Night Passage (A Jesse Stone Novel)

the back wall of the cell and turned and walked to the barred door again.
    “What kind of deal?”
    “Depends what I hear, and how good it is.”
    Jo Jo walked to the back wall and turned and leaned on it, looking at Jesse.
    “So I spill my guts to you and you don’t promise me nothing.”
    Jesse smiled.
    “Works for me,” he said.
    “No deal,” Jo Jo said.
    Jesse waited.
    “You can’t even get me for Tammy, no way you can prove it.”
    Jesse waited.
    “If I did know something, I’m not going to fink out without something better than you’re offering.”
    “You need a little time,” Jesse said, “run this thing over in your mind, think about how your life is going to go from now on. I’ll come back in a while and see you.”
    “I got to know what the deal is,” Jo Jo said.
    Jesse turned and left him there standing alone in the dim light at the back of his tiny cell, the tape recorder silently waiting on the floor by the folding chair outside the bars.

73
     
    When her husband came into the house Cissy Hathaway had already mixed the first of their two evening Manhattans. Hasty went as he always did to the living room and she brought the drinks in, as she always did, on a small silver tray someone had given them at their wedding. She put the tray down on the coffee table. She felt weak, as if she’d been ill, but steady enough, quiet inside now that the thing had got out. Hasty took his drink and sipped some without waiting for her. Then he took a Polaroid picture from his inside pocket and dropped it faceup on the coffee table.
    “Oh God,” she said.
    “I got this in the mail this morning.”
    She nodded.
    “Explain it to me, please.”
    Her husband’s voice was thin and very tight. His face was white, and there were vertical grooves in his cheeks. The hand holding the Manhattan was trembling slightly. She felt the weakness open beneath her and it was as if she would slump into it and disappear. She didn’t want her drink. It stood on the tray in front of her with the short thick glass beaded slightly and the amber light showing through it. She shook her head gently. She couldn’t go through it all again.
    “Explain.” Her husband finished his drink. “I need you to explain.”
    She stared at her hands folded in her lap. They looked foreign to her. Her knees looked remote and unconnected to her. Her living room, in the house where she had lived for most of her adult life, looked like a museum room. Not hers, not anyone’s. Why would someone make a chair like that? Why would someone sit in it?
    Her husband’s voice was so tight it seemed half strangled.
    “Now, I want to know now.”
    “Jo Jo,” she whispered.
    It was so soft he couldn’t hear her. He leaned forward.
    “What?”
    “Jo Jo. He sent the pictures. I told the police.”
    “What police?”
    “Jesse.”
    She was still whispering. He was still leaning forward. His face was bloodless and there was sweat on his upper lip.
    “Did he force you?” Hasty said.
    “No.”
    Her voice was barely audible.
    “Goddamn you,” Hasty said.
    “Jo Jo killed that girl, too,” she whispered. “I told Jesse.”
    Her husband didn’t say anything. He leaned farther forward until he was doubled over and clutched at himself and began to moan. Then he stood and walked to the wall and pounded on it with both fists and began to scream. Then he stopped pounding and stopped screaming and turned back toward her.
    “You … you don’t know …”
    He shook his head. He couldn’t find words. She was still, staring at the hands folded in her lap.
    “I’m sick,” she whispered. “You have to understand, Hasty. I’m sick.”
    “Goddamn you,” he said. “Goddamn you.”
    With the back of his hand her husband knocked a floor lamp over and when it was on the floor he kicked it. Then he turned and ran from the room. After a moment she heard the back door open and after another moment she heard the car start. She sat for a long time in the empty house before she got up finally and walked slowly to the kitchen and closed the back door that her husband had left open. Then she sat and rested her arms on the kitchen table and put her head down onto them, and cried.

74
     
    He had them assembled in Bob Merchant’s carriage house, where they had their weekly meetings; all the Horsemen, in fatigues, with weapons, sitting on folding chairs among the children’s bicycles, and the family garden tools: the wheelbarrow, power mower, snowblower,