Роберт Паркер - The Bitterest Pill

Westerns were usually the movies Jesse loved, but he got the reference. He had seen Casablanca . Can’t be a cop in Hollywood and not pick up on movie history, no matter how hard you might try to avoid it.

“The end of a beautiful friendship,” he said.

She bowed her head. “Maybe not the end, but at least a temporary halt to things.”

“Why am I here, Marygl — wait, that’s not your name, is it?”

She smiled. It was a sad smile. “No fooling you, Chief Jesse Stone.” She held her right hand out to him. “Esther. I can’t tell you my last name. Sorry. I’m sorry for the lies.”

He took her hand and could not deny feeling the jolt of attraction. That hadn’t simply evaporated. “Nice to meet you, Esther. Very Old Testament.”

“It was meant to be. Obviously, almost nothing you know about me is true. Well, I have always loved art. Art is the only way I manage to hold on to who I was.”

“Anything else?”

She leaned forward, kissing him hard on the mouth. “That is true. I am more than a little in love with you, I think. I don’t even understand it.” She pulled back and studied his face in the strobe light. “I think you may feel the same.”

Jesse said nothing, but smiled.

“I do very dangerous work, Jesse,” she said. “I did dangerous work. Important work, and there are some people looking for me.”

“Bad people.”

“The worst kind of people and the most dangerous kind. People with revenge on their minds and people with nothing to lose. People who would kill themselves and everyone in Paradise if it meant getting to me.”

“A new name a new place for you?”

“There’s a file on the plane and someone to teach me about who I am and will be.”

Jesse looked past Esther at the jet. There was a man’s head in one of the portholes. The man was staring back at Jesse. “I’m sorry,” he said. “They probably aren’t pleased about you talking to me this way.”

“I don’t care. They owe me and I owed it to you. I’m sorry, too, but I can’t risk other people’s lives, especially not yours.” She reached out and stroked Jesse’s face. “If I can ever get word to you, I will. But get on with your life, Jesse. You deserve happiness. I’ll miss you.”

“I already miss you,” Jesse heard himself say without quite believing it. He really was making progress. “Be safe and take care of yourself.”

“I promise I will. Enjoy Cole’s party. I wish I could be there.”

Before Jesse could say anything, one of the special-ops types came and stood between them. He turned to Esther and said she had to go.

She said, “Give me a second.”

When Special Ops hesitated, she stepped around him and threw her arms around Jesse. Jesse hugged her tight. When they let go of each other, the special-ops guy told Jesse he had to leave before the jet took off. He did as he was told and didn’t look back.

Jesse had the party for Cole at Daisy’s two nights before he was to enter the academy. It had taken a lot of schedule rigging to allow Suit, Molly, Gabe, Peter Perkins, and their spouses to attend. Still, they managed to do it without the collapse of the Paradise PD. Healy and his wife were there, as well as Lundquist and his girlfriend. Jesse’s AA sponsor, Bill, came. Tamara Elkin, the former ME and Jesse’s friend, came up from Austin to meet Cole and to visit. Jesse had invited Jenn and Hale Hunsicker out of some strange sense of pride and loyalty. He was relieved when they sent their regrets. Hunsicker, being Hunsicker, sent a thousand-dollar gift card along with their regrets. Even Dix had broken protocol to come. But what made his son happiest was that Jesse had flown in Cole’s two best friends from L.A.

Daisy, who had given Cole a job and welcomed him even before his father had, waved Jesse over. “Nice party. You shocked we pulled it off, Stone?”

“I guess.”

“You didn’t invite your girlfriend.”

Jesse laughed. “She was never my girlfriend, and she’s gone now anyway.”

“I knew that woman was an idiot. Didn’t she realize what she had in you?”

“She had her reasons, Daisy. Reasons I agreed with.”

“She ever tell you why I wasn’t a fan of hers?”

Jesse shook his head. “No.”

Daisy didn’t quite believe him. She left it at that.

It had been a quiet month since Arakel Sarkassian’s capture, but the town was changed by the violence in the streets as it had been changed by the violence and destruction of the old meetinghouse. Though Jesse was at a loss to explain why, he felt these recent events were worse somehow. Maybe, he thought, the trouble with the white supremacists was like a virus that had run its course and gone. Sure, there was damage in its wake, but a form of immunity as well. If that disease came around again, they would recognize it. This was different. There would be no immunity from drugs, only temporary respites. Even now, he knew, there were greedy people in a room somewhere, planning on how to get a supply chain back up and running in towns like his. And though he had a lot to thank Vinnie Morris for, Jesse damned him for being right about the crime that had come to Paradise.

It was good that all the kids they knew about were in treatment. Petra North as well. The DA had declined to prosecute her. Jesse had no issue with the girl but found it difficult to forgive her father. He couldn’t help but think that if Ambrose North had spoken up five minutes earlier, he could have spared a woman’s life and saved Suit the trauma of killing a man. No one was shedding any tears for the man Suit had killed. He was a murderer, after all. Nor was anyone wringing their hands over Brandy Lawton’s demise, especially not the North family. Yet Jesse understood she was a victim as well as a victimizer. Only an alcoholic or another addict could understand the hunger, the thirst, the ache.

Jesse knew despair. This wasn’t despair, but it was in the ballpark. Because, in the end, Heather Mackey’s passing would have little meaning in the scheme of things. There would be no one to pay the price. Chris Grimm, Brandy Lawton, and Georgi Lubinov were dead. The one name Arakel Sarkassian had given to the police that might have gotten them to the upper levels of the drug trade led nowhere. A week after the events in Paradise, Mehdi Khora’s bullet-riddled body was found in the trunk of a stolen car in Maine, five miles south of the Canadian border.

If he lived long enough to get there, Sarkassian himself would spend the rest of his life in prison without chance of parole. He had foolishly neglected to mention killing Chris Grimm. When the ballistics reports matched the slugs from the shooting at the hospital to those removed from the Grimm boy’s body, Sarkassian’s fate was sealed. His repeated explanations about having killed Chris Grimm to save the boy from further pain fell on deaf ears. Only Stojan had gotten clear. By the time Lundquist and the Staties got to the warehouse in Helton, the van was a burnt-out hulk and Stojan was nowhere to be found.

“Hey, Dad,” Cole said, noticing Jesse had isolated himself at a corner of the restaurant. “Why the face?”

“Nothing. I’m good.”

“Thanks for this. Thanks for everything. Whose idea was it to fly Paul and Alan in from Woodland Hills?”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m just glad you’re happy.”

“Here, this is for you,” Cole said, handing Jesse a gift-wrapped package. “Before this, I haven’t given you much except a hard time. It’s my way of saying thanks for not giving up on me, on us, even though I was a real prick to you when I got to town. Open it up.”

Jesse tore off the wrapping and opened the box. Inside was a brand-new glove, the exact model he wore when he played ball. Inside the glove was a baseball signed by Ozzie Smith to Jesse. He hugged his son harder than he’d ever dared.