Night Passage (9 page)

“Maybe.”

“Well, so far you seem to have justified their faith in you.”

“Maybe,” Jesse said.

“Why the maybes?” Abby said.

“Maybe they wanted a lush for a police chief.”

She frowned.

“Why on earth would they?”

“Don’t know. Maybe they didn’t want a good cop in town.”

“That’s crazy,” she said. “I think you’re too hard on yourself.”

“I try not to be,” Jesse said.

The food came, and another drink apiece.

“The lobster’s in a damn hot dog roll,” Jesse said.

“I told you.”

“I didn’t think you meant an actual hot dog roll.”

They ate quietly for a few moments. The moon made a long shimmer on the harbor water. There was no wind. The salt smell was strong.

“You still feel connected to her,” Abby said.

“Yes. I’m working on it, but I still do.”

“She with someone else now?”

“She’s still living by herself, I think. But she’s in another guy’s bed a lot.”

“And that hurts,” Abby said.

Jesse nodded.

Abby smiled at him and drank from her martini. She wondered if he were passionate, if someone, herself for instance, could get past the containment.

“Maybe it would help if you got even a little,” she said.

Her eyes were very bright, and her body, so neatly and professionally clad, seemed somehow kinetic as she sat across the table.

“Couldn’t hurt,” he said.

Charlie Buck got out of his Ford Bronco and walked across Route 59 toward the burned-out truck. A portly man with a pleasant face, receding hair, and rimless glasses, he was a detective from the Campbell County Sheriff’s Department. Yellow crime-scene tape defined the place. Half a dozen county vehicles were parked haphazardly around the perimeter of the tape, and more than half a dozen county employees were in the area.

“How many dead?” he said to Ray Vollmer.

“Coroner thinks only one,” Vollmer said. “Remains are a little scrambled.”

“Infernal device?” Buck said, looking at the twisted metal skeleton.

“I’d say,” Vollmer answered. “No sign that he ran into anything. Got some bomb-squad people coming in from Casper.”

Buck nodded, looking at the scene along the empty roadway. Occasionally a car would appear and slow to look at the crime scene only to be waved on by one of the deputies stationed on the road for that purpose. Most of the time, however, they were alone with the silent wreckage under the high sky.

“No reason for him to have stopped here?” Buck said.

Vollmer shook his head.

“ ’Less he stopped to take a leak,” he said.

“Even so,” Buck said, “be hard for someone to rig a bomb on your car while you were pissing.”

“Coulda driven by and thrown it,” Vollmer said.

“Which would mean they were following him with a bomb waiting for the moment.”

“Yep.”

“More likely it was rigged earlier, with a timing device.”

“Could be,” Vollmer said. His eyes were wandering over the other deputies who were crisscrossing the area looking for anything that might be useful.

“If it was, would they have any way to know where he’d be when it went off?”

“They must have had a way to know he’d be in the car,” Vollmer said.

“Yeah. You can rig it to start when the ignition goes on. But what if his wife drove it. Could be a matter of weight.”

“So what if the wife and some kids got in?”

“Could be rigged for weight in the driver’s seat.”

“And what if it went off in the middle of Cheyenne, or in Gillette, next to a school bus?” Vollmer said.

“Maybe they didn’t care,” Buck said.

“Nice people.”

“Or maybe somebody trailed him at a distance,” Buck said. “And when he got out in the middle of an empty stretch they beeped the bomb like you’d open a garage door.”

“The technology’s there for that,” Vollmer said.

“Yeah. What’s up there.”

“Piece of the truck,” Vollmer said, “and maybe some bits of the driver.” He made a face. “M.E. scraped most of that up and took it with him.”

Buck nodded.

“I’ll take a look,” he said.

He and Vollmer walked up the hill where the mule deer had grazed and looked at the twisted hood and part of the foam-plastic dashboard. He squatted on his heels and looked more closely at the dashboard. Riveted into it was a metal band bearing the serial number of the truck.

“A little luck,” he said to Vollmer, and nodded at the band.

“Take a while to trace it,” Vollmer said.

“We got a while,” Buck said.

Lou Burke came into Jesse’s office with two cups of coffee. Captain Cat was asleep on top of the file cabinet. He didn’t stir when Burke came in. Burke put one cup down on the desk for Jesse, and took his to the window and looked out.

“Anthony’s cruiser,” Burke said. “He took it home last night after work and parked it in front of his house. Somebody spray-painted the windshield.”

Jesse got up with his coffee and came to the window and stood beside Burke. In the parking lot below was one of the Paradise cruisers. Clumsily sprayed in blue onto the windshield was the word
SLUT
.

“I had it towed in,” Burke said. “It wouldn’t look good to have Anthony drive it in peeking around the graffiti.”

Jesse sipped some of the coffee and stared down at the cruiser.

“ ‘Slut,’ ” Jesse said. “Maybe it’s personal.”

Burke shrugged and didn’t say anything.

“Have Perkins go over it,” Jesse said. “Probably won’t find much, but it’ll be good practice for him.”

Burke nodded.

“And ask Anthony to come talk to me,” Jesse said.

Burke nodded again and left the office. Jesse stood for a while at the window drinking his coffee. He watched as Peter Perkins, the crime scene specialist, came out with his kit. While Jesse watched, Perkins took pictures of the car and dusted it for prints. He scraped a small sample of the paint off the windshield and dropped it into a small envelope. Probably a hundred people had had access to the cruiser in the last month, Jesse knew. The prints, to the extent there were any usable ones, would mean almost nothing. Still, the department had an evidence specialist; if he didn’t go over the car, what was he getting paid for?

Anthony DeAngelo came into the office and Jesse turned from the window.

“You wanted to see me, Jesse?”

“Yeah. What can you tell me about the paint job?”

“Nothing much. I parked it outside my house, you know where I live, up on Archer Ave, after I got off at eleven last night. We always take the cruiser home on that shift unless we’re turning it over.”

“I know,” Jesse said. “That’s no problem.”

“Anyway I went in, my wife made me a sandwich, and I had a beer and watched the end of the Sox game from Seattle and hit the rack. In the morning I went out and there it was.”

“Talk to any of the neighbors?” Jesse said.

“No, I, to tell you the truth I was a little embarrassed.”

“Yeah, I can see why you would be. On the other hand, be less embarrassing if we catch the perp,” Jesse said. “Could it be personal? I mean, ‘slut’ is sort of a funny thing to spray on a police cruiser.”

“You saying it could be about my wife or something?”

“No. I’m asking. Your wife got any enemies?”

“No. And she’s no slut either.”

“Had to ask, Anthony.”

“Sure. Probably some kid mad at me for rousting him off the wall, or something. You know what assholes kids are.”

Jesse nodded.

“Ask around,” he said. “See what you learn.”

“Sure, Jesse, I’m sorry it happened.”

“Not your fault,” Jesse said, and DeAngelo left the room.

Talking to Anthony hadn’t told him anything. He hadn’t thought it would. Asking around probably wouldn’t tell him anything either. They would probably never know who sprayed their car, anyway. Hardly the crime of the century. Still, all the buttons had to be pushed, otherwise what were the buttons there for? Lot of motions to go through in police work, Jesse thought. He picked up Captain Cat from the top of the file cabinet and held him in his arms and scratched him thoughtfully behind the ear.

“ ‘Slut,’ ” he said to the cat. “What the hell does that mean, Captain?”

Abby Taylor had done this before. She seemed calm as she undressed and hung her clothes up in his closet. She was careful when she wiped off her lipstick, and she was relaxed when she came to the bed and he put his arms around her. Then she gave herself to the experience. The lovemaking absorbed her. She was inventive and adroit, but most of all, he noticed even at the highest pitch that she was genuine. She pretended to nothing, and kept nothing in. She liked this. They made love for a long time and finished and lay together on their backs with her head resting in the crook of his arm.

“Whatever she didn’t like about you,” Abby said, “it couldn’t have been the sex part.”

Jesse smiled in the darkness. The sex part had been one of many things Jenn didn’t like. He wasn’t sure what all of it was that Jenn had liked or not liked. Right now she appeared to like Elliott Krueger.

“Some guy said once that war was the extension of politics,” Jesse said.

“That’s an answer?”

“Sex is probably the extension of a relationship,” Jesse said.

“Why can’t it just be sex?” Abby said.

As she talked she raised her head and leaned it on her elbow; her naked body was damp with the recent effort. She seemed not to notice that she was naked. Jenn, who had always flaunted her tightly clothed body, seemed oddly ill at ease when her clothes were off … at least with him.

“I don’t know,” Jesse said.

“Wasn’t that what this was? A good time was had by all?”

“Yes.”

“So how does that fit with your theory?”

“We don’t have a relationship.”

“That’s cold, Jesse.”

“I didn’t mean to be,” he said.

“No, I don’t think you did,” Abby said.

“I’m just saying we don’t come to bed with any arguments to finish, you know?”

“So the key to perfect happiness is wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am?”

“Well, I don’t think I was saying that,” Jesse said.

“Oh?”

Jesse was silent for a time. He did not normally spend much time thinking about matters like this, and with her lawyer’s mind she had raced ahead of him.

“I think Jenn didn’t have sex for the pleasure of the sex,” he said. “I think she did it to start a romance or keep one going or because she was in a marriage and it was like her responsibility to have sex, you know?”

“Didn’t she like it?” Abby said.

“I don’t think she disliked it, except maybe at the end, with me. But I don’t think the question of liking or disliking really has much to do with sex for Jenn. It’s like an instrument of policy, if you follow what I’m saying.”

“Yes,” she said.

“When we were feeling good, sex was what we did to prevent us from not feeling good. When we were feeling bad, sex was the way we said we were mad.”

“That’s pretty thoughtful for a guy who recently kicked Jo Jo Genest in the balls.”

“I know. I’m a little surprised myself.”

“Still, it would be depressing to think that the longer the relationship, the worse the sex.”

“Maybe we need to research it,” Jesse said, “develop a relationship and see what happens.”

“Day at a time,” she said.

“Easy does it,” he said.

They both laughed.

“Both been to meetings, I guess,” Abby said.

“I had a little trouble acknowledging a higher power,” Jesse said.

“I don’t know you very well,” Abby said. “But why am I not surprised?”

Sitting at the rustic pine conference table, under the glass-cased boat models, in his office at the bank, with the door closed, Hasty Hathaway counted the stacks of small bills that Jo Jo took from the suitcases on the floor beside the table.

“People don’t realize,” Hathaway said, “how troublesome cash is to deal with.”

“Yeah, and it’s no picnic lugging it around in suitcases,” Jo Jo said.

Hathaway nodded, his hands moving expertly among the bills.

“Lucky you’re so strong, Jo Jo.”

The counting continued. The bills were stacked and banded and put aside as Hathaway counted them.

“I started as a teller,” he said as he counted. “You never forget.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m telling you, I counted already. There’s two million three hundred and twelve thousand, eight hundred and fifty-four dollars there.”

“I have a fiduciary responsibility,” Hathaway said.

“How come you started as a teller?” Jo Jo said. “Your father owned the fucking bank.”

Hathaway smiled without answering and continued to count.

“I hear you had a dispute with Jesse,” Hathaway said. “We were surprised at the outcome.”

“Son of a bitch blindsided me,” Jo Jo said.

“It makes us worry a little,” Hathaway said, carefully slipping the band over a stack of twenty-dollar bills, paying great attention to the process, “about our judgment.”

“Don’t worry,” Jo Jo said. “He ain’t that good.”

“I hope he isn’t. He was certainly hired on the assumption that he wouldn’t be. What also concerns us is that we hope you are better than the encounter suggests.”

Jo Jo stopped taking bills from the suitcase and rose to his feet.

“You ever been kicked in the balls?” he said.

Hathaway shook his head and looked mildly contemptuous. People of his caste did not receive kicks in the balls.

“He suckered me once, he won’t do it again.”

“We hope not,” Hathaway said.

Jo Jo stood looking down at him, feeling the anger surge along his latissimus dorsi. He could pick the little twerp up and strangle him like a chicken. It annoyed him that Hathaway was not more aware of that.

“Look at me,” Jo Jo said. “Look at him, next time you see him. You think I’m not going to even it up?”

“Not directly,” Hathaway said.

“Whaddya mean?”

“He’s the Chief of Police,” Hathaway said.

As he spoke he continued to count.

“So fucking what?” Jo Jo said. “Anyone screws around with me, has to pay.”

“You are a valuable member of our team, and we can’t compromise the team mission for petty personal reasons.”