in the boys’ room,” Hanson said. “Where are your
priorities.”
“I’m a cop,” Jesse said.
“I been a cop for fifteen, sixteen
years now. I’m good at it. I know how to do it. You don’t.”
“So we just stand aside and let you do what you want?”
“Exactly,” Jesse said.
“Jesse,” Morris Comden said. “I
know how you don’t like being
pushed. But, for God’s sake, you work for us. We have to justify
your budget every year at town meeting. We have the right to know what’s going on.”
“I’ve told you what I know about the killings,” Jesse said. “The
undercover thing at the high school is just that, undercover.”
“You won’t even tell us?”
“No.”
“And you won’t put the personnel working the high school on the
killings.”
“No.”
“Goddamnit,” Hanson said. “We
can fire you.”
“You can,” Jesse said. “But you
can’t tell me what to
do.”
No one said anything for a time. Comden looked down at his yellow pad and drummed the eraser end of a pencil softly on the tabletop.
Finally Comden said, “Well, I think Jim and Carter and I need to
discuss this among ourselves. We’ll let things ride as they are
while we do.”
Jesse nodded and stood up.
“Have a nice day,” he said and left the room.
24
Jesse walked around his apartment. Living room, dining area, bedroom, kitchen, and bath. Through the sliding doors to his balcony he could see the harbor. Over the bar, in the corner of his living room, he could look at his picture of Ozzie Smith. On his bedside table, he could look at his picture of Jenn, in a big hat, holding a glass of wine. He walked around the apartment again.
There wasn’t anything else to look at. He sat on the edge of his
bed for a time looking at Jenn. Then he got up and walked into the living room and stood and looked at the harbor. The apartment was so still he could hear himself breathing. He turned and went to the kitchen and got some ice and soda. He took it to the bar and made himself a tall scotch and soda with a lot of ice and sat at the bar and sipped it. There was nothing like the first one. The feeling of the first one, Jesse sometimes thought, was worth the trouble that ensued. He let the feel of the drink ease through him.
Better.
He wasn’t as alone as he felt, Jesse knew: Marcy, the other
cops, Jenn, sort of. But that was just reasonable. In the center of himself he felt alone. No one knew him. Even Jenn, though Jenn came close. His cops were good small-town cops. But a serial killer? No one else but him was going to catch the serial killer. No one else was going to protect Candace Pennington. No one else was going to fix it with Jenn. What if he couldn’t? His glass was empty.
He
filled it with ice and made another drink. What if the serial killer just kept killing people? He looked at the lucent gold color of his drink, the small bubbles rising through it. It looked like that odd golden ginger ale that his father had liked and no one else could stand. He could feel the pleasure of the scotch easing along the nerve paths. He felt its settled comfort in his stomach.
Maybe he should walk away from it. Maybe I should just say fuck
it and be a drunk, Jesse thought. God knows I’m good at
it. It would certainly resolve things with Jenn.
He made a third drink.
If the killings weren’t random, they were certainly connected in
a way only the killer or killers understood. Which from Jesse’s
point of view was the same as random. He swallowed some scotch.
I feel sorry for people, he thought, who have never
had this feeling. So far they seemed to have killed only in Paradise. And the killings weren’t random in the sense that the
victims were merely those available at the moment. The woman in the mall parking lot could have been merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the murder at night on the beach, and the one down the dark tracks at the edge of the not yet lighted church parking lot were unlikely to be of the moment. Those victims probably had been preselected. Or the site had been. It was unlikely that the killer/killers were merely hanging around there. Say the killers had preselected the site. How did they know someone would come along for them to shoot? And how did they know that if they hung around in such unlikely places for long, someone might not get suspicious and a cop might not sooner or later show up and say whaddya doing. No, the least unlikely hypothesis was that he/they had preselected the victim and followed the victim to the site.
Elementary, my dear Ozzie. Now that he knew that, what did
he know?
Nothing.
He held the glass up and looked at the light shining through it.
He wondered if Ozzie Smith had been a drinker. Probably not. Hard to do what Ozzie had done with a hangover.
The bastards weren’t going to ruin that girl’s life, though. If
he did no other thing he was going to save Candace Pennington. He wasn’t clear yet how he was going to do that, but as the alcohol
worked its happy way, he knew that he could, and that he would, no matter what else.
Be good to save something.
25
At 8:10 in the morning, Bo Marino sat alone in the back of the school bus with his feet up on the seat next to him, smoking a joint. The smell of weed slowly filled the bus and several kids turned to look and a couple of them giggled. Bo took a deep drag and let it out slowly toward the front of the bus. The driver was a woman. Bo wondered if she even knew what pot was when she smelled it. Bo looked older than he was. He was already shaving regularly.
He had been lifting weights since junior high, and it showed. His neck was short and thick, and his upper body was muscular. He was the tailback in the USC-style offense that Coach Zambello used.
Several small colleges had recruited him, and he was very pleased with himself.
In the rearview mirror, Molly could see Bo smoking. She smelled
the marijuana. Well, well, she thought, Bo Marino
appears to be breaking the law. She called Jesse on her cell phone and spoke softly.
“One of the three young men we’re
interested in is inhaling a
controlled substance in the back of the bus,” Molly said.
Jesse was silent for a moment.
Then he said, “When you get to school, arrest him.
I’ll have
Suit meet the bus.”
“Okeydokey,” Molly said.
“Aren’t you supposed to say something like
‘roger that,’” Jesse
said.
“I like okeydokey,” Molly said, and smiled and shut off the
phone.
The bus pulled into the circular driveway in front of the high school and the kids got off. Bo stayed until last, smoking his joint, and pinched it out when there was no one else on the bus. He dropped the roach in his shirt pocket, swung his feet contemptuously off the seat, and stood.
As he got off the bus, the lady bus driver said,
“Hold it there
for a minute, Bo.”
He stared at her.
“Hold what?” he said.
The lady bus driver took a badge out of her purse and showed it
to him.
“I observed you using a controlled
substance,” Molly said. “We’d
like you to come down to the station.”
Bo stared at her. Peripherally he saw the janitor that everybody
knew was a cop walking toward the bus.
“A what?”
“A controlled substance. You were observed smoking a joint on
the bus. The snipe is still in your shirt pocket.”
“You’re fucking crazy,” Bo said.
“We can go in my car,” Molly said.
“It’s parked over
here.”
“Fuck you, lady,” Bo said.
He started to walk past her. Molly stepped in his way.
“Don’t make me arrest you,”
Molly said.
“You?” Bo said. “Get out of my