Night Passage (A Jesse Stone Novel)

landscape. Hats and kerchiefs and Winchester rifles and the creak of saddles and the smell of bacon and coffee. East of Albuquerque he was back into sere landscape with high ground lying ominously in the distance, like sleeping beasts at the point where the vast high sky joined the remote landscape. At a rest stop the sign warned of rattlesnakes. He stopped for gas at an Indian reservation in New Mexico. He didn’t know what kinds of Indians they were. Hopi maybe, or Pima. He didn’t know anything about Indians. The gas was cheaper on the reservation and so were cigarettes because neither was subject to federal tax. Signs for miles along the interstate advertised the low price for cigarettes. A couple of Indian men in jeans and white tee shirts and plastic mesh baseball caps were hanging around the self-service pump. One of them eyed the California plates on the car.
    “Where you headed,” he said with that indefinable Indian accent.
    “Massachusetts,” Jesse said.
    The two men looked at each other.
    “Massachusetts,” one of them said.
    “All the way to Massachusetts?” the other one said.
    “Yeah.”
    “Driving?”
    “All the way,” Jesse said.
    “You got to be shitting me, mister. Massachusetts?”
    Jesse nodded.
    “Massachusetts,” he said.
    “Jeesus!”
    The pump shut off and Jesse went into the tiny station to pay. There was some motor oil on a shelf. There was the electronic cash register on a tiny counter. There was a fat old Indian woman at the register in a red tee shirt that had “Harrah’s” printed across the front in black letters. A cigarette was stuck in the corner of her mouth and she squinted through the smoke as she took Jesse’s money and rang it up. The rest of the store was filled with stacked cartons of cigarettes.
    “Cigarettes?” she said.
    “Don’t smoke.”
    She shrugged. As Jesse pulled away from the pumps he could see the two Indian men looking after him, talking excitedly. Massachusetts! There was nothing else in the shale and scrub landscape but the station and the two men…. The first time he met Jennifer she had blond hair. He had played basketball for an hour at Sports Club LA, where Magic sometimes worked out, against a bunch of former college players and one guy who’d spent a couple of years as the eleventh man on the Indiana Pacers. Showered and dressed, he was drinking coffee at a table for two in the snack bar during a crowded noontime when she asked if she could sit in the empty seat across from him. He said she could. It was a big part of why he came to Sports Club LA. He didn’t really need to work out much. At six feet and 175 it was as if he’d been born in shape and never really had to work at it. He’d been a point guard at Fairfax High School, the only white point guard in the conference, and he could climb a long rope hand over hand without using his feet. At the Academy he had been the fastest up the rope in his class. Mostly he came to Sports Club LA because he knew there would be many good-looking young women there in excellent physical condition, and he hoped to meet one. He played some handball, some basketball, and drank coffee in the snack bar where, had he wished to, he could have had a blended fruit-and-yogurt frappe or some green vegetable juice. Jennifer set her tray down and smiled at him.
    “My name’s Jennifer,” she said.
    “Jesse Stone.”
    “What are you having?” she said.
    Her eyes were blue, the biggest eyes Jesse had ever seen, and the lashes were very long. She was wearing cobalt-and-emerald spandex and her fingernails were painted blue.
    “Coffee.”
    “Wow,” Jennifer said. “Here in the health food bar?”
    Jesse smiled. Jennifer had some kind of sandwich with guacamole on whole wheat bread. When she took a bite the guacamole oozed out of the edges and dribbled on her chin. She giggled as she put the sandwich down and wiped her chin with a napkin. He liked the way she giggled. He liked the way she seemed unembarrassed by slobbering her sandwich on her chin. He liked the way her green headband held her hair back off her face. He liked the fact that her skin was too dark a tone for her blond hair, and he wondered momentarily what her real color was.
    “So, you in the business?” Jennifer said.
    “I’m a police officer,” he said.
    “Really?”
    “Yes.”
    “God, you don’t look like one.”
    “What do I look like?” Jesse said.
    “Like a producer, maybe, or an agent. You know, slim, good