Night Passage (A Jesse Stone Novel)

it’s in the banking system nice and legitimate. Gino would write checks on the new accounts. No nasty CTRs pile up on some treasury agent’s desk in Washington.”
    “And you think Chief Carson got wind of this?”
    “My guess, yeah. And he wouldn’t go with it. Everybody knows it’s drug money. And I heard that Tom said he couldn’t let that slide.”
    “And?”
    “So they got him to resign, and set him up in a town out in Wyoming. Some Posse group out there fixed it. And after he was out there a while, they sent Lou out to blow him up. They wanted the local Posse guys to do it, but that didn’t work out.”
    “Why didn’t they just kill him right away?”
    “We talked about it. Decided it would draw too much attention to kill a police chief. Figured an ex-police chief out in the freakin’ boondocks someplace would go down easier. I think they thought the bomb would pulverize him and they’d never be able to get an I.D.”
    “Wyoming cops I.D.’d him,” Jesse said. “How about Tammy?”
    “Hasty was tapping her,” Jo Jo said. “She wanted him to leave his wife and marry her. You know Hasty. He thinks he’s a leading freakin’ citizen. Can’t have that. So he told me to dump her.”
    “Did he tell you to make it part of the pattern of the painted police car and the dead cat?”
    “No, my idea. I had it in for you ever since you suckered me, in front of my ex.”
    “I know. I knew you were pulling the ‘slut’ stuff and I knew why.”
    “But you couldn’t prove it. I thought it would be cool to do her in a way made you look bad.”
    “How about Lou Burke?” Jesse said.
    Jo Jo smiled.
    “Hasty wrote the damn suicide note. Didn’t trust me to.”
    “Why’d you kill him?”
    “Hasty said to. Said you were getting too close. Said Lou would talk eventually. So I got him to meet me up on Indian Hill. Told him it was Horsemen business. And I threw him over.”
    Jesse was silent for a moment. Jo Jo was finally getting a chance to brag. He was telling the stories almost eagerly, as if they were interesting things that he’d done on vacation.
    “I knew about Hasty and Tammy,” Jesse said. “It was in her diary.”
    Jo Jo shrugged.
    “And Lou’s suicide note was typewritten.”
    “Couldn’t handwrite it,” Jo Jo said. “Be too easy to see it wasn’t Burke’s writing.”
    “Except Lou didn’t have a typewriter,” Jesse said.
    “Coulda typed it here.”
    “Nope. We’re all computerized.”
    Jo Jo made a disgusted sound.
    “Freakin’ Hasty is so stupid, you know. He thinks he’s Napoleon or something with his freakin’ Horsemen.”
    “So how come you sent the picture of Cissy to her minister?” Jesse said.
    Jo Jo smiled broadly. “Sent it to a lot of people,” he said. “Sent one to Hasty too.”
    “I’ll bet he was pleased,” Jesse said. “You take it?”
    “Yeah. Her idea. She liked being tied up. Spanked. Weird broad—big time. Had a lot of poon tang with that broad, and you know how most broads are—all the time moaning about love—she wasn’t like that, she liked the sex, but she was always like mad while we was doing it. She liked to pretend I was forcing her, you know? Grim.”
    Jesse nodded.
    “She was banging one of your cops too, you know.”
    “Probably pretended he was rescuing her,” Jesse said. “How come you decided to go public?”
    “With the pictures? I was, ah, brokering an arms deal for Hasty. Gino was supposed to get him some heavy weapons—you know Gino?”
    Jesse shook his head.
    “Major dude in Boston,” Jo Jo said. “Queer as a square donut, but really wired.”
    “And you know him through the money laundering,” Jesse said. He was stroking Jo Jo’s ego.
    “Yeah, I know Gino. Hasty’s a big deal in town here maybe, but on the street, he’s nowhere. He had problems, he always had to come to me.”
    “So he asked you to get him heavy weapons?”
    “Yeah. Machine guns, mortars, some kind of anti-aircraft missiles. I’m telling you, he thinks he’s going to take over the town and, you know, defy the freaking government.”
    Jo Jo laughed. Jesse laughed along with him. Couple of good old boys, Jesse thought, chewing the fat in the back room.
    “So I set him up with Gino and Hasty gets high and mighty with him when they have a meeting and when the time comes for the guns, they take his money and stiff him.”
    “No guns,” Jesse said.
    “None, and he blames me. Freaking twerp. Says it’s my fault. Says I better get