ordered a nonalcoholic beer and when it was served he left the glass and picked up the bottle and carried it with him as he walked along the bar looking everything over.
    “When’s that dancing start?” he said to one of the bartenders.
    He spoke loudly, perhaps because he needed to speak over the music in his ears. He drank his nonalcoholic beer from the bottle, holding it by the neck.
    “Nine o’clock,” the Hispanic girl said. She had no accent.
    The cowboy looked around the bar at Jesse, at the two guys in plaid shirts drinking beer, at the two bartenders.
    “Anybody know a happening place around here?”
    One of the beer drinkers shook his head without looking up. Nobody else even acknowledged the question. Everybody knows it, Jesse thought. Maybe it’s how loud he talks. Or how he looks like a model in one of those western-wear catalogs. Or the way he walks around in the little backwater bar, like he was strolling into the Ritz. Whatever it was, everyone knew he was a guy who, encouraged by an answer, would talk to you for much too long. The cowboy nodded to himself, as if his suspicions were confirmed, and walked into the empty dance hall and walked around it, looking at the caricatures of dapper semi-human coyotes hanging on the walls. Then he put his half-finished bottle of nonalcoholic beer on the bar, surveyed the bar again, and walked out.
    “Takes all kinds,” the blond bartender said.
    A jerk, Jesse thought. A good-looking jerk, but just as lonely and separate as the homely ones. His sandwich came. He ate it because he needed nourishment, and drank two more scotches and paid and went to his room. Nothing was going to happen when they opened up the dance floor that Jesse wanted to watch.
    In his room he got the travel bottle of Black Label out of his suitcase and poured some into one of the little sanitary plastic cups he found in the bathroom. The walk down the hall for ice seemed too long so he sipped the scotch warm. He didn’t turn on the television. Instead he stood at the window and looked out at the high pines that rimmed the hill behind the motel. He’d grown up in Tucson when The Brady Bunch was hot, and while it was only four or five hours away, it could have been another planet. Tucson was sunlight and desert and heat, even in January. Up here they had winter. It was 7:45, getting dark. He was still in the same time zone. Jennifer would be home from work. Actually she’d probably be fucking Elliott Krueger about now. He let the images of his wife having sex roll behind his eyes as he stared at the now-dark windowpane and sipped his scotch. His reflection in the windowpane looked somber. He grinned at it, and raised his glass in a toasting gesture. Go to it, Jenn, fuck your brains out. It’s got nothing to do with me. The bravado of it, buoyed with the scotch, made him feel intact for a moment, but he knew it was scotch, and he knew it was bravado, and he knew there was nothing behind the smile in the empty window.

4
     
    Hasty Hathaway had never really worked. His father had made a great deal of money in banking, and while he spent time in his office at the bank he’d inherited, he was mainly busy with being the most prominent citizen in Paradise, chairman of the Board of Selectmen, Commander of Freedom’s Horsemen, and president of the Rotary Club. He stood now in his bedroom with the closet door open thinking about which jacket to wear. His wife lay in bed in her nightgown watching him.
    “What about the blue seersucker?” he said.
    “Blue looks good on you, Hasty,” Cissy said.
    “New chief of police is arriving this week,” Hasty said, “from California.”
    “Didn’t you meet him already?”
    “Chicago. Burke and I went out to interview the finalists. Stayed at the Palmer House.”
    Hasty pulled out the blue seersucker and put it on and turned so Cissy could see him.
    “Good,” she said. “Are you going to wear that plaid bow tie?”
    “You think I should?”
    “It would go very nicely with that shirt and jacket.”
    “All right, then,” Hasty said and took it off the tie rack on the back of the closet door.
    “Is he a nice boy?” Cissy