Night Passage (A Jesse Stone Novel)

dish. The sense of her aloneness made him feel a little panicky, and he put the car in gear and drove away, finishing his sandwich on the move. As he drove he ran the ball of his thumb over his wedding ring, in a habitual gesture. But of course there was no wedding ring, only the small pale indentation on his third finger where the ring had been. He glanced at the indentation for a moment and brought his eyes back to the road. The sun was behind him now, the car chasing its own elongated shadow east. He wanted to make Tucumcari by dark … The play had been incomprehensible, he remembered. A lot of white makeup and black lipstick and shrieking. He took her up to a place on Gower called Pinot Hollywood that was open late and featured a martini bar. They drank martinis and ate calamari and talked. Or she talked. She chattered easily and without apparent pretense. He listened comfortably, glad not to talk too much, pleased when she asked him a question that he could answer easily, aware that though she talked a lot she was quite adroit at talking about him. After the bar closed he drove her to West Hollywood where she had an apartment on Cynthia Street above Santa Monica Boulevard. It was 2:30 in the morning and the street was still. At the door she asked if he’d like to come in. He said he would. The apartment was living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bath. It had been built into one corner of the building so that all the rooms were angular and odd shaped. The living room overlooked the street. The bedroom allowed a glimpse of the pool.
    “Would you like a drink, Jesse?”
    “Sure,” he said.
    She was wearing a little black dress with spaghetti straps and backless high-heeled shoes. She put her hands on her hips and smiled at him. Maybe a little theatrical, but she was an actress.
    “Let’s have it afterwards,” she said.
    Her bedroom was neat. The bed freshly made. She had probably planned, this afternoon, to ask him in. He watched her undress with the same feeling he used to have when, as a small boy, he unwrapped a present. She folded her dress neatly over the back of a chair and lined her shoes carefully together under it. She squirmed out of her underpants and dropped them into the clothes hamper in her closet. She wiped her lipstick off carefully and dropped the tissue in the wastebasket. They made love on top of the bedspread, and lay together afterward in the dim bedroom listening to the comforting white noise of the air conditioning.
    “You’re very fierce, Jesse.”
    “I don’t mean to be,” he said.
    “No, it’s fine. It’s exciting in fact. But you seem so, um, so still, on the outside and then, you know, wow.”
    “You’re pretty exciting,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t like to talk about his emotions.
    “I try to be,” she said.
    They lay quietly on their backs. His arm under her neck. Her head on his right shoulder.
    “I wouldn’t want to make you mad,” Jennifer said.
    “You won’t.”
    They lay quietly for a while longer, then she got up and put on a longish tee shirt and made them a drink. He felt like a fool sitting naked, but he didn’t want to be so formal as to get fully dressed. He settled for putting his pants on, and leaving his gun holstered on top of her dresser. They sat on stools at the tiny counter that separated her kitchen from her living room, and sipped white wine.
    “How’d you get to be a cop, Jesse?”
    “I was going to be a baseball player,” Jesse said. “Shortstop. Dodgers drafted me out of high school, sent me to Pueblo. I was doing okay and then one night a guy took me out on a double play at second base. I landed funny, tore up my shoulder, ended the career.”
    “Oh, how awful,” she said. “Does it bother you still?”
    “Not if I don’t have to throw a baseball.”
    “Couldn’t you have played where it didn’t matter?”
    “No. I hit okay for a shortstop, but I was going to make it on my glove.”
    “Glove?”
    “I was a much better fielder,” Jesse said, “than I was a hitter.”
    “And you couldn’t just field?”
    “No.”
    “How old were you?”
    “Nineteen,” Jesse said. “I came home, worked construction for six months, joined the Marines, got out, took the exam for fire department, police, and DWP. Cops came through first.”
    “Do you miss baseball?”
    “Every day,” Jesse said.
    “Isn’t it kind of depressing being a policeman?” she said. “You know, seeing all that