“I’m speaking now as town counsel,” Abby Taylor said carefully.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“May I call you Jesse?”

“Of course, Abby.”

She smiled automatically.

“Now, I know,” she said, “that you are new not only to this job, but to this environment.”

Jesse smiled helpfully.

“But whatever the circumstances of your police work in Los Angeles, this is a town in which everyone’s civil liberties are important.”

Jesse nodded. He seemed interested.

“May I be frank with you?” Abby Taylor said.

“Sure.”

“You cannot go about beating people up,” she said. “It leaves the town vulnerable to lawsuit. I understand the provocation. And I certainly am sympathetic to Carole Genest’s situation. But we cannot permit you to take the law into your own hands. It is not only illegal. It simply is not right.”

Jesse nodded thoughtfully.

“Let me ask you a question,” he said.

“Of course.”

“You asked me if you could call me Jesse, and I said you could. But you didn’t.”

“Excuse me?”

“You never used my name.”

“What the hell has that got to do with you brutalizing Mr. Genest?”

“Just seemed odd to me,” Jesse said.

“Well, if it does, it does,” Abby Taylor said. “I’m not going to be sidetracked.”

“’Course not, Abby.”

“Do you have anything to say about the matter of your assault on Mr. Genest?”

“Not really,” Jesse said.

“I’m afraid there has to be more than that,” Abby Taylor said.

“The restraining order wasn’t working,” Jesse said. “Think of me as implementing it.”

“You really have to take this seriously,” Abby Taylor said.

“ ‘You have to take this more seriously, Jesse,’ ” he said.

Abby Taylor smiled.

“You have to take this more seriously, Jesse.”

“No I don’t, Abby.”

“You don’t make it easy . . . Jesse.”

He nodded and leaned back a little in his chair. His blue uniform shirt was tailored and carefully pressed. He had nice eyes, she noticed, with small wrinkles at the corners as if he had spent a lot of time squinting into the sun.

“Jo Jo Genest should be kicked in the balls once a day,” Jesse said. “He’s terrorizing his ex-wife. He’s frightening his children. When Anthony went up there the youngest two were under the bed. There’s a restraining order in place. He paid no attention to it. It was necessary to get his attention.”

Abby was silent for a time, frowning, as she thought about his answer. He watched her think. He liked the way the small vertical wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows when she frowned.

“The selectmen are aware of the provocation,” Abby said. “And they are prepared to go forward from here. But they would like your assurance that something like this will not occur in the future.”

“It might,” Jesse said.

“God,” Abby said. “You don’t give a damn inch, do you?”

Jesse smiled.

“Since you drew it up,” Jesse said, “you know that my contract here provides recourse to the selectmen if they are dissatisfied with my performance.”

“So, you’re saying the ball is in their court.”

“Yes.”

They looked at each other. Abby held his look, feeling challenged by it. Then she smiled.

“God, you are so much harder than you look.”

Jesse smiled again.

“And what’s my name?”

“Jesse.”

They laughed. Abby sat back in her chair and crossed her legs.

“I mean you look like a history teacher,” she said. “Who might coach tennis on the side.”

Jesse didn’t say anything. He was looking at her legs.

“And yet you handled Jo Jo Genest.”

“Experience is helpful,” Jesse said.

“Have you had that much experience with people like Genest?”

“In L.A. I worked South Central,” Jesse said. “People in South Central 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.”

Chapter 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 fine people for various violations of Rotary procedure, and to participate in the general bonhomie. He collected the fines every week in a chamber pot. Now that was over. His wife was neither understanding nor forgiving of the move to Wyoming. His children went miserably to a regional grammar school with the children of plainsmen and miners. He could not explain to any of them why they were here and they badgered him angrily about it nearly all the time. He was ashamed to have been sent away, ashamed that he hadn’t stood firm and seen justice done. Often he thought of going to the FBI office in Cheyenne. It was the closest one. He’d looked it up in the phone book. But he was afraid to. Afraid for his wife and children, and, he had to admit it, afraid for himself. But every day here became more bitter. He missed the ocean, the faces on the evening news, the closeness of the horizons back home where you could only see as far as your neighbor’s house across the street. He missed the sense that he was enveloped by the civilization as old as the country. Out here he felt vulnerable and exposed. He felt skittish. He was afraid to act, but he hated his inaction and he hated the life he was leading. He hadn’t found a job yet in this wilderness and he was running out of the money they gave him. He didn’t dare ask them for more. There was something about the steeliness in Hasty’s prissy eyes. . . . But he couldn’t go on like this, his family miserable, all of them lonely, himself frightened in addition. He spoke aloud in the cab of the new Dodge pickup they’d provided.