Read Online Night Passage by Robert B. Parker - Free Book Online Page B

would keep Jo Jo for a pet.”
    “No one ever confronted him before like that.”
    “Guess it was time,” Jesse said.
    “You won, but don’t misjudge him. He can be very dangerous.”
    “Anybody can be very dangerous, Abby.”
    “I believe he has mob connections.”
    “ ‘Jesse.’ ”
    She smiled.
    “Jesse,” she said.
    “Good. You married?”
    “I don’t see what that has to do with the issue before us,” she said.
    “Me either,” Jesse said.
    “I’m happily divorced,” Abby said. “Five years.”
    “Taylor your own name?”
    “Yes.”
    They were silent again. Outside his office he could hear the sporadic murmur of the dispatcher’s voice. The occasional sound of a door opening and closing. It was a lulling sound, it went with quiet summer nights and green space in the center of a small town. The office itself was very spare. Jesse’s desk was bare except for the phone and a pair of gold-tinted Oakley sunglasses. There was a window behind his chair which looked out at the driveway of the fire station. A green metal file cabinet stood to the right of the window. There was no rug on the floor. No pictures of anyone.
    “Have you ever been married?” Abby said.
    “Yes.”
    “But you’re not married now.”
    “No.”
    “Divorced?”
    “Yes.”
    “Jesse, one of the rules of conversation is that when asked a question you don’t give a one-word answer.”
    Jesse looked at his watch.
    “Okay,” he said. “It’s suppertime, want to have dinner with me?”
    Abby opened her mouth and closed it. She had come in to reprimand this man and he didn’t seem reprimanded.
    “I … I don’t … certainly,” she said. “I’d love to.”

16
    Driving toward Gillette on Route 59 north of Bill, Wyoming, Tom Carson felt alien in the rolling landscape. Pronghorn antelope appeared here and there in the hills, grazing in herds, strung out along a stream drinking. Buffalo grazed too in the gently undulant pastures. They weren’t wild herds, he knew. They were ranch buffalo, healthful, destined to be slaughtered and sold in specialty stores. He’d never been anywhere very much until he moved to Wyoming. Lived all his life in Paradise, and his parents too. His mother taught seventh grade at Paradise Junior High. His father ran the Gulf station. The only gas station in the downtown area. He had no military experience. He hadn’t gone to college. He’d joined the cops after working three years for his father. The complete townie, he’d married a girl from his high-school class and lived with her in a house his parents helped him buy, near Hawthorne Park on the hill above the harbor. Along the empty roadway, he saw several mule deer, nervous and gangly as they grazed and looked up. More skittish than the pronghorns, he thought. Always looking over their shoulder. Now he was marooned here, vastly alone with his family in an emptiness of grass and rolling hills over which the huge blank sky hovered comfortless. He’d been proud to be a policeman, proud of the right to carry a gun. It hadn’t been very hard. Life in Paradise had been largely law-abiding. He had been polite to the selectmen, and firm with the high-school kids who used to congregate on the stone wall around the historic cemetery across from the common. He had taken courses in criminal justice at Northeastern University in the evening, and he had practiced regularly at the pistol range, in case he ever had to use the gun, which he hadn’t. He wasn’t spectacular, maybe, but he hadn’t done anything wrong either and when he was appointed chief he felt it an achievement which he had earned. He wasn’t much with budgets and finance, but Lou Burke was able to take care of that end of things for him, and he got along well with the men in the department. The townspeople liked him. He was genial and nonthreatening, and he looked pretty good in dress uniform at the Memorial Day parade. He liked the weekly Rotary Club meetings, where he got to