But whatever the reason the taste of scotch was in his mouth now, it was there. Right there.
And a familiar thirst along with it, one that never really went away.
He never needed a specific trigger like Roarke. Sometimes it was when he was tired. Or jammed up on a case. Or jammed up on cases, plural, the way he was now, feeling as if he were trapped in a maze, trying to get out so he could find out, once and for all, what had happened to Charlie Farrell and Jack Carlisle.
Whatever the reason, the wolf was back at the door, just like that.
He tried to tell himself when it happened, the way it was happening right now, that he’d just dropped his guard. But Jesse knew that wouldn’t fly, because he never dropped his guard. He never took his sobriety for granted, not one single day as he went one day at a time.
He never forgot that he was a drunk.
Just a dry one at this time, and for a good long time.
Whether he was happy or sad or tired or pissed off or angry about Charlie Farrell or pleased that he’d managed to crack another case, sometimes hanging on to his job like it was a lifeline, he was still a drunk.
There it was.
He knew he could call Dix at any time of the day or night, but he wasn’t going to bother him with this. Nellie was with Molly again tonight. As tough as Nellie Shofner was — and she was tough enough to be a cop — what had happened on the street in front of Jesse’s place the other night had scared her. Nothing like it had ever happened to her before. Now it had rocked her world. The way Molly’s world was rocked when she had been shot last year, for the first time.
It had been Jesse’s suggestion that Nellie stay on with Molly for a few days. To his surprise, she had readily taken Molly up on the offer.
“It’s win-win,” Jesse told Molly. “You can look out for her when Crow isn’t. And she can act as a chaperone now that Crow is back.”
“Jesse?” Molly had said. “You know how much I love you, right?”
“This is going to be bad, it’s always bad after you tell me that.”
“Blow it out your ear,” Molly had said and hung up.
He got up now and walked over to his desk, to the bottom drawer he always kept locked, as if that meant anything, opened the drawer with the key he kept on his chain, and pulled out the bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue.
Fifty-Six
He knew why the bottle was there.
Why he told himself it was there.
Not in case of an emergency, because there would be no emergency until, and unless, he uncapped the bottle.
Jesse told himself he kept it there as a reminder that no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t hide from your own boozing.
Or run from it.
So here was the whiskey he told everybody he didn’t keep in the house. They told you in AA about people, places, things. But this bottle, it was the thing. The whole ballgame. He could hold the bottle up, the way he was now, the way Crow had held his glass up at the Scupper, and look at the amber liquid, and see through it all the way to the bad old days.
He couldn’t remember how long ago he’d bought the bottle. A couple years ago? Back when the world was still in lockdown because of COVID, definitely, when the days and weeks and months ran together. Two hundred dollars for the good stuff. Better than he used to drink when he was still drinking.
What he always told himself, and told the bottle, was this:
You don’t scare me anymore.
The hell it didn’t.
The bottle was still sealed. It didn’t matter, the way it hadn’t mattered with Crow’s drink. Jesse could taste it, and could smell it. Sensory memory.
On high alert.
He put the bottle down on the middle of his desk blotter and leaned back in his chair and stared at it.
It never mattered why he took it out, even if it had been a while since he had taken it out.
There it was, anyway, right in front of him.
He reached over and did hold it up now, in the light of the antique desk lamp that Sunny had bought for him at a shop in the Vineyard one time. The feel of the bottle in his right hand as familiar as if he were holding a baseball, or had both his hands on a bat.
He could hear the sound of his own breathing.
It was then that he felt his phone buzzing in his pocket, loud in the quiet of the moment.
Jesse put the bottle back down, and took out his phone, and looked at the screen.
Miss Emma
Let go, they also told you in AA, let God.
“You need to get over here,” she said. “Please hurry.”
“Are you all right, Emma?”
“Yes and no,” she said.
Fifty-Seven
Maybe Miss Emma really was an angel, sent to look out for Jesse in this moment by God Herself, which was the way Sunny referred to God.
She was pacing on her front porch when he pulled into her driveway, lit by an overhead light, wearing a powder-blue sweatshirt tonight, sneakers to match. Jesse wondered if she was always color-coordinated like this, or just when he happened to be in her presence.
“What’s upset you?” Jesse said.
“What has upset me and royally pissed me off,” she said, “is that I got another call from one of those punk-assed bitches Charlie was after.”
She was leading him into the house now, Jesse behind her, which meant that there was no way for her to see him smiling at her language.
When they were in the living room, it was impossible for Jesse not to notice the Smith & Wesson revolver on her coffee table. He would have bet all the money in his wallet that it was a concealed-hammer 640.
“A gun, Emma?” Jesse said. “Were you planning to shoot somebody through the phone?”
“I’m not in the mood for any sass tonight, mister,” she said.
“I can see that. But am I allowed to know if you have a license for this thing?”
“My boyfriend used to have your job,” she snapped. “What do you think?”
She sat on the couch. Her sneakers barely touched the floor. Jesse sat across from what appeared to be a mahogany table. There was what appeared to be a glass of whiskey next to the revolver. One of those nights, he thought.
The wolf now chasing him over here, even if Emma Cleary was his designated angel.
“The call upset you that much?” Jesse asked.
“I’m a little edgy these days. And you may recall that I got scammed once before.”
He said he sure did remember.
“Charlie wanted to catch just one of these punks so badly,” she said.
Finally her face softened as her voice did. Maybe it was the mention of Charlie. She was his Miss Emma again.
“He still wanted to be a cop so much,” she said.
“He was still a cop,” Jesse said, then asked her to tell him about the call.
She said it would be easier for him to listen to it.
“You recorded it?” Jesse said.
“Fuckin’ ay,” she said. “My friend Doris, down in Newport, got ripped off to the tune of five thousand dollars last week on a fake charity call. They tried that one on me a couple weeks ago, on my landline, before I might have told them what I wanted them to do to theirselves.”
“The other times they called on your cell?” Jesse said.
Miss Emma nodded. “The assholes do both,” she said.
Jesse and Healy had done enough research by now to know that family-members-in-peril was just one of the scams. There were old reliables, threatening calls from the IRS. Warranty calls on cars. Lottery hustles. People saying they’re from your bank, asking about a recent purchase they know hadn’t occurred, saying they’d blocked it, but asking for the account number. Just before they cleaned you right out.