Robert B. Parker’s Fallout

Two

Spike was at the Gray Gull, which he had owned for a few years now.

He was Sunny Randall’s best friend but had become Jesse’s friend, too. Spike also owned Spike’s, on Marshall Street in Boston. He had just been spending more time in Paradise lately, primarily because his current boyfriend had a weekend place on the water.

Sunny liked to call Spike a gay superhero. Jesse had asked her one time, just in the interest of proper record-keeping, what kind of superhero she considered him.

“An inner-directed one,” Sunny had said.

“Anything else?” Jesse had said.

“Hunky one,” she’d said.

Back when she still considered him as such, sometimes quite enthusiastically.

“I know you want to ask me how she’s doing,” Spike said to Jesse when he arrived at the Gull.

Both of them knowing who “she” was.

“I’m fighting it,” Jesse said. “The way I do my urge to drink.”

“How about if I tell you anyway?” Spike said.

“How about I pop into the kitchen and look for possible health code violations?” Jesse said. “Or we could stop talking about Ms. Randall and you could show me to my table.”

“Right this way, Chief Stone!” Spike said.

Charlie Farrell, who’d retired as police chief in Paradise long before Jesse had arrived from Los Angeles, was already seated at his favorite corner table, a martini in front of him. White hair, worn long, but he was able to carry off the longish hair, even at his age. Good tan. Bright red V-neck sweater. Charlie was partial to red. Said his late wife used to tell him the color “popped” when he wore it. Red golf shirt underneath it. Charlie didn’t look his age, which Jesse knew to be right around eighty. It was his hands that gave him away. They always did. His hands looked older than the town lighthouse. Or the ocean beyond it.

He grinned and put his right hand out to Jesse. Jesse shook it, but lightly, knowing by now Charlie’s hands were about as sturdy as leaves.

“Chief,” Charlie said.

“Chief,” Jesse said.

“I’d get up,” Charlie said to Jesse, “but it would take too long.”

“We need to get you one of those portable ski lifts you’ve got at the house to get you upstairs,” Jesse said.

“Bite my Irish ass,” the old man said.

Charlie and Maisie Farrell had finally gotten tired of the Paradise winters and moved down to Naples, Florida, after he retired. To live happily ever after in the sun. But Maisie Farrell was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s two years ago, died last year from complications. Charlie had sold their condominium almost immediately after the funeral and moved back to Paradise. He told Jesse one time that he thought guys his age waiting around to die in Florida seemed like a cliché.

He pointed to his martini glass and did what he always did, no matter how many times they met for dinner, and asked if Jesse minded.

“Yeah,” Jesse said. “Tonight’s the night I decided to let your drinking finally bother me.”

“Well, you never know,” Charlie Farrell said.

“As long as you drink responsibly,” Jesse said.

“I’m eighty years old,” Charlie said. “What the hell’s the point in that?”

He drank some of his drink and smacked his lips and put his glass down. He never ate the olives. Said they were more decorative than anything else.

“I never asked,” Charlie said. “Were you a martini guy in your drinking days?”

“Scotch,” Jesse said. “Lots and lots of scotch.”

“You still miss it?”

“Only when I’m awake,” Jesse said.

Spike brought Jesse an iced tea without Jesse having ordered it.

“On the house,” Spike said.

“Too small to be a bribe,” Jesse said.

“Gotta start somewhere,” Spike said.

Charlie wanted to know how things were going with the red-haired lawyer.

Rita Fiore.

Jesse smiled. He smiled a lot when Charlie was on the other side of the table. Like he was here with his grandfather.

Or maybe a second father.

“You know how they say in sports that the legs go first?” Jesse said. “I’m starting to think they go second.”

Charlie Farrell sighed.

“And the thing you’re talking about that does go first?” he said. “It just keeps going and going. South.”

“So it doesn’t keep going like the Energizer Bunny,” Jesse said.

“A battery, maybe,” Charlie said. “But a dead one.”

“I’ll bet Miss Emma doesn’t say that,” Jesse said.

Librarian emeritus in Paradise. In Charlie’s demographic.

“Despite her advancing years,” Charlie said, “Miss Emma continues to be aspirational, bless her heart.”

Jesse laughed. Sometimes he thought the best part of being in Charlie’s presence was just listening to the old man talk.

They both made small talk over filets and fully loaded baked potatoes. Jesse wanted to know how Charlie’s grandson was doing. Nicholas. In his late twenties, in a wheelchair since his motorcycle spun out of control one night in the rain on the Stiles Island Bridge. Jesse was the first to the scene. The helmet Nicholas was wearing might have saved his life. But couldn’t prevent the damage to the lumbar region of his spinal cord.

“He loves working at that candy store,” Charlie said. “They got the kid moving up fast in sales.”

It was a lot more than a store. It was the hottest new business in Paradise, Mass., the candy company owned by Hillary More. She had moved here with her teenage son the year before, opened More Chocolate, and it had almost immediately become a sensation, and not just in Paradise. Hillary More had bought the old firehouse at the edge of town, refurbished it, extended it, hired only local people to work for her, making an especially big point of hiring people with disabilities like Nicholas Farrell, who now handled talking to nonprofits using More Chocolate for fundraising. The factory where the chocolate was actually manufactured was up in Nashua, New Hampshire, just over the state line, for tax purposes.

Jesse liked her a lot. He couldn’t see himself having a romantic relationship with her, as much as she kept trying to put that into play, and not just because he knew she was a single parent with a son at the high school. What he did fantasize about was her running for mayor in the next election, an idea she had already floated herself from time to time.

It was a piece of a larger fantasy for Jesse, one that involved shooting his current boss, Mayor Gary Armistead, out of a cannon.

Jesse noticed Charlie had gotten quiet when it was time for him to order dessert.

“What?” Jesse said.

“What what?” Charlie said.

“Unspoken thoughts have never been one of your specialties,” Jesse said. “Right up there with bullshit.”

“I promised myself I wouldn’t bother you with my niggly problems,” Charlie said.

“With you, there’s no such thing,” Jesse said. “You’re family, Chief.”

So Charlie told Jesse about the “Grandpa call” he’d gotten the day before. A female voice, young, saying it was Erin. Granddaughter. Nicholas’s sister. Traveling in Europe. Telling him that one of the girls she was traveling with in Europe had been arrested with drugs, and that they both needed a lawyer, which is why Grandpa needed to wire money, like right now. Or, better yet, buy some cash cards and read her the numbers over the phone.

“Erin” said she’d call back in the morning.

“What’s pissing you off so much about that?” Jesse said. “You’re too smart to have gone for it. On top of that, you’re a cop.”

“What pisses me off,” Charlie said, “is thinking about other geezers who do fall for this scam, and lose money they can’t afford to lose. Or give the scammers an account number from their bank and get themselves good and cleaned out. Or buy into the fact that the IRS is coming after them if they don’t come up with some dough, and fast.”

He told Jesse then that Miss Emma had even lost a few thousand dollars to a scammer of her own the year before.

The martini was long gone. Charlie was working on an espresso now. And even though Charlie had gotten sidetracked riffing about the scam and spam calls, they both knew they weren’t leaving until Charlie got his vanilla ice cream.

“I’d like to have a talk with whatever thief is behind this thing,” Charlie said.

“It’s the same as looking to get even with telemarketers,” Jesse said. “But even if you could somehow stop one of them, it would be like whack-a-mole. There’s more of them than there are of us.”

Jesse turned and waved for their waiter.

“Order your ice cream,” he said. “That always makes you feel better. And let this go.”

“Something else that’s never been one of my specialties,” Charlie Farrell said. “And not one of yours, either, I might add.”

“How about this?” Jesse said. “How about we put a tap on your phone? I’ll put Molly on it. Next time they call, if they call, keep them on the line and maybe they’ll slip up.”

“I just want one face-to-face with these bums,” Charlie said. “Maybe pistol-whip one of them.”

“Focus on your next face-to-face with Miss Emma,” Jesse said. “And allow your former department to serve and protect that Irish ass of yours.”

Spike came over and took Charlie’s dessert order.

“Two scoops tonight,” Charlie said.

“Good call, Gramps,” Jesse said.

“Your ass,” Charlie Farrell said.