Robert B. Parker's Debt to Pay (2 page)

A
fter last year's spasm of blood, life in Paradise, Mass, had settled back into its predictable, small-town rhythms: steady as the tides, no waves cresting over the seawalls. There hadn't been a single act of violence for months, the last one being a bar fight among four drunk musicians at the Gray Gull. Oh, there had been some snowfall, but nothing record-breaking, not even a hint of a nor'easter. The spring had passed as if following the script of old rhymes and adages. March had started out blustery and cold and ended on a week of sunny sixty-degree days. It had rained every two or three days in April, and by mid-May the gardens in town were so lush and colorful with early-spring blooms the place looked like . . . well, a paradise. What passed for a crime wave in Paradise these days was a spate of car vandalism. Somebody had lately taken to shooting out the rear tires of cars parked all over town.

“Anything?” Jesse asked Molly, coming through the station house door on Saturday morning.

“Nothing worth mentioning.”

“Mention it anyway.”

“No, really, Jesse, there's—”

“Crane, can't you ever make it easy?”

“Where's the fun in that?”

“Fun for who, exactly?”

“Whom,” Molly corrected.

Jesse shook his head and laughed. “Are you sure it's ‘whom'?”

“I'm not, but it's fun to think you're wrong. Did Diana come down from Boston last night in that rain?”

“Uh-huh. But don't change subjects. What's not worth mentioning?”

“Some water got into our basement and we had to turn on the pump.”

“For crissakes, Molly, is that—”

“I told you it wasn't worth mentioning, didn't I?”

Jesse raised his hands above his head. “I surrender.”

Molly frowned. “No fun in that, either.”

“No new flat tires?”

“No.”

Jesse turned and went into his office. He picked up his old baseball glove off the desk even before sitting down. He removed the hardball from the pocket of the glove where it resided, slid the glove over his left hand, and marveled that the glove was still in one piece after all this time. The glove had been his when he was a minor-league shortstop for the Dodgers, and he didn't like thinking about how many years ago that was. Nor did he like thinking about why it was sitting on his desk in Paradise instead of in a display case at Cooperstown. For the moment he wasn't worrying about his absence from the Hall of Fame, but rather about the big softball game tomorrow night against the fire department team.

He had other things on his mind, too. One, a fancy envelope inside the top drawer of his desk, and the recent rash of vandalism.
For the moment, he was focused on the latter. Although Mayor Walker and her merry band of selectmen were all over him to do something about it, it was Jesse's experience that the perp was some stupid kid or a cranky old man with a grudge against the town or against Goodyear. He knew that this sort of thing would end soon enough, that the guy doing it would get bored or get sloppy and be caught. Of course there was always potential for things to turn bad. No good ever came of bullets in a populated area. So as Jesse pounded the ball into his glove—it helped him concentrate—he considered ways of catching the shooter in the act.

He heard the phone ring and Molly answer it. A few seconds later, she was sticking her head through the doorway.

“It's Robbie Wilson. You want me to tell him you're not here?”

“No,” he said, putting his glove and ball back down on his desk. “I'll take it.”

Jesse generally didn't have much use for Wilson, the chief of the Paradise Fire Department, but he was happy for the distraction.

“Morning, Robbie.”

“Morning, Chief Stone.”

“So?”

“Fifty bucks on tomorrow's game?”

“Gambling's illegal, Robbie.”

“Dinner, then?”

“Field might be too sloppy to play on,” Jesse said.

“Don't you worry about that. My guys are over there now taking care of it. So, are we on? Dinner to the winner?”

“How can I turn down an offer from a man who can rhyme
dinner
and
winner
? We're on.”

Jesse put down the phone and stared at the top drawer of his desk.

H
e sat very low in the front seat of the Yaris, not because he was worried he would be recognized, but because caution and invisibility were words he lived by. The stolen car . . . no problem. As was his style, he had removed the nondescript subcompact late at night, from the garage of an elderly person away on a long cruise. He laughed his gloating, superior laugh, thinking about the stupidity of the masses. At how key codes made them feel safe and secure.
How typical and how foolish.
All he ever needed to do was find his mark, sit on her house for a few days before her trip, and use a long lens to watch her punch in the garage code. He always chose elderly widows because they lived alone, put very low mileage on their cars, and kept their cars well maintained. If he didn't possess such a cautious nature, he believed he could simply trick most people into volunteering their key codes.
Morons!

He knew he was in almost no danger of being recognized because there were only two men in all of Paradise and, quite possibly, the entire world, who might know his face. And those two were busy playing softball on the other side of town. He had made sure of that,
as he had made sure that the mess he had left behind in Boston had yet to be discovered. That was what he did, he made sure of things, controlling as many factors in any given situation as he could. Until the unfortunate incidents in the wake of his crossing paths with Jesse Stone, his record of success had been impeccable. He had been able to kill with impunity, at will, and the way he most enjoyed it: slowly, torturously, and profitably. But the two men at the softball field had taught him a valuable lesson about the limits of control. For that lesson, the little man sitting low in the front seat of the stolen car felt he had a debt to pay. He meant to pay it on his own terms and in blood—their blood and that of their loved ones.

For now, he was playing a bit of cat-and-mouse with the Paradise PD by shooting out the tires of cars around town. Of course he could easily have killed the chief or that idiot deputy of his at a distance, but where was the sport in that? Where was the pleasure in killing anonymously? He wanted them to know, as Gino Fish had known, who was doing this to them and why. He shook his head, upset that Fish had robbed him of his enjoyment the way he had. He wanted to see them helpless and begging, powerless to stop him from grinding their loved ones into dust as they watched.

Although it was that moose Simpson who had shot him, he would take his greatest delight in paying his debt to Jesse Stone. Stone had lied to him and it was Stone who had toppled the first domino in his run of misfortune. If Stone hadn't stuck his nose in where it didn't belong, none of his other troubles would have followed. And Stone, like Fish, had called him Mr. Peepers, a name he detested beyond all reason. Only Stone had lived to tell the tale. Even now, long after his encounter with the chief, he felt fury welling inside him, his cheeks flushing with rage. Reaching up, he
readjusted the rearview mirror to see his reflection. The ashen skin and unremarkable features of his face turned an ugly shade of red beneath his wire-rim glasses.

In spite of his rage, he had a measured respect for Stone. A host of agencies and organizations on both sides of the law had tried unsuccessfully to put an end to him. They might as well have tried to lasso a ghost or to capture shadows in a box. No one had ever seen him for who he was until it was too late. With Stone, it had been different. But some of the respect he had for the chief was diminishing by the day. He thought for sure that by now Stone would have figured out the admittedly subtle message he had been leaving for him in the rear driver's-side tires of used cars all over Paradise. He was about to leave another two hints.

The street was quiet. Not a single car had driven past his location in forty-five minutes and not a soul had strolled along Scrimshaw Street in twice that amount of time. Dusk was deepening, and there were dark, threatening clouds in the sky. He sat up as tall as he could in the driver's seat and reached over to the passenger seat. He lifted the edge of a plaid blanket and folded it over on itself. On the seat beneath the blanket sat a handsome .22 pistol, the one he had waved at Gino Fish. He laced his fingers around the custom wood grip of the Smith & Wesson Model 41 and thought what he always thought at moments like these: A great artist uses great tools. And this gun was a work of art itself. Then he felt a twinge of pain in his shoulder and the rage rose up in him again. There had been a time not too long ago he could have put a man's eye out from twice the distance he could now, but Luther Simpson had ruined that with a single lucky shot to his right shoulder.

Swiveling his head and using the car's mirrors, he took one last careful look at the street to make sure he wouldn't be spotted. It was
safe. Turning in his seat, he raised his pistol and rested the bottom of the grip in the niche of his bent left arm atop the doorsill. He took aim and fired. The tire flattened in short order. He laid the pistol in his lap, started the car, and rolled farther up the street to repeat the process. With the last two hints left behind, he drove toward the turnpike. He made sure not to speed or do anything else that might bring undue attention to himself. If Stone didn't get the message by now, he would as soon as the bodies were discovered in Boston.

J
esse Stone didn't strike out, not in softball, yet he was in danger of doing just that. He stepped out of the batter's box with a two-strike count against him. Resting the knob of the bat against his left thigh, he tugged at the left shoulder of his jersey, squeezed his shoulder blades together, stretched his neck, and closed his eyes. He took three deep breaths, trying to refocus his mind on the task at hand. Because Jesse had once been a phone call away from starting at shortstop for the L.A. Dodgers, he understood better than most that physical gifts were only part of the equation. Aside from talent, the other element separating highly skilled athletes from everyone else was the power of concentration.

Whether he was in the midst of a hostage crisis or standing in the middle of the infield during a Pacific Coast League championship game, Jesse could shut out the rest of the world. Suit had once asked Jesse if the crowd noise ever bothered him during a big game. Jesse laughed. Not at Suit. At himself.

“You know, Suit,” he'd said. “I never heard the crowd.”

And as Jesse dug his back foot into the dirt of the batter's box, preparing to wait for the next pitch, he laughed at himself again.
Many years and many miles separated Jesse from those big games. This was the Paradise slow-pitch beer league, and the crowd, if you could call it that, consisted of wives and kids and girlfriends and a few drunk guys whose games were already over. Still, try as he might to collect his thoughts, Jesse couldn't focus. He had his reasons.

One of them was the former FBI special agent sitting in the stands on the first-base side of the diamond. She was a stunning, sharp-witted blonde named Diana Evans. If Jesse had been given the power to create his perfect woman, he would have created Diana. They'd first met in New York City at the ill-fated reunion of Jesse's Triple-A baseball team. Although it had taken a long time for them to end up together, together they were . . . sort of. Diana wasn't the settling-down type, and even if she had been, small-town New England wasn't where she would have picked to do it. For the time being, she was working as a security consultant for a high-tech firm in Boston. She came up to Paradise most weekends and Jesse spent his free weeknights at her Cambridge apartment. The arrangement seemed to work for them both.

Then there was Jesse's drinking—or, rather, his lack of it. He had stopped for long periods in his life before now, but as Dix had said, those other times were like Jesse holding his breath. Sooner or later he was going to breathe again.
Not
this
time,
he thought.
Not
this
time.
He stopped drinking for himself and not to prove a point to someone else. Maybe because he had attached the notion of forever to his farewell to Johnnie Walker Black Label, stopping hadn't been as easy as during his earlier periods of sobriety. There were days his lack of alcohol really screwed with his usual calm demeanor. His patience was more easily worn thin and he snapped at Suit and Molly on occasion.

But Jesse had no illusions as to why he couldn't focus today. It
was the fancy, embossed wedding invitation sitting on his desk back at the Paradise PD. Molly had whistled at the sight of it and told him that the gilding on the invitation was the real deal, twenty-four-karat gold leaf. The invitation was irksome enough by itself, but it was the RSVP card and the answer he would have to put on it that haunted his thoughts. That and the conversation he would need to have with Jenn about it.

“Play ball!” the ump said, jarring Jesse out of his trance. “Come on, Chief, sometime before midnight.”

Jesse got back in the batter's box, gripped the bat, and took a few practice swings. Robbie Wilson, the squat fire chief and pitcher for the Paradise Pumpers, stared in at the catcher and went into his windup. Jesse locked eyes on the release point of Wilson's pitch, followed its high arc, waiting for the ball to come to him. He repeated to himself the mantra of every batting coach he'd ever had.
Let the pitch come to you. Let the pitch come to you.
Yet somewhere between the zenith of the pitch and its fall toward home plate, Jesse got lost in his own head again. Whether it was muscle memory or pure instinct, he swung the bat without actually seeing the ball.

Instead of the usual crisp ping of metal alloy making flush contact with the ball, there was a rubbery dull thud. And when Jesse snapped back into the moment, he was pumping his arms, running hard as he could toward first base. He caught sight of the ball centered between the pitcher's mound, the foul line, and first. The ball was spinning sideways like a cue ball, the way it does when hit off the very end of the bat. Robbie Wilson bent down to field it and, tripping over his own feet, collided with his first baseman. The first baseman swiped at the ball as he fell, knocking it away from both men and into foul territory. Jesse reached first safely and Suit Simpson scored from third.

Jesse hadn't struck out. The winning run had crossed home on what had been very generously scored an infield hit and RBI for the chief. Yet even as the team swarmed around him, slapping his back, hugging him, shaking his hand, the reality of what had happened wasn't lost on him. No, he hadn't struck out, but he'd come pretty damn close. And when he looked up into the stands for Diana, he noticed a roiling line of lead-gray clouds stretching across the horizon. The meaning of those clouds wasn't lost on him, either.