Night Passage (A Jesse Stone Novel)

what we must. Our forefathers eliminated the British agents of repression at Lexington and Concord. We’ve done this exercise often enough. We know how. Each of you should report to his squad leader now. First squad will disable telephone service from the town hall. Second squad will see to the electricity. Third and fourth squad will deploy to the town hall and establish a perimeter.”
    The silence in the room was jagged with excitement. What had been a kind of war game had suddenly become real and the men felt frightened and heroic.
    “It is our moment,” Hasty said softly. “Paradise will be ours. Quietly, without fanfare, and without opposition, we can establish a free white Christian community. And bit by bit, community by community, with ever-growing force as our communities proliferate and begin to connect, we will return this nation to its place of freedom and individual rights which our ancestors dreamed of when they threw off the British yoke.”
    Lying on her stomach behind a folded canvas pool cover in the loft of the carriage house, Michelle Merchant listened intently. Her father and her brother were both Horsemen. She thought that all the rah-rah crap that Mr. Hathaway was spouting was really bogus, but she kind of liked the movement because it was antiestablishment the way she was. And when her father got on her case she could say that she was just rebelling the way he did. Her father didn’t like her knowing anything about the Horsemen, which was why she liked to hide in the loft during meetings and listen in. It gave her ammunition when he would yell at her. Her mother didn’t care. Michelle suspected that her mother liked it when Michelle got her father back, like her mother wanted to, but was too wussy.
    Below her the men had broken up into four groups. They checked their watches. Then two of the groups went out first. The other men waited. The tension was so strong that it even reached the loft and filtered through Michelle’s nearly impenetrable scorn. She could feel her heartbeat quicken. The men kept checking their watches and, after what seemed to Michelle a long time, the last two groups went out and the room was empty.
    Michelle could feel her breath coming a little faster. Were they actually going to attack the town hall and kill Jesse? Did they actually believe that crap about starting a free town, whatever that meant? That was total crap. Even if they killed Jesse and got Jo Jo Genest out of jail, pretty soon other cops would know and they’d come and put all the dumb Horsemen in jail. Anybody knew that, for crissake. She smiled for a moment at seeing her father and jerkface brother hauled off to jail. She could go visit them, like in the movies, and talk to them through the bars. Cool. She was dying for a cigarette. The barn was empty. She sat up and lit a cigarette and took in a big lungful of smoke. Her old lady would poop her pants, Michelle thought. She smiled in the dark loft and smoked some more. The only thing that bothered her was Jesse Stone. He was the only adult she’d ever met who hadn’t given her a load of bullshit when he talked to her. She kind of didn’t like him getting killed. She didn’t want to spoil this thing. It was kind of exciting. And she wanted to see what her old lady would do when Dad got arrested. What kind of lecture would they give Michelle then, she wondered. She kind of liked Jesse, though. She finished her cigarette and lit another one. With the tiny red glow of the freshly lit Camel Light bobbing from the corner of her mouth, she slid out the hay loft door and climbed down the back ladder and set off across her backyard.

75
     
    “I don’t know exactly what it was Tom Carson did,” Jo Jo said. “Maybe found out about Hasty laundering cash for Gino.”
    “You were the go-between?” Jesse said.
    “Yeah. I set it up.”
    It was late, and Jesse was tired. He and Jo Jo were on their respective sides of the barred door to Jo Jo’s cell. Jesse had a tape recorder. There was a single overhead light in the cell corridor with no shade.
    “Hasty’d get a couple percent of what he laundered, and I guess he was using that money to finance the Horsemen.”
    “How did he launder it?”
    “Just didn’t fill out the cash deposit forms, I guess,” Jo Jo said. “It was his freakin’ bank, you know? Then he’d deduct his two percent, put it in the Horsemen’s account, and wire-transfer the rest to checking accounts in other banks. Now