Hasty felt good about the way he’d stood up to Gino Fish. You have to be firm. And he was pretty sure they knew that he was firm. He wasn’t just some suburban banker in over his head. He commanded armed men. Once they realized who they were dealing with, Fish had been as nice as pie. Good meeting, Hasty thought. The arms deal seemed firm and Freedom’s Horsemen could at last be fully combat-ready. He couldn’t stave off what was to come, perhaps, but, properly armed, he and his men could keep their little piece of America safe and free. They went over the crest of the bridge, where the toll booths had been before it was toll-free northbound, and sloped down toward Chelsea. Hasty needed to clear Tammy Portugal from the agenda. He could not have his life’s work contaminated by a mercenary woman, just as his life’s work was to reach fulfillment. He was a little worried about the new chief. Jesse didn’t seem to be what he was supposed to be when Hasty hired him. He seemed to have his drinking under control. He seemed to be a lot tougher and maybe a lot smarter than they had thought he would be when he had sat in the hotel room in Chicago smelling of booze, trying not to slur his speech. But that wasn’t clear yet, and aside from manhandling Jo Jo, which Hasty had actually rather enjoyed, Stone hadn’t gotten in the way, and maybe would not. If he did he could be dealt with. If one were steadfast, one could deal with what came along. It was the girl that needed tending. He knew it was as much his fault as hers, his own weakness, to throw himself into the arms of this cheap tramp, like he had. But he was a man, and a man needed things. Cissy seemed unable to give him those things. He didn’t know why, and after a while had stopped thinking about it. Women were women. So he’d made a mistake, but he could rectify it.

He glanced over at Jo Jo sitting vastly in the passenger side of the big Mercedes. Someday, perhaps, when he was no longer of use, he might be rectified as well. But not yet. For all his loutish stupidity he was handy.

They reached the flat where the roadway curved through Chelsea before it split off to go north along Route 1 or east along the Revere Beach Parkway.

“Jo Jo,” Hasty said. “I need you to fix something for me.”

Chapter 40

Michelle Merchant was smoking dope with some friends on the low stone wall of the historic burial ground opposite the town common. They liked to sit there and freak out the adults. The adults retaliated through the selectmen who posted “No Loitering” signs and insisted that the Paradise police enforce them. Michelle was seventeen. She had dropped out of school after tenth grade and spent as much time as possible on the cemetery wall.

When Jesse Stone pulled his unmarked car up onto the grass beside them, the two boys Michelle was sitting with got up and moved sullenly away. Michelle did not. She took a last long drag on her joint, and dropped it in the street and scuffed it out with the heel of her red sneaker, looking all the time straight at Jesse as he got out of the car and walked toward her.

“You gonna bust me, Jesse?”

She put a heavy stress on the name, to remind him that she was not speaking respectfully to an officer of the law.

“Probably not,” Jesse said.

He sat down beside her on the stone wall.

“How you doing?” he said.

Michelle snorted, as if the question were too stupid to answer. Jesse nodded as if she had answered. The kids who had moved sullenly off lingered now, near the shopping center, watching. The traffic was sparse at midmorning, and the bird noise was easily audible in the burial ground behind them. It was late in September and the leaves had just begun to turn on some of the early trees, showing a touch of yellow or red against the still predominant green. Jesse was quiet. Michelle looked at him sideways, puzzled, annoyed, and stubborn. She was a small girl with a thin face that would have been pretty had it not been so empty. There was a streak of lavender in her blond hair, and her fingernails were painted black. She wore jeans and red sneakers and a blue sweater with the sleeves too long so that only the tips of her fingers were visible. She had a small gold bead in one nostril.

She struggled to be as quiet as Jesse, but she couldn’t.

“You going to run me off the wall or what?” she said.

“No,” Jesse said.

“So how come you’re sitting here?”

“I was thinking what a waste of time this deal is for both of us,” Jesse said.

“What deal.”

“You sit on the wall and smoke dope. I chase you off. You come back. I chase you off. You come back. It’s a waste of my time and yours.”

“I’m not wasting my time,” Michelle said.

“Really?”

“Really. It’s a free country. I should be able to do what I want.”

“And this is what you want?” Jesse said. “Sit on the wall and smoke dope.”

“You can’t prove I’m smoking dope.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“So why don’t you leave me alone then?”

“Why don’t you go to school?”

“School sucks,” Michelle said.

Jesse grinned.

“Babe, you got that right,” he said. “You know that Paul Simon song, ‘When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school/It’s a wonder I can think at all’?”

“Who’s Paul Simon?”

“A singer. Anyway, yeah, school sucks. It’s one of the great scams in American public life. On the other hand, most people grind through it. How come you don’t?”

“I don’t have to, I’m seventeen.”

“True,” Jesse said.

They were both quiet for a time. Michelle kept looking at Jesse as covertly as she could.

“My sister says she sees you sometimes down the Gray Gull having drinks,” she said.

“Un huh.”

“So how come that’s okay and smoking dope isn’t?”

“It’s legal and smoking dope is illegal.”

“So that makes it right?” Michelle said.

“Nope, just legal and illegal.”

Michelle opened her mouth and then closed it. She was trying to think. Finally she said, “Well, that sucks.”

Jesse nodded.

“Lot of things suck,” he said. “After a while you sort of settle for trying not to suck yourself, I guess.”

“By pushing kids around?” Michelle said.

Jesse turned his head slowly and held her gaze for a moment.

“Am I pushing you around, Michelle?”

She shrugged and looked absently at the white meeting house across the street.

“What do you think you’ll be doing in ten years?” Jesse said.

“Who cares?” Michelle said.

“Me,” Jesse said. “You ever see any thirty-year-old people sitting on the wall here, smoking dope?”

Michelle gave a big sigh.

“Oh please,” she said, drawing out the second word.

Again Jesse nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know. Lectures suck too.”

She almost smiled for a moment, and then looked even more sullen to compensate. The boys by the shopping center had tired of watching them and drifted off. On the front porch of the town library, across the common, a young woman with a small child clinging to her skirt, and another on her hip, was sliding books into the library return slot. Jesse wondered briefly when she got time to read.

“You think I’m going to end up like her?” Michelle said, nodding at the woman.

“No,” Jesse said.

“Well, I’m not,” Michelle said.

Jesse was quiet.

“So what about right and wrong?” Michelle said after a time.

“Right and wrong?”

“Yeah. You said stuff was just legal or illegal. Well, what about it being right or wrong? Doesn’t that matter?”

“Well, I’m not in the right or wrong business,” Jesse said. “I’m in the legal and illegal business.”

“Oh, that’s a cop-out,” she said. “You just don’t want to answer.”

“No, I don’t mind answering,” Jesse said. “That was part of my answer. There’s something to be said for trying to do what you’re paid to do, well.”