Robert B. Parker's Debt to Pay (3 page)

J
esse skipped the customary postgame team trip to the Gull. Part of it was that he didn't want to be in a crowd of drinkers. He had never been a celebratory kind of drinker, anyway. For Jesse, imbibing was kind of like a boxer's roadwork: something to do every day whether he felt like it or not. It was part of him. Ritual. In this instance, Jesse's decision was less about the drinking than his recent distraction. That little squib he hit toward the pitcher's mound was bothering the hell out of him.

Jesse was a quietly confident man by nature, not a vain one. Though, like everyone else, he had his small vanities, and baseball was one. Playing ball, no matter that it was in a slow-pitch softball league, kept him connected to his glory days. Even at his age, he was by far the best player around. Reality had long ago forced him to accept that the shoulder injury he had suffered in Pueblo had finished his dreams of a major-league career, but his love of the game and the what-ifs stayed with him. Secretly he worried that whatever skills he still possessed might finally be fading. Now, pulling his old Explorer up to the station house, Jesse thought that fading skills might have been easier to deal with if he was still on friendly terms
with Johnnie Walker. He didn't share that thought with Diana, sitting there right next to him.

“I'll be back in a few minutes,” he said.

Molly was at the front desk. When she saw Jesse, she gave him a puzzled look.

“What are you doing here?”

Jesse pointed at his office door. “See, Crane, it says the words
Chief's Office
on the glass? Every now and then I like to pretend that means something.”

She made a face. “But I heard you guys beat the fire department.” She pumped her fist. “I bet Robbie Wilson is somewhere drowning his sorrows right about now.”

In every city and town, large or small, there was a natural rivalry between the police department and the fire department. Usually it's as friendly a rivalry as that between lions and hyenas. And it was even less friendly in Paradise. Molly, in particular, despised Robbie Wilson.

Molly smiled. “And I heard you drove in the winning run. Sweet.”

Those words stung Jesse more than Molly could know. “Uh-huh.” He changed the subject. “Anything going on?”

He expected no for an answer. As to the general lack of crime, Jesse chalked that up to good fortune and an uptick in the economy. Manpower was also a factor. After several months on patrol, Molly was back in her old spot, working the desk. Suit had fully recovered from his gunshot wounds and had taken Molly's place on patrol. Gabe Weathers had finally returned after his long, painful rehab. And, most surprising of all, the town had let him take on a new officer.

“Yeah,” Molly said. “We had some more vandalism along Scrimshaw.”

“Tires again?”

Molly nodded. “Two cars parked a block apart.”

“Anyone see anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Who's over there?”

“Alisha.”

“The new kid,” Jesse said. “What do you think of her?”

“Hey, if you think I'm going to bad-mouth another female officer—”

He cut her off. “Come on, Molly.”

“She's very good, Jesse. I hate to say it, but you've got the knack for spotting people cut out for this work.”

“Thanks. Okay, I'm heading home. I'll be in early. Who's on the desk in the morning?”

“Alisha. I'm doing what you said, scheduling her so she learns the whole job.”

He nodded his approval, then turned with a wave good night. As he headed out to the Explorer, he didn't like the feeling in his gut. Something about the vandalism was bothering him, something like the sight of those clouds at the softball field. Just as he reached his SUV, the sky opened up.

F
ull control of her body still eluded Diana Evans, not that she was so anxious to have it back. The intensity and frequency of these tremors and aftershocks were one of the perks of loving Jesse Stone. She had always enjoyed sex. But it had been this way with Jesse ever since that first drunken encounter in New York. Now that she was with him, she had trouble believing she had been willing to risk losing him. For the moment, though, she was content to feel his strong arms around her, to feel his body pressed to her back, and to listen to the crackle of far-off thunder. Rain pelted the windows as her muscles began to finally relax. She watched the wind make the tree shadows dance against the bedroom walls.

When she felt Jesse stir, she said, “Could you get me a drink?”

“Sure.”

He rolled out of bed and headed downstairs to the bar. There was no protest about how he wasn't drinking anymore. No complaints about how her drinking made it harder on him. That was one of the other things she loved about Jesse, his oneness. Molly called it his self-containment. But whatever you called it, Diana realized that some women would have been put off or intimidated by it. Not her.
She wasn't looking for a man to complete her. She'd been looking for a complete man and she'd found him. And Jesse seemed as content with her as she was with him, seemed to love in her the same things she loved in him. Yet as she lay there in the dark, the room full of the raw scent of sex, of their sweat and her crushed herbs and cut-grass perfume, she worried about losing him. Losing him not to another woman, but to the memory of another woman. She wasn't afraid about competing with a real woman, but it's impossible to compete with a memory.

When Jesse walked back through the bedroom doorway, the ice rattling around in the glass, she sat up in bed. She shook out her hair, gathered it in her hand, and tossed it over one shoulder. He handed her the scotch.

“Don't lick your fingers,” she said, a smile in her voice.

“No worries.”

Diana took a sip, sighed. “Jesse . . . I . . .” Her voice faded into the noise of the rain.

She had tried to have this conversation with him a couple of times since the invitation had arrived a few weeks back, but whenever she tried to put words to her fears, she felt a fool. She had tried waiting Jesse out, hoping he would bring it up to her. That wasn't going to happen. If there was a negative to Jesse's oneness, it was his silence. He was a man who kept his cards close to his vest, a man who liked to work things out for himself. Still, Diana was a trained investigator and, in her own way, as competent as Jesse. She couldn't help but notice that Jesse had been different since he'd gotten the invitation to Jenn's wedding.

She'd never been married, so she could only imagine what Jesse was going through. It wasn't like Diana hadn't gotten offers. She'd
been tempted by some of them. She'd been in love before, just not like this. At the Bureau she had struggled so hard to get ahead, to be noticed for something other than her looks. In the end she had thrown it all away, but not unhappily.

“Come on, Evans,” Jesse said. “You want to say something. Say it.”

“Jenn.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Uh-huh! What's that even mean?”

“Okay,” he said. “What about Jenn?”

“Don't play dumb with me, Chief Stone. Ever since you got the invitation, you've been different.”

He didn't answer right away because he didn't want to sound defensive and because she was right. He'd spoken to Diana about Jenn, but superficially. He never enjoyed being around people who went on about their exes. He certainly tried not to do it. And in spite of all the hard work he'd done with Dix on his relationship with Jenn, he was also unsure of how to explain the tangled, dysfunctional two-step they had done for so many years. He still wasn't completely sure he understood it himself.

“It's complicated.”

She laughed. “No kidding. But you're going to have to do better than that.”

“Not tonight,” he said, cupping his hand behind her head and pulling her mouth to his.

But she pushed back. “The scotch,” she said. “Don't.”

He knew she was right. She guzzled her drink.

“Listen, Jesse, I'm going to use the facilities and brush my teeth. We don't have to talk about Jenn tonight, but you do have to talk to her and answer the invitation for my sake, if not for yours.”

“How's that?”

“There's only room for two in my bed, Jesse: me and you. No room for memories and ghosts.”

She put the empty glass on the nightstand and stepped out of bed.

S
uit used the key Elena had given him. Elena, he thought, laughing to himself that he still sometimes caught himself thinking of her as Miss Wheatley. Miss Wheatley was pretty much all the eighteen-year-old senior and football star Luther Simpson could think about. She was certainly who he dreamed about. As an adult, he'd always had a weakness for older women—sometimes married, sometimes not. Stepping into the vestibule, he couldn't help but wonder if his high school crush on Elena had started him along that path. Not that there had been a huge age difference between them. She was a twenty-one-year-old student teacher in Suit's English class when they met.

Suit remembered the first day he saw her. She was pretty in a way he had never experienced before, her hair so black it almost shone purple in the sunlight spilling into the classroom through the high arched wood-framed windows at the old high school. She was what his mom used to call petite. He never knew exactly what that word meant until he'd laid eyes on her. Before that day, he'd thought it just meant small, but she wasn't just small. She was so delicate and her features were so fine that for the first time in his life he felt
embarrassed by his hulking size. He didn't understand his embarrassment then, and he wasn't sure he did now. What he did understand was that he had fallen deeply, stupidly in love with her and that he was never going to be able to express the way he felt or have his feelings returned.

“Luther?” Elena asked, calling down again from the second floor of the house she'd inherited from her mom. “Did you guys win?”

“I scored the winning run.”

She came downstairs dressed in a faded black tee and white satiny panties, the cranky old steps barely complaining under her weight. Although there were gray threads in Elena's hair now, they didn't register for Suit. Every time he saw her it was that first day all over again. Standing on the bottom step, she leaned over the rail and kissed him.

“I was kind of hoping you'd come straight from the bar and we'd shower together.”

He smiled at her and at his good fortune. One night, three months earlier, Suit had been driving by the house on patrol and noticed the front door open. The house was dark, but he saw the telltale beam of a flashlight cutting through the living room. When he got out to investigate he found Elena Wheatley, sitting on the sofa, in tears. When Suit saw who it was, he couldn't believe it.

“Miss Wheatley?” he said, feeling like the lovesick high school senior he had been all those years ago.

“Luther Simpson! Is that really you?”

“Why is your front door open?”

“The electricity went out and it got really hot in here.”

Ten minutes later, after Suit had found the electrical box and flipped the circuit breakers, they were seated at the kitchen table, sharing coffee. Elena was explaining how her mom had died a few
months back and that she'd come home to sort through her mom's things.

“Then there's the house,” she said. “It's mine, but I don't know what to do with it.”

That was when Suit uttered the words he couldn't quite believe he had it in him to say. “There's at least one person in Paradise who wishes you would stay.”

“Two,” she said. “I find that now that I'm here, Boston seems like a lonely and faraway place.”

Maybe it was that only several months before he had been close to death, or that he was tired of the life he had carved out for himself. Whatever it was, something made Suit say what had been in his heart to say for two decades.

“I was in love with you, Miss Wheatley.”

“Elena. Call me Elena, Luther.”

“Elena.” He repeated her name, his face turning red with the realization of what he'd just confessed. “Call me Suit. Everybody does these days.”

“Everybody but me,” she said. “I'm hurt, you know?”

“I knew I shouldn't have said what I said about—”

“No, no, Luther, please, don't be embarrassed,” she said, placing her right hand on his cheek. “It's just that you said you were in love with me. I have a confession to make to you. I used to wait for you to come into class. I used to look forward to seeing you. Whenever you were sick or you cut class, I missed you. I couldn't have said anything to you then, but now we're both adults.”

He took her tiny hand off his cheek and kissed her palm. When he stood, he kissed her on the mouth. He remembered very little else of what happened during the remainder of his shift. What he did remember was that he had never been happier.

D
iana was dead asleep. Jesse had showered, shaved, and crept quietly downstairs. He was dressed in a pair of raggedy athletic shorts and an old LAPD T-shirt so worn and faded that it was in danger of disintegrating into a memory at any second. The den was mostly dark and he spent a fair amount of time—more than he should have—staring at the bar. He poured himself a club soda, got a lime wedge out of the fridge, and squeezed it into the glass.

He walked back into the den, raised his glass to the poster of Ozzie Smith, and drank. Twisted up his lips. He liked soda and lime well enough, just not as much as good scotch or second-rate scotch or wine or beer.

“So, Wiz, what do you think about my swinging bunt today?” Jesse asked the man in the poster.

Suspended in time and captured by the photographer in midair as he leapt to make a play, Ozzie kept his answer to himself.

“When did you know it was over, Oz? When did you know you were losing it?”

Same answer.

Resigned to Ozzie's silence, Jesse shook his head and said, “At least you're consistent.”

He checked the time.
Ten-thirty-five. Nine-thirty-five in Dallas.
Jenn would probably still be up. Pacing, cell phone clutched in his hand, he knew Diana was right. He had to talk to Jenn before he answered her wedding invitation. He wanted to get some sense of her. Did she actually want him there? Was she playing with him? It wouldn't be the first time. Was this a last desperate attempt to get him to reconcile? Truth be told, he wasn't sure he wanted to know any of these answers. Although he had moved on and was in love, far more in love with Diana than he had ever really been with Jenn, there was a gnawing stubborn part of him that didn't want to let go. And what that piece of Jesse was shouting at him was “Jenn is mine. She always was and always will be.”

He guessed he dreaded the notion that Jenn's little voice wasn't shouting the same thing to her about Jesse as Jesse's voice was screaming to him about her. He didn't know why it was so important to him, but it was. And if there was one thing in this world Jesse Stone wasn't, it was a liar. Did he tell lies? In the name of right or justice, definitely, but never to fool himself.

Good thing there was another voice in Jesse's head: Dix's voice. And though it spoke to him more calmly, it was equally insistent. “Therapy changes you, but the old you never disappears. You still carry all that old baggage—the bad patterns and self-destructive attachments—with you until the day you die. The difference is you keep it separate. You know it's there as a reminder of what not to do. How not to react.”

He dialed the 214 number. It was answered on the second ring.

“Hell, if it isn't Jesse Stone. Not the way I thought we'd meet,” a
man said. He had a booming friendly voice. Then, “Hold on a second. Hey, Jenn, hon, it's Jesse on the phone. Gimme a second, then come and get it. Hey, Jesse, Hale Hunsicker here.”

“Nice to meet you, Hale,” Jesse said, trying to match the friendliness in his counterpart's voice. He was doomed to fail, because boisterousness and glad-handing weren't in his DNA.

“I hope you're gonna grace us all with your presence at the wedding, Jesse. It'll break Jenn's heart if you're not there. I don't mind telling you, your opinion still means an awful lot to our girl.”

Our girl!
This was getting strange and uncomfortable. This wasn't a phrase he had expected to hear when he called.

“That's exactly what I wanted to talk to Jenn about, Hale.”

“Good man. Good man. Well, here she is. Like I said, nice meeting you. Come down a few days early and we'll do some shooting and riding together. You be well.”

“Jesse . . . Jesse,” Jenn said, her voice several decibels lower than Hale's and much more tentative. It sounded like maybe she had dreaded receiving this call as much as Jesse dreaded having to make it. “Is everything all right? It's an hour later there.”

“Fine, and yes, it's around ten-forty.”

“Are you sure you're all—”

“Hale sounds like a good man,” he said, cutting her off.

Jesse had learned not to fall into the well of Jenn's neurosis and manipulations. He wasn't in the mood for her drama because, if he let the pattern play out, her drama would somehow become his, too. They needed to talk about the wedding, but that was it. Although in reality Dix rarely gave Jesse an “attaboy,” he pictured his therapist standing in the corner, applauding.

“Jenn, I'm not coming. I'm sorry. I needed to tell you and not just mail you the RSVP.”

Before the words came out of his mouth, he wasn't sure what his answer would be. But as soon as he heard the neediness in Jenn's voice, all sorts of alarms went off in his head. No, he had to move on once and for all. If he had any real hope with Diana, he had to leave Jenn in his rearview and then break the mirror. But if Jenn were the type to give up easily and let go, they wouldn't be having this conversation.

“Why not? Is it Hale? You don't have to worry about him. He's like you, Jesse. He's his own man. He's not intimidated by our past.”

“It's not Hale, Jenn. He sounds like a good guy.”

“He's a wonderful man. I want you to meet him.”

“I will someday.”

“Why not at the wedding?” she said.

“Because your ex-husband doesn't belong at your second wedding, and things in Paradise . . . well, you know how things come up.”

“It's her, isn't it? It's Diana. She doesn't want you to come.”

That wasn't it at all. In fact, Jesse had hoped Diana would make this easy for him by saying just that, by expressing her desire for him not to go. But Diana treated Jesse as he deserved to be treated, as a man to be trusted, a man who knew his own mind, a man to make his own decisions.

Jenn didn't let him answer. “Bring her along, Jesse. It was stupid of me not to have invited you with a guest. That was just me being me. Please don't hold that against me, not now. Not when I'm on the verge of being happy for the first time in a long time.”

There it was, Jenn trying to make Jesse responsible for her happiness. If he'd had any doubts at all about not going, he didn't have them any longer.

“Sorry, Jenn. I can't. And just so you know, my decision has nothing to do with Diana.”

“Then who?”

“Me and you, Jenn. Same as always. I wish you all the best. Hale does really seem like a good guy.”

Then he was off the phone. He was feeling a lot of things, but not the one thing he wanted to feel: relief. He looked up at Ozzie Smith and said, “Yeah, Oz, I know. What did I expect?”