“I find the little punk asshole that did this,” Suitcase Simpson said, and realized he didn’t quite know what he’d do and so didn’t finish the sentence. But his round face was bright with anger.

“What the hell does ‘slut’ mean?” Pat Sears said. “For crissake he’s a male cat.”

Jesse picked up the cat and his head flopped loosely.

“I’d say his neck is broken,” Jesse said.

He put the cat back down.

“Peter,” Jesse said to the evidence officer, “when you’ve done what you can do here, take the cat down to the vet and see what he died of. And dust that tag on him.”

Perkins nodded. Jesse stood and went into the police station. He closed his office door and sat in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. “Slut” again, he thought. It didn’t fit with spray painting the cruiser, and it doesn’t fit with killing the cat. But of course it was not about the cruiser, Jesse knew that, or about the cat. It was about the police department and about somebody’s private connection to the word “slut.” Is it the whole department? Is it one cop? Is it me? Jesse laced his hands behind his head and let his mind go empty, letting the problem drift at the periphery of his consciousness, looking at it obliquely. He was still sitting, hands behind his head, feet up on the desk, lips pursed slightly, when Peter Perkins knocked on the door.

“Vet says the cat’s neck is broken,” Perkins said. “Says he would have died immediately.”

Jesse nodded.

“There’s a little trace of dried blood on the cat’s claws,” Perkins said. “Not enough really to do me much good, but I figure Captain scratched the guy.”

“Can you get a blood type?”

“Not enough,” Perkins said. “It’s microscopic.”

“How about state forensic?”

“For what,” Perkins said. “A felinicide?”

Jesse smiled slightly.

“Might be a little embarrassing, I guess.”

Perkins stood without speaking in front of Jesse’s desk.

“You find anything else?” Jesse said.

“No.”

Jesse waited.

“I,” Perkins started and stopped, looking for what he wanted to say. “I don’t like this thing, Jesse.”

“What thing?”

“The slut thing. The cruiser, now the cat. It’s an escalation.”

“Yes,” Jesse said. “It is.”

“Maybe this isn’t some kid.”

“Maybe not,” Jesse said.

“Maybe it’s serious,” Perkins said.

“Maybe you need to take the microscopic blood samples into state forensic,” Jesse said.

“It’s still on the cat’s claws,” Perkins said.

“So take the cat.”

“Jesus, Jesse.”

“I’ll call over there,” Jesse said. “Sort of smooth the way for you.”

Perkins nodded. He was not happy.

“You think it could be important, Jesse?”

“I got no idea, Pete. I’m just trying to accumulate data.”

Perkins nodded. He wanted to say something else. But there wasn’t anything else to say. He hesitated another minute, then turned to leave.

“I’ll get right on it, Jesse.”

Perkins went out and closed the door quietly behind him. Jesse leaned back again with his feet up and his lips pursed and his mind relaxed and laced his hands behind his head.

Chapter 26

Freedom’s Horsemen were practicing squad maneuvers in the wooded area along the railroad tracks in back of the high school.

In full battle dress, camouflage fatigues with a white-handled .45 revolver in a shoulder holster, Hasty Hathaway directed his troops through a bullhorn.

“I want first squad along the track embankments to the right.”

His voice amplified by the bullhorn had lost its human sound.

“I want second squad on the high ground back here under those trees.”

The mechanized voice sounded odd in the leafy margin where the tracks went out through a low salt marsh.

“You spread out,” the voice boomed, “under the trees so the helicopters can’t see you, and you lay your field of fire down, so it’ll intersect with first squad, the way we laid it out. Noncoms stand by your men, and await my command.”

The late-summer afternoon buzzed with the low hum of locusts, and the sound of a bird’s odd cry which was more like hiccup than song. The salt marsh supported a large number of flying insects with big translucent wings who hovered close to the surface of the brackish water between the salt hay hummocks. Bobbing on the water among the clumps of sea grass were several bright beach balls.

The mechanical voice over the bullhorn spoke again.

“Commence firing.”

And a fusillade of small-arms fire snarled over the salt marsh. The beach balls exploded as the bullets tore through them, and the water between the clumps of marshland spurted and roiled as the bullets sloshed into it. The gunfire was mixed. There was the crack of pistols and the harder sound of rifle fire and the big hollow sound of shotguns.

After a few moments of sustained fire, the mechanical voice boomed, “Cease firing,” and the marsh, ringing with the memory of sound, was now entirely silent, devoid even of the odd hiccupping song and the locust buzz. No insects flew over the surface of the marsh, and the beach balls had vanished from the waterways. Only the bright scrap of one clinging to a reed remained as evidence that they had been there.

“Assemble on me,” the bullhorn voice said. And the men dressed up like soldiers came out of the woods and from behind the railroad embankment and gathered around Hathaway, who stood on a pile of railroad ties, a hundred yards down the track from the football field behind the high school. He put the bullhorn to his mouth again and the voice spoke.

“Fellows, first let me congratulate you. Had this been the real thing, and not an exercise, we would have prevailed entirely. The fields of fire interlocked, the firing discipline was maintained, each of you did his job and I’m proud of every one of you.”

The men stood in a semicircle around him, thirty-one of them, carrying a variety of shotguns, hunting rifles, modified military weapons, and side arms.

“And make no mistake about it, men, one day it will be the real thing. And men like us will be what stands between the one-worlders and this White Christian Nation. We who have remained true. We who abide by the constitutional mandate for a well-regulated militia. We who exercise our constitutional right to keep and bear arms. We will keep safe the heritage of this country. And if someday we must die to serve this cause, well, then, it will be a good day to die.”

Hathaway handed the bullhorn to Lou Burke, who was standing on the ground beside the pile of ties. Then he turned back toward the assembled men and came to attention and saluted them. They returned the salute and Hathaway yelled, his voice much smaller without the bullhorn.

“Dismissed!”

The men broke their ranks and wandered down the tracks toward the parking lot near the commuter station off Main Street. They stowed their guns in trunks and backseats and drove home in their Toyota sedans and Plymouth Voyagers to take off their uniforms and watch television until bedtime.

The parking lot had been empty for several minutes and the insect buzz and birdsong had resumed around the salt marsh and along the railroad tracks when Jesse Stone walked out of the woods, cut through the high-school football field, and walked back toward the town hall in the lavender twilight.

Chapter 27

Cissy Hathaway lay facedown on the bed, her face buried in the pillow, holding on to the white iron headboard, while Jo Jo Genest spanked her naked backside quite gently with a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. Each time he struck her she made noise into the pillow and her body twisted as if trying to get her grip loose from the headboard.