Robert B. Parker’s Buried Secrets

Fifty-One

Jesse skidded to a halt just outside Daisy’s café, feet slipping on the wet sidewalk, the file close to his chest, under his jacket, where he’d stuffed it to protect it from the rain.

He tried to crane his neck to see through the front window without being seen himself. No good. It was too dark inside. Nothing but light reflected from the streetlamps dancing against the glass as the rain poured down from above, soaking him to the skin despite his jacket.

He saw the sign in the front: No Paradise Cops Allowed.

He could go around the back. The door there opened into the kitchen. But it was possible that whoever had Daisy had that covered as well.

Daisy could be bleeding out, dying inside.

He forced himself to take a deep breath. To think.

The man said no calls for help. Jesse assumed he had a police scanner to hear anything that went out over the radio.

Truth be told, there was a part of him that wanted to do this alone. To be the only cowboy dealing with the bad guys in his town.

But he wasn’t alone.

He took out his phone again and dialed.

Listened to it ring, alone in the rain. And heard it ring, faintly, inside the café.

Elliott looked at the phone. What the hell? Why was Stone calling back? Did he think he could negotiate his way out of this?

Elliott let the call go to voicemail.

Nothing happened. Stone didn’t enter the café. There was no call for police on the scanner app Raney had installed on all of their phones. There was nothing but the sound of the rain and the woman on the floor breathing heavily.

What the hell was Stone up to?

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“We’re on our way into the cells,” Raney said. “What are you doing? I thought we said we’d keep the line clear—”

“You’re sure Stone isn’t there?”

“What? No, why would he be here?”

The phone rang again.

“Never mind,” Elliott said, and muted his own phone again.

Daisy’s phone kept ringing.

This time he answered it.

“I’m here at Daisy’s,” Jesse said. “Front door.”

“Come on in,” Elliott said.

“Why should I? Is Daisy even alive?”

Elliott, inside the café, kicked Daisy in the chest, almost impersonally. Her grunt of pain was audible over the phone.

“Still breathing for now,” Elliott said.

“Is she hurt? Should I call an ambulance?”

“Stop stalling, Chief. You want to see her? See how she is? Well, the door is open. Next move is up to you.”

“Okay,” Jesse said. “I’m coming in.”

Elliott hung up on him.

Jesse moved toward the front door of the café and hoped his message was clear enough.

Halfway across town, Suit looked at his phone dumbly as he heard all this. He was sitting wrapped in a sheet in his bed, still wiping the sleep from his eyes. The call had been from Jesse, but Jesse hadn’t said anything to Suit. He’d just started talking to someone else.

“I’m here at Daisy’s,” Jesse had said. “Front door.”

Suit shook his head to clear the grogginess, and it slowly occurred to him that Jesse had patched him into another call.

Then he heard Daisy grunt in pain, and it all became clear to him.

Holy shit, he thought.

Molly rang on the other line as Suit grabbed his pants. She was already shouting at him.

“Goddamn it, Suit, get moving, Jesse is all alone over there, it’s going down now—”

“Molly, what...?”

“He conferenced us in on the call, you moron!”

“I knew that!” Suit protested.

“They’ve got Daisy! Get your ass up and down to the café, I’ll meet you there—”

That was as much as Suit heard because he knocked the phone to the floor as he pulled on his vest and Elena yelled at him from the other side of the bed.

But he didn’t have time to stop. He splashed his way to the car, rain sheeting down on him as he struggled to buckle his gun belt and open the door at the same time.

Raney had to admit that at least Tate knew what he was doing inside the station. They went into the conference room and he moved methodically and systematically through all the evidence on the table, piling it into the garbage bags they’d brought, ripping down photos of the Burton house from the wall, taking an old mug shot and rap sheet of Charlie Mulvaney and wadding it up with the other trash.

Tate moved into the chief’s office while Raney gathered up every other scrap he could find and bagged them all.

Tate came back from the office empty-handed. “The file is gone.”

“What?”

“The original photos. The file Stone’s been carrying around like it’s a damn baby. It’s not in the safe. It’s not on his desk. It’s gone.”

“Shit,” Raney said. That file had the pictures from his job as well as the others. Nobody had connected him to it yet, but that was the whole reason he was here. The money didn’t mean shit if he was stuck in prison for murder.

Tate kicked a trash can across the room, sending it bouncing off the wall. “Damn it, what did he do with that file?”

Raney clicked over to the line with Elliott. “We can’t find the file,” he said into his mic. “You get that? We can’t find the file.”

No answer. Elliott’s phone had been iffy since the start. Now he wasn’t responding at all.

What the hell was going on over at the café?

Jesse opened the café door slowly. It didn’t creak ominously or squeal with rust. Daisy ran a tight ship. There was only the cheerful little jingle of the bell attached as it swung.

He stepped inside the café. The light from the street was enough to see the man with the gun standing over Daisy, who was huddled on the floor. They were in the space between the booths and the four-top tables. Jesse wouldn’t have had a clear run at him even if the guy didn’t have a gun aimed at Daisy’s head.

Jesse stood there, dripping, for a moment.

“Daisy, are you okay?”

“No, I’m not, Jesse,” she said, in a tone that implied Jesse ought to be able to see that for himself.

“She’s fine,” the man said, the gun absolutely rock-steady in his hand. Aside from his lips, he didn’t move an inch. “At least she is for now.”

Jesse looked at the man. He thought he’d seen him around town a couple of times. Casual dress. Graying hair. Anonymous. An early tourist, a guy up from Boston for the weekend or for a lunch.

Now he seemed like a different kind of creature altogether. Something that had been bred or even manufactured. Jesse had seen Vinnie Morris exhibit this kind of stillness. Crow, too. Like a trap about to spring.

Jesse reached toward the top of his jacket. The gun in the man’s hand moved like it was on a swivel, coming up from Daisy to target Jesse center mass.

“Easy,” the man said.

“I’m easy,” Jesse said.

“Drop your gun on the floor.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Bullshit. You’re not that dumb.”

“Appreciate the compliment, but you said come unarmed, so I came unarmed.”

“I assumed you’d do it anyway. I told you, you had three strikes. This is strike two. Take out your gun and drop it on the floor, then kick it away.”

“I don’t have—”

The man aimed his gun back at Daisy, centering it on her head.

Daisy did not look up. Her eyes were locked on Jesse’s.

“You sure you want to take a swing on strike three, Jesse?” the man said. “I will put a crater in her skull right here, right now.”

“Okay,” Jesse said quickly. He reached, slowly, under his jacket and took his Glock out, holding it by the handle with two fingers. Then he placed it on the floor and kicked it across the tiles to the man.

It hit a table leg and skittered away in another direction, disappearing into the shadows under a booth.

“Close enough,” the man said. “I assume you’ve got a backup piece. Toss that, too.”

“You didn’t give me enough time to get fully dressed.”

The man smiled, but his eyes looked like the glass marbles of a crocodile in a taxidermy shop.

“I told you I’d shoot her.”

“Come on over and search me if you want.”

The man shook his head. “And get that close? No, thanks.”

They both waited for a moment.

“All right. Let’s pretend you don’t have a backup at your ankle. I don’t think you can get to it before I kill her—”

Daisy made a little sound at that.

“—so we’ll call that ball one. But you better have the file.”

Jesse unzipped the top of his jacket and pulled out a plastic file folder, tied shut with a string, stuffed with papers and photos.

“This is it,” Jesse said, holding it in front of his heart.

“How do I know that’s not just the pictures from your summer softball league and old parking tickets?”

“You know, at some point, you have to extend a little trust in any transaction,” Jesse said.

The man smiled again. “They were right. You are funny.” He gestured with his .357. “Place it on the table over there. Open it and spread out the contents. I want to take a look.”

Moving slowly, Jesse did as instructed. He opened the plastic file and pulled out the pictures and the pages from Burton’s weird encoded records. The dead people stared back at him as they had since he’d first seen them, scattered among the stacks of garbage.

“Step back,” the man told him.

Jesse backed up to his place by the door again.

Keeping his gun pointed at Jesse — an impressive amount of control, considering the length of time he’d been holding it — the man went to the table and scanned the pictures and papers.

“You don’t seem to care that much about the money in the cell,” Jesse said.

“This is more valuable,” the man said.

“Why are those so important to Mulvaney?” Jesse asked.

“Not just Mulvaney,” the man said, watching Jesse only from the corner of his eye.

“You, too,” Jesse said. “They matter to you, too. Personally.”

The man’s eyes snapped back to Jesse. “Yes,” he said. “They do. This is my insurance policy. Mulvaney almost never got his hands dirty. But, well... this one was personal. This is why he owed me.”

“So why not use it? Turn him in. You could offer state’s—”

The man’s laughter cut Jesse off before he could say another word. “I’m sorry, did you think I was looking for a way out? That I’m anxious to enter witness protection and spend the rest of my life waiting for a bullet or a car bomb? I am fine where I am, thank you. This is just so I can go back to my life and never have to see this godforsaken corner of the country again. I’ll finally be left alone.”

“Because one of those killings could bring Mulvaney down,” Jesse said.

“You have no idea,” the man said, grinning for the first time with what looked like genuine glee. It was not a happy expression, or a comforting one.

It occurred to Jesse that the man was giving away a lot of information. As if he never expected Jesse or Daisy to repeat it to anyone.

“Okay, you’ve got me and the file. Let her go.”

“You think that’s how this ends?” the man asked. He looked thoughtful.

“You can keep me here. I’m a better hostage, anyway. Anything goes wrong, you can always threaten to kill the chief of police. Just shoot me,” Jesse said, tapping his chest. “Right here.”

Daisy stirred in her position on the floor. “Jesse, don’t,” she said.

The man shook his head. “Come on, seriously? Doesn’t this hero bullshit get a little old after a while?”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at that sign,” the man said. “She told you what she thought of you. She said she doesn’t need you. She said screw the police. And yet here you are. Offering your life for hers. Tragic.”

“Jesse—” Daisy said again.

“Shut up,” the man told her, and turned back to Jesse before he could blink. “Why do you do it? Why take the risk for people who don’t even thank you?”

“It’s not about thanks,” Jesse said.

“I’ve known cops all my life. That’s bullshit.”

“Not here,” Jesse said. “Not to me.”

The man scowled. “You’d really take a bullet for her even though she told you to go fuck yourself?”

“Yeah,” Jesse said. “That’s the job.”

The man looked like this was either the funniest or the saddest thing he’d ever heard, but he couldn’t tell which.

“Suit yourself,” he said, and fired at Jesse, hitting him dead center in the chest.