Robert B. Parker's Debt to Pay (8 page)

H
ealy stood up from his chair and poured himself double the amount of whiskey Jesse had already poured in his cup.

“How much more than a month?”

“Five weeks total,” Jesse said.

“You know what you're asking me to do?”

“I know.”

Healy took half the whiskey in a single swallow and made a face. “Why five weeks? Why not three or six or three months?”

Molly answered for her boss. “Because of Jenn's wedding.”

Healy tilted his head at Jesse like a confused puppy. “Your ex?”

“Jenn's getting married to a rich real-estate guy in Dallas in five weeks. And as a run-up to the wedding, they're having a week's worth of events. That's when he'll try to kill her,” Jesse said.

Healy shook his head. “And what, you're going to be Captain America and stop him?”

“Hopefully, I'll have Diana with me and I'll alert the people who need to know.”

“That's big of you, Jesse. You're a good cop, maybe the best cop I ever met, but this sounds crazy. First off, I need more than the
bullets to prove we're talking about the same guy who did the Salem vics and the vandalism here. And you've got to do better than your word to prove that Fish didn't kill his boy toy and then himself of his own accord. And even then, even if you convince me you're right, you're putting me in a bad spot.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Give me something, Jesse. Make the case.”

“Right now we know his target. We know approximately when and where he's going to strike, but if we blow the whistle and let him know we're onto him, we give up any edge we've got. He may come after me through Molly or through Diana. Maybe Sunny Randall or even you, Healy. And I can tell you right now, he's coming after Suit one way or the other. Suit may have been the one to shoot him, but he blames me for going back on my word. This is all payback for what went down during the thing with Vic Prado. That's why Gino Fish is dead. It was Fish who put me in touch with Mr. Peepers. Fish warned me that if things went sideways, Peepers would come after us both. And you know his rep. He even scares Vinnie Morris, and no one scares him. Peepers enjoys his work. Fish killed himself to save himself.”

Healy drank the rest of his Dew. “Okay, so let's say you prove all this to my satisfaction. Why not go wide with it? Put every law enforcement agency on earth onto this guy? We'll have everybody from the top folks at Interpol to the lowliest square badge at ShopMart on the hunt for Peepers.”

Jesse shook his head. “C'mon, Healy, you know why.”

“He'll go to ground,” Suit said in an uncharacteristic monotone. “And he'll come after us another way and when he feels like it.”

Molly took up where Suit left off. “Look, Captain, this man waited over a year to make his move after sending that photo to Jesse
to let him know he was coming. He likes torturing people physically and psychologically. If we drive him into hiding now, we may never get a chance at him again.”

“She's right,” Jesse said. “We won't see him coming next time. Besides, according to the research I've done, law enforcement has cast a wide net for him for two decades and they've never gotten close. Suit and I came as close as anyone's ever come and that was mostly luck. Suit winged him and was nearly killed himself. We have an idea of what he looks like, which is added incentive for him to kill us. Right now, he wants to hurt me first by getting Jenn. He wants maximum effect, but if we screw up his plans, who knows what he'll do? Who knows how he'll react?”

Healy pounded his fist on Jesse's desk, “Damn it, Stone! Fuck!”

“I know I'm asking a lot.”

“I'll put a rush on the ballistics comparison,” Healy said, putting the two evidence bags in his pants pocket. “If the slugs match, you've got two days to make the case to me that what you said about Peepers and Gino Fish is fact. Then, and only then, I'll put in my papers and take all my vacation time. That will give you what you've asked for. It'll make my wife and my damned golf instructor happy. But Christ help you if something goes wrong or if somebody else is killed. We're friends, Jesse. I don't suppose I've gotten as close to another cop since my first partner. No shame in admitting it to you, but like I say, Christ help you.” He walked to the office door and about-faced. “I'll call you as soon as I get the ballistics. Then you've got forty hours. Not a second more.”

“Understood.”

Healy slammed the door shut.

Molly, Suit, and Jesse stared at one another in silence for the longest moments of their lives.

T
he world was back on his schedule.

He had just put in his application at Big Dee Caterers and had no doubt he would be getting the call to come in for his orientation any day now. He was best at killing, but he had other skills, too. Lying, for instance. He was a good liar. He knew how to fill out a job application so that he would look good for a job without looking too good for it. You never want to be perfect. You want to be just good enough. It was harder for some jobs than others. For a catering job, you basically needed to have a pulse and the ability to lift a heavy tray. He'd passed that test easily enough in spite of his now balky arm and shoulder, though the hard-faced woman who'd put him through his paces had been skeptical. He knew she would be. They always were, women especially. Perhaps that was why he enjoyed hurting them the way he did.

He turned his attention away from that preoccupation to the barbecue on the brown-papered metal tray before him. He pinched off a bark-covered chunk of beef rib. As advertised, it fairly melted in his mouth. After that, he sliced off a piece of hot link. The unexpected smokiness of it was almost as welcome as the taste of the meat
itself. He washed that down with a too-dainty sip of his Shiner Bock and then went for a forkful of coleslaw.

He had been in Texas before, had killed in Texas before. A drug dealer's mistress in El Paso—
El Asshole,
he thought and laughed to himself—had to be dealt with because the dealer was getting paranoid about her going to the DEA. He had enjoyed that aspect of his visit, leaving parts of his victim out in the scrub for the coyotes after he was done with her. The food sucked. Everything but the killing sucked. Then there was the time in Houston he'd been hired to make an heir to an oil fortune look like he'd committed suicide by taking a dive out the window of his hotel suite. The food was an improvement. The work was not.

He had two other places at which to put in applications, but he was enjoying his food far too much to rush back out into the midday heat and baking sun. Dallas was like an inferno. He'd heard someone at the train station call it a dry heat.
Yeah, so is sticking your head in an oven.
People were such morons. He smiled his smile. His smug, superior smile. The one dripping with self-congratulation and contempt and loathing for everyone else. He liked the way that smile felt on his unremarkable face and the way it made him feel inside.

He was luxuriating in the taste of his food, the pleasing cold tang of his beer, and the feel of his smile when an impatient-looking blonde pulled out the chair across from him at the two-top table. She was pretty enough, he guessed, if you liked your blue-eyed women in gray business suits and white silk blouses, with too much makeup and too much hair spray.

“Do you mind?” she asked without a hint of sincerity in her voice, and sat without bothering to wait for his answer. “The place is so damn crowded today and I've got to get back to the office in fifteen minutes.”

Of course he minded. He minded everything about her, from her looks to her manner. He minded her presence. The smile disappeared from his face. He knew her, all right. Or, rather, he knew her type. The pretty girls who took one look at him and thought he'd get excited just to have a woman like her sit in close proximity. She probably thought he'd ask her permission to take a selfie with her.

He grunted at her, not wanting to draw attention to himself. He had to keep his focus on his reason for being in Dallas in the first place: that other blonde. But when she pushed her tray into his and his tray knocked the remainder of his Shiner Bock onto his lap, it was difficult to just grunt and ignore it.

“Damn it!” He jumped out of his seat, pressing a wad of paper towel onto the spreading wet spot covering his crotch.

“Oh, I'm so sorry,” she said with that same lack of sincerity. She almost sounded annoyed at him.

“Look what you did.”

Then she got indignant. “I said I was sorry, didn't I?”

He opened his mouth to say something threatening, but realized that about half the restaurant was now turned his way. Many of the women were pointing at his wet pants, giggling, covering their mouths. Men shook their heads at him.
Poor ugly little fella.

“Never mind,” he said to the blonde. “That's all right. It'll dry off outside in a few minutes.”

But instead of smiling at him or nodding her pretty head or apologizing again, she pulled out her cell phone and began tapping away.

He picked up his beer bottle, placed it on the tray, threw the wad of paper towels onto the wet floor, and took his tray over to the garbage. He turned back to look at her, but she had already forgotten he existed. She had probably forgotten the second she laid eyes on him.

He stepped through the doors of the barbecue joint and back
onto the furnacelike streets of Deep Ellum. Walking back to his stolen Civic, he tried desperately to forget the blonde and the quickly drying spot on the front of his pants. He couldn't forget, though. He just couldn't. So when he got into the sweltering Honda, he drove over to the barbecue restaurant and parked where he could see the entrance. He parked and he waited. He would make her remember him. He would make it so that he was the only thing she would remember. Him and the pain.

J
esse had driven down to Boston and arranged to take Diana to a hot new Malaysian restaurant in the Back Bay, a restaurant she had mentioned wanting to try after reading a review in the Sunday paper.
Hot
,
new
, and
Malaysian
were not adjectives usually associated with Jesse's idea of great food. These days his tastes ran more to donuts and sandwiches from Daisy's, but he had to ask some things of Diana that were going to be hard for her to swallow. He hoped that if the food pleased her, it might make his requests easier to digest.

Diana, dressed in a simple white summer dress and heels, met him downstairs and hopped into his old Explorer. She was already suspicious of this hastily arranged date and when she saw Jesse was wearing a freshly ironed button-down shirt, his blue blazer, and gray dress pants, her suspicions grew stronger. But it wasn't until she noticed his shined shoes that she knew something was definitely up. When it occurred to her what that something might be, Diana Evans got slightly nauseated and asked Jesse to crank the AC. Looking out of the corner of her eye, she searched for a ring box–shaped
bulge in his jacket pocket. Just because she couldn't see one didn't mean he might not have the ring somewhere else on his person.

He turned to stare at her. “You okay?”

She lied. “Fine.”

“You look beautiful and smell even better.”

She smiled her neon-white smile at him. She knew she was pleasing to look at. She always found false modesty nonsensical, but that didn't mean she wasn't conflicted about her beauty. Being taken seriously had been a struggle for her since she turned thirteen. It was never worse than at the Bureau. Still, when Jesse complimented her appearance, it was different somehow. Maybe because she knew he loved her or because he had consulted with her on cases. Maybe it was because he had forgiven her for the lies she'd told him when they first met. No man she'd ever encountered had taken her as seriously as Jesse Stone did. Even so, she dreaded the idea of him popping the question. She loved him something awful, but she wasn't sure marriage to Jesse or any man was for her. Monogamy suited her. Marriage was a different animal altogether. And even if she could bring herself to get married, she didn't want to put down roots in a place like Paradise. Pretty as it was, she just couldn't picture herself locked into small-town life.

Jesse could see Diana was squirming a bit in her seat and that this whole last-minute deal was making her curious and uncomfortable. He laughed at himself for trying to go about things this way. The grand gesture had never been his style, but he supposed it was a measure of his love for her that he was willing to try things this way. Either that or a measure of his concern. As he had suspected, the bullets matched. Healy had called to confirm that the .22s dug out of the rear tires of the cars in Paradise were twins to those removed
from the bodies in Salem. Now he had to prove that the shooter was Mr. Peepers. For that he would need Diana's help.

“You still pals with Abe Rosen at the Bureau?” he asked.

“That's a weird question.”

“But are you?”

“Sure,” she said, wondering where Jesse was headed with this.

“You think he would do you a favor?”

“Depends on the favor. Last time he did one for me, he put his own neck in a noose to cover for me. If things had gone a little bit differently, he would have been shown the door and not quietly, the way I was asked to leave.”

“He was in love with you. He probably still is.”

“Jesse!”

“I don't blame him. You're pretty easy to love,” Jesse said, a slight smile at the corners of his mouth. “And Abe came out of it all right.”

“All right, but not unscathed. So what's the favor I'm asking him?”

Jesse reached into his jacket pocket and handed her a slip of paper. “I need all the street surveillance footage, Federal and BPD, for those streets on the day Gino Fish killed himself.”

She squinted, pursed her lips, and tilted her head at him. “Can't you just ask your contacts at the Boston PD?”

He shook his head. “I can't let them know I'm looking at it this closely.”

“Why not?”

“Long story.”

She pointed at the car in front of them. “We've moved twenty feet in five minutes, so we've got plenty of time.” But now Diana was gesturing to her right. “Holy crap! Did you see that? That asshole just knocked the woman over and stole her bag.”

Before Jesse could answer or move, Diana was out of the car. She
shed her heels and took off down the street after the man. Jesse pulled his Explorer to the curb, dialed 911, and went to see how the woman knocked to the ground was doing. When he saw that she was just stunned and that other people were tending to her, Jesse took off after Diana and the mugger. He was about twenty yards behind them when Diana leapt forward, tackling the mugger. They went down hard, the mugger face-first into the sidewalk. His nose broke; the sidewalk didn't. There was blood everywhere, some of it on the front of Diana's dress. But by the time Jesse got there, Diana had the perp in an armbar and was threatening to rip the guy's lungs out if he tried to run.

“Too bad I already hired Alisha,” Jesse said to Diana as he slapped handcuffs on the mugger. “That was pretty amazing.”

Diana caught her breath and asked, “This surprises you?”

“I guess it shouldn't.”

“Don't ever underestimate me, Stone, or I'll do to you what I just did to this clown.”

“I don't doubt it. Your dress is ruined.”

She shrugged. “I guess I can't show up at a restaurant looking like this. After the cops come, let's go back to my apartment. I want to clean up.”

An hour later, Diana freshly showered, her scrapes washed and treated, a scotch in her hand, she asked Jesse to finish the explanation that had been so rudely interrupted.

“What's up? Why the sudden date? Why do you need Abe to get this surveillance video? What the hell is going on?”

When Jesse explained about the bodies in Salem, the .22 bullets in the tires of the cars in Paradise, and about Mr. Peepers, it got very quiet in Diana's apartment. Diana suddenly didn't feel much like eating, whether it was Malaysian food or at Burger King. Instead she guzzled her drink and poured herself another.

“I have another favor to ask,” he said.

Before Jesse could get the question out of his mouth, Diana thought she heard herself say yes.

“But you don't know what I'm asking.”

“I do, though. You're going to ask me if I'd go to Jenn's wedding with you.”

He smiled at her. Diana continued to surprise him at every turn: first the mugger and now this. What Jesse couldn't have known was how conflicted Diana felt. She felt an immense sense of relief that there would be no kneeling, no ring box, and no proposal of marriage. She also felt equally hurt and disappointed. She wasn't sure Jesse would understand it if she were to explain it to him. Never mind him. She wasn't sure she understood it.