Night Passage (A Jesse Stone Novel)

coloring books and some crayons and some little wooden figures scattered about, watching a home shopping show as if it were a performance of King Lear .
    “Want some coffee?” Carole said.
    “Sure.”
    Jesse followed her through the long formal dining room into the big kitchen, paneled in pine, with shiny copper pots hanging from a rack over the stove. The big window at the back of the room looked out at more land behind the house, planted with flowering shrubs and shielded by white pine trees.
    “Nice property,” Jesse said. “How much land you got?”
    “Three-quarters of an acre,” Carole said. She put coffee into the gold filter basket of a bright blue coffeemaker and added water and turned it on, and sat down at the kitchen table opposite Jesse. She was a pretty woman, with an empty face and wide eyes which always looked a little startled.
    “Been here long?”
    “Ten years,” she said.
    The kid came from the den carrying a ratty-looking stuffed animal by the ear. It was too dilapidated for Jesse to tell what it had been. The child laid the upper half of himself over his mother’s lap and, holding the stuffed animal tightly, started to suck his thumb. Carole patted his head absently.
    “You get it as part of the divorce?”
    “Yes. And he’s supposed to pay me alimony every month but he doesn’t.”
    “Must be tough to keep the payments up,” Jesse said.
    “I got to pay taxes quarterly, but at least there’s no mortgage.”
    “No mortgage?”
    “No. Jo Jo bought it for cash, when we got married.”
    “Cash? Really? When was that.”
    “Nineteen eighty-six,” she said. “House cost a hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars. Probably worth five now.”
    “I should think so,” Jesse said. “Where’d Jo Jo get the cash?”
    Carole shook her head. The coffeemaker had stopped gurgling. She raised the kid from her lap and got up and poured them coffee.
    “You take anything?” she said.
    “Cream and sugar, please. Two sugars.”
    “Skim milk okay?”
    “Sure.”
    She put the coffee down on the table and sat back down. The kid plopped back in her lap and sucked his thumb some more.
    “What did you ask me?” Carole said.
    “Where Jo Jo got the cash. Hundred and fifty-five thousand is a lot of money. It was even more in 1986.”
    “I don’t know,” she said.
    Jesse nodded.
    “Jo Jo come around since he and I had that talk?” Jesse said.
    “No.”
    “How are the kids doing?”
    Carole shrugged.
    “You talk to a shrink at all?”
    “How’m I supposed to afford a shrink?” Carole said. “My HMO pays a hundred bucks for counseling. You know how far that goes?”
    Jesse nodded.
    “How are you getting by, financially?”
    Again Carole shrugged. It was a particular kind of shrug. Jesse had seen it often. It was not a gesture of surrender or even of defeat, those were long past. It was a gesture of numbness. It meant no hope.
    “You got any family?”
    “My mother’s dead,” Carole said. “My father’s in Florida with my stepmother. My father sends me some money.”
    “If Jo Jo’s not paying what he’s supposed to you can take him to court.”
    “Sure, and pay a lawyer, and have the judge tell Jo Jo to pay and have him not pay, and maybe come around later and beat the shit out of me?”
    “I don’t think he’ll do that again,” Jesse said.
    “Maybe not if you’re around, he hasn’t bothered me since that time. But how long you going to stay around here?”
    “I don’t know,” Jesse said.
    “How come he’s scared of you anyway?” Carole said. “I mean, look at him. Look at you. How come he doesn’t get you for slapping him around?”
    Jesse looked at the little boy, sucking his thumb on his mother’s lap. How much of all this did he hear? Probably all of it. How much did he understand? Probably too much of it. What could Jesse do about that?
    “Well,” Jesse said. “I’m a cop, which carries a little weight, and I carry a gun, which may have a lot of weight.”
    “Jo Jo’s got a gun. He used to have two or three around here.”
    Jesse nodded.
    “So what is it,” Carole said.
    Jesse looked at the boy again. Nothing to do about that.
    “Jo Jo’s a fake,” Jesse said. “Alone at night, when he can’t sleep, sometimes, for a minute he knows it. And he knows that I know it too.”
    “A fake?”
    “Sure. He’s strong, and he’s cruel. And that’s a dangerous combination. But he isn’t really tough.”
    “And you are?”
    Jesse smiled at