Nobody spoke until Kevin did. Jesse watched him, the kid frowning, as if he were starting to put things together. Or at least trying to.
“I had told Mom about being gay the day before Jack died. I told her about Jack and me. I wasn’t ready to tell you myself, so she said she would. I figured that might soften the blow or whatever.”
Jesse said, “It was his people making scam calls. So they’d been ghosting numbers for months. Easy to ghost yours if he wanted them to — Lord knows they knew how to do it.”
Kevin was staring at his father.
“Did you have one of your men ghost my number?”
“Don’t listen to him,” Roarke said.
“Did you, Dad?”
“No,” Roarke said.
Not looking at him. Staring out the window.
“Did you get Jack to meet you?”
Kevin was shouting now.
And in that moment, Liam Roarke seemed to collapse into himself, as if the fight had gone out of him, at least for now. Jesse thinking: They’re all tough until they’re caught. What Roarke said next came out in a harsh whisper.
“I couldn’t let you be like me,” he said.
“Like you?” Kevin said. “You mean a criminal?”
Roarke shook his head. Still whispering. “I didn’t want you to be gay.”
Kevin opened his mouth and closed it. “You?” he said. “You’re...?”
Roarke nodded. Then nodded at me. “You might as well hear it from me. Stone would have told you, anyway.”
Then Roarke said, “I didn’t want you to end up hating yourself the way I hate myself.”
“What are you talking about?” Kevin was shouting again. “I was happy. I loved Jack. He loved me. What was there to hate about that?”
He was standing over his father then. He was the one who looked like the bigger man, Jesse thought.
“So how did it work, Dad?” he said. “You killed Jack because you couldn’t kill me to keep me from being gay?”
“You need to leave, Kevin,” Roarke said. “I’m done talking about this for now.”
“Got it,” Kevin said. “I’m leaving now, and won’t be back, not ever again, you son of a bitch.”
He turned and walked out of the room and maybe half a minute later the front door slammed.
Just Roarke and Jesse now.
“You got a death wish, Stone?” Roarke said.
“I thought I’d given it up when I gave up drinking,” Jesse said. “Maybe not.”
“Because you act like you have one.”
“Why did that boy have to die?”
“Fuck you.”
Roarke finished his drink, slammed the glass down hard.
Jesse thought: I should have waited to come here with Crow.
Everything had changed when Kevin More came through the door, not in a good way for Jesse. Now Roarke was back to being a gangster, in full. Self-hating or otherwise.
Jesse reviewed his options, limited as they were. He was wondering if he could make a move on Dennis when he came back in here, because that might be his only chance to leave this house alive.
“You’re a fucking dead man now,” Roarke said. “You might not have been before Kevin showed up. But you are now.”
“People know that I came here.”
“Tell them to try and find you in about an hour.”
“If Crow doesn’t hear from me, he’ll come for you.”
“Tell him to try and find me. Him and Marcus both.”
At some point Jesse was going to have to make a move, maybe on Roarke, knowing that there were guns on the other side of the door. He just didn’t know when. Or if the moment had already come and gone when Kevin was still there as distraction.
“Dennis!” Roarke yelled finally.
This time when Dennis came through the door, he had his gun out.
“It’s time for Chief Stone to have that accident we talked about a week ago,” Roarke said. “Take a bottle from the cabinet downstairs. No reason to waste the good stuff on a drunk.”
Dennis motioned for Jesse to walk out ahead of him, and start down the stairs.
Roarke was right behind them.
“You and the boys tie him to a chair in the kitchen,” Roarke said. “I want to watch him start drinking again.”
“You’ll have to kill me first,” said Jesse.
“Have it your way,” Roarke said.
They had just gotten to the foot of the stairs when the front door opened and Kevin More, gun in his own hand, yelled for Jesse to get down and fired his first shot into his father’s chest, and then two more in rapid succession after that, all of the shots sounding like explosions in the small area.
Dennis was raising his own gun, but Jesse wheeled and knocked it out of his hand before punching him in the neck. Then he had Dennis’s gun in his hands as the black suits from outside were coming through the door, Jesse yelling at Kevin to get down now.
The taller black suit got off a shot before Jesse put him down. The second guy put his gun on the ground, and his hands up. Jesse told Kevin to now use his phone to call 911, and then let Jesse do the talking when the cavalry arrived.
Even before Jesse heard the first siren, and had established that Liam Roarke was dead, he wondered whether Kevin had shot Roarke to save Jesse.
Or if he had shot him and kept shooting for Jack Carlisle.
Eighty-Three
Two weeks later.
Nellie Shofner had made headlines just about everywhere, and put herself on the national map, with her story headlined “To a Gay Athlete Dying Young.”
She had written the piece with the permission of Jack’s mother, and also with permission from Kevin More. It turned out he’d had a copy of Jack’s one-act play all along, which he’d written on a computer at the Paradise High library. He’d shown it to Kevin the day before he died, because he said it was finally ready to be seen.
Nellie didn’t use all of the play. But she used a lot of it, primarily the speeches from the main character.
“The world is going to care about my story,” the main character, called Ben, says at one point. “I just hope it cares for the right reasons.”
From the responses Jesse had seen, that they’d all seen, the world had embraced the story of Jack Carlisle, who’d finally come out.
Kevin More hadn’t been charged in the shooting death of Liam Roarke. Jesse had told Lieutenant Frank Belson, the first cop to the house on Monument Square — Jesse imagined it being a race once they found out who the victim was — that the kid was actually a hero for saving a policeman’s life.
His.
When Belson had arrived, Jesse was the only witness still on the scene, Roarke’s men having run like the dogs they were, same as their boss had been about to do.
“Kid put four in him,” Belson said, chewing on an unlit cigar. “He must have really wanted to save you.”
“He’s a kid, Frank,” Jesse said. “He’d never shot anybody before. He clearly panicked. Probably couldn’t even tell you right now how many times he fired.”
“Unless it was an execution,” Belson said.
“Of his dad?”
“Well,” Belson said, “maybe this dad.”
Jesse was sitting across from Kevin More at the Gull, having just finished lunch. He told Jesse his mom, last he heard, was somewhere in Southern California, sorting out the shuttering of the company and the payouts remotely.
“She told me she wanted to move near Stanford so she could be close to you,” Jesse said.