Robert Parker: Death in Paradise

"That's right, and this little dropout whore… I'm a best-selling author. I had too much to lose."

Shaw stopped.

"You shoot her?" Jesse said.

Shaw didn't answer. "God," he said. "I need a drink."

"You shoot her?"

Shaw's voice sounded hoarse. "Yes," he said.

They were in Swampscott, walking on Fisherman's Beach, near where they had first eaten lunch together. Jesse was chewing gum.

"How did Billie's parents react?" Lilly said.

"The old man got up without saying anything and walked out of the house. The mother didn't flinch. Told me she'd lost her daughter a long time ago."

"God," Lilly said. "What about the other one? The one who brought him the girls?"

"Alan Garner."

"Yes."

"Gino Fish will find out he's been running a child prostitution ring out of Gino's office," Jesse said. "He won't be around long enough to prosecute."

"His boss will fire him?"

"His boss will kill him."

"Kill him?"

Jesse nodded.

"You know that and you'll let it happen?" Lilly said.

"I can't prove he's going to do it."

"But you know it," Lilly said.

"Sure."

"But…" Lilly paused and her eyes widened. "You want it to happen. Don't you?"

"Garner isn't much of a guy," Jesse said.

They were quiet. The tide was out. The beach was wide and firm and easy to walk on. A couple of terns moved ahead of them, cocking heads occasionally, then hopping on.

"That's the part of you that doesn't show much," Lilly said.

Jesse smiled. "I beg your pardon," he said.

"Not that part. It's the cold part of you-without sentiment, without mercy. It is frightening."

"People are more than one thing," Jesse said.

"I know," Lilly said. "I didn't mean that as critically as it sounded. I know you can feel compassion. I know you found that girl's killer, partly because you felt somehow you owed it to her."

"I'm also employed to do that," Jesse said.

"And maybe the scary part of you-the remorseless part, the part that looks at the world with an icy stare-maybe that part of you is why you can do what you're employed to do."

"Maybe," Jesse said.

They were walking the beach at the margin where the sand was hardest. The ocean eased up toward them as they walked and almost reached them and lingered and shrank back, and eased up toward them again. Lilly stopped and stared out at the ocean. Jesse stood beside her.

"Long way out," Jesse said.

They stood silently together looking at the horizon.

"Where are we going, you and I?" Lilly said.

"Back to your place?" Jesse said. "Where I show another hard side of myself."

Lilly smiled. "Probably," she said.

The easy wind off the ocean blew her silvery hair back from her young face and pressed her white cotton dress tight against her chest and thighs.

"But I meant where are we going ? more like, ah, metaphorically."

"You mean what about our future?"

"Yes."

"Like walk into the sunset?"

"Yes."

Jesse put his head back so that he was squinting up at the sky. He chewed his gum slowly. The tide was coming in. The reach of the ocean water had forced them back a step.

"I think I love you, Jesse."

Jesse's jaw moved gently as he chewed the gum. The two terns that had been shadowing them flew up suddenly and slanted out over the ocean.

"If I can be with Jenn," Jesse said after a time, "I will be."

Out from shore, a lobster boat chugged past them heading toward Phillips Beach.

"Even if you are together again," Lilly said at last, "maybe we could still have our little… arrangement."

Jesse took a deep breath. He liked Lilly a lot. In bed she was brilliant. With her he felt less alone than he had since Jenn left. He let the breath out slowly.

"Maybe not," he said.

Jesse still used a wooden bat. The ball jumped off the aluminum ones much farther, but they didn't give the feeling of entirety, in the hands and forearms, that a wooden bat did. Jesse was playing tonight in shorts and a sleeveless tee shirt. His gun and badge were locked, with his wallet, in the glove compartment of his car. There was a league rule against wearing spikes, so they played in colorfully ornamented sneakers. And Jesse didn't wear batting gloves. He had worn them when he played in the minors, because everyone did, and it hadn't occurred to him not to. But in a twilight soft-ball league they seemed pretentious to him.

Jesse planted his feet in the holes that had already been worn there. But Jesse wasn't uncomfortable. He had never been uncomfortable playing ball. Playing ball was like being home.

He took a pitch wide for a ball.

When you were going good, he remembered, the ball had come up there slowly, looking the size of a cantaloupe. He smiled to himself. Now it was about the size of a cantaloupe. He took a shoulder-high pitch for a strike. He glanced back once at the umpire. The umpire shrugged. Jesse grinned. He'd get a make good in one of these at bats.

He's pitching high and low , Jesse thought. Next time he'll be down .

The wind off the lake swirled a little dust between home and the pitcher's mound. Jesse stepped out. The infield was well over to the left side. The outfield was around to the left and deep. In this league he was a power hitter. Jesse got back in the box.

The next pitch came in thigh high, where Jesse was looking for it, and when he swung he could feel the exact completeness of the contact up into his chest. He dropped the bat and, without looking, began to trot slowly toward first.

Suitcase Simpson, coaching at first, said to him, "Three trees back toward the restaurant."

The opposing third baseman said, "Nice home-run trot."

There were a half dozen people in the stands behind third base. As he came into third, Jesse looked at them. One of them was Joni Shaw. She waved at him. He grinned at her, and ran on home.

Robert B. Parkeris the author of nearly forty books, including two other Jesse Stone novels, Night Passage and Trouble in Paradise . He lives in Boston.