Robert Parker - Night Passage

“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 antiaircraft 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 the money back or else. He’s actually threatening me. Well, first I thought maybe I’d just break his scrawny neck for him, wring it like he was a chicken, you know? But then I think no, be smart, Jo Jo. Don’t get mad. Get even. So I got some of the pictures of his old lady and I sent them out. I sent one to his minister and one to him and one to the president of the Paradise Garden Club that Cissy belonged to. Ought to freak them out. I was going to send a few out every day. Drive Hasty crazy.”

Jo Jo laughed again. Jesse felt like he’d bathed in dirty water. He shut off the tape recorder.

“Think about something, Jo Jo,” Jesse said. “When I suspended Lou Burke Hasty was so worried about what Burke might say that he had you kill him.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve actually arrested you, and you know more than Burke.”

“You think he’ll try for me?”

“He’ll have to,” Jesse said. “Or he’s a goner.”

“How’s he gonna get me in here?” Jo Jo said.

“My guess is he’ll try to get you out of here, one way or another.”

“And?”

“And kill you,” Jesse said. “You know the Horsemen. Do they believe in him?”

“Yeah. Assholes. They think he’s freakin’ George Washington.”

Jesse nodded.

“You think he’ll try to kill me?”

“I think he’ll try to kill us both,” Jesse said.

When suitcase Simpson pulled up in his own car behind the men in battle dress fatigues gathered around the station, he could see Jesse on the front steps with a shotgun. There were no lights showing at the station, but several men in the crowd had flashlights focused on Jesse. Simpson parked quietly on the street and got out. He was in uniform, wearing a bulletproof vest. He carried a shotgun and his service pistol. He stood silently in the shadows behind the Horsemen.

Two steps forward of the other Horsemen, Hasty Hathaway stood very straight in front of Jesse.

“We’re relieving you of your duties,” he said to Jesse. “And we are coming to take your prisoner.”

Simpson felt someone move up beside him. It was Abby Taylor. She had on something that looked like a navy pea coat and the collar was high up around her head so that Simpson could barely see her face. Her hands were deep in her pockets. She looked briefly at Simpson and then looked at Jesse on the station steps. Neither of them spoke.

On the steps Jesse worked the pump on his shotgun and jacked a shell up into the chamber. The sound of the action was very sharp in the quiet night. Jesse was wearing a vest too, Simpson noted.

“Couple of things, Hasty,” Jesse said.

His voice wasn’t loud but it carried and the men were very still, nearly trancelike, confronting the stunning thing they were about to do.

“First,” Jesse said. “Anything happens here and I’ll kill you.”

As he spoke Jesse raised the shotgun slowly and aimed it directly at Hasty. Before he could stop himself, Hasty took a step back.

“Second,” Jesse said. “I’m arresting you for the murders of Tom Carson, Tammy Portugal, and Lou Burke.”

Peter Perkins’ Mazda pickup pulled in beside Simpson’s car, and Perkins and Anthony DeAngelo got out, with shotguns and vests. They looked at Simpson. Silently Simpson gestured that they should spread out behind the Horsemen. Molly Crane arrived on foot. She was wearing sweats and sneakers and her service pistol. Her badge was pinned to the sweatshirt. Simpson pointed her to the left and she nodded and went.

“You can’t bluff us, Stone,” Hasty said. He felt dreadful about stepping back. His face felt hot. He tried to make his voice cut like Jesse’s had. “We have relieved you of duty. Step aside or... step aside... or be killed.”

“I hear one round go up into one chamber,” Jesse said, “and I will shoot you dead, Hasty.”

Hasty didn’t step back this time, but he glanced automatically around at his troops to see that no one put a round up.

“You are a murderer and a goddamned fraud. What you really want is to kill me, and to kill Jo Jo. What were you going to do, rush the jail and shoot him? Claim it was a stray bullet? Poor Jo Jo. You gotta kill him because he knows. You tell your men how you got conned on the arms deal? Jo Jo knows. You tell them how you were sleeping with Tammy Portugal until she wanted to get serious, then you had Jo Jo kill her? You tell them how you had Tom Carson killed? Jo Jo could tell them.”