Robert B. Parker’s Fallout

Eleven

There were lights on in the house. A good thing. Sometimes Charlie turned in early. The Jetta was parked in the driveway. Jesse knew the old man did a lot of takeout, now that he’d proudly and successfully mastered Uber Eats.

So often when the two of them would get together, here or at the Gull or when Charlie would occasionally stop by the station when out on his morning walk, and Jesse would start some kind of bitch-a-thon about the general bullshit of being chief, Charlie would say, “Remember something: Nobody died today.”

But today somebody had.

Jesse’d had experience before in dealing with a senseless death like this, plenty of times. Charlie Farrell had had more.

Before he got out of the Explorer he saw a text from Molly.

Jesse didn’t respond. Molly Crane didn’t need luck, especially when the task at hand was dealing with a high school girl. She’d raised four daughters. No one knew more about talking to high school girls, or drawing them out, even getting them to reveal their secrets whether they wanted to or not, than Molly did.

She could teach a course in it.

Maybe I should take that course, Jesse thought.

Maybe it would make me smarter about women when they were all grown up.

He walked up the front steps and rang the doorbell.

Waited.

No sound from inside, not even the television in the living room, the big-boy flat screen that Charlie had bought for himself, one that was always on when Jesse would pay him a visit. If there was an old Law & Order on, any kind of Law & Order — And when wasn’t there one on? Jesse thought — Charlie would be watching it.

“That Mariska Hargitay,” he liked to tell Jesse, “she’d still be ringing my bell on the rare occasions when it still gets rung.”

Jesse hit the doorbell again.

Still nothing.

The door was unlocked, as usual.

“Hey, Chief,” Jesse called out, stepping inside. “It’s me. The other chief.”

He closed the door behind him and listened.

Something wrong.

Something about the air Jesse didn’t like.

Not the kind of silence you got from a poem.

Jesse unholstered his Glock. On instinct. Or force of habit. Or both. Being overly cautious had never gotten anybody killed, he told Suit all the time. And Molly. And even Sunny Randall.

If Charlie came walking down the stairs now, or in from the kitchen, or from the backyard, the two of them could have themselves a good laugh about Jesse pulling a gun on him.

“Chief,” Jesse said, louder this time, in case he was upstairs in the bathroom or in the yard. “You here?”

Gun at his side, he stepped into the living room.

He found him on the floor, the side of his head caved in, a spread of blood underneath him.

Charlie’s own old Glock near his right hand.

Jesse knelt next to him, all the breath out of him at once, like a tire had been punctured, put a finger to Charlie Farrell’s neck, knowing there was no point. Knowing he was gone.

Jesse stood and pulled his phone out of the back pocket of his jeans and dialed 911.

Swallowing hard and telling himself he wasn’t going to cry in front of Charlie Farrell.

Even now.

He quickly told the operator who he was, and where he was.

“Does the victim have a name?” she said.

“Chief Charles Edward Farrell,” Jesse said.

Ended the call and holstered his weapon and put his phone back in his pocket and sat down on the floor next to the body of Charlie Farrell.

“Cop,” he said, his voice sounding even louder now. “Died old.”