Robert B. Parker’s Fallout

Three

Charlie had driven to the Gull in his beloved Jetta. Despite the old man’s protests, Jesse took the keys and drove him home to the small, two-story house on the west side of town that he’d kept even after he and Maisie had moved to Florida.

He had never been able to bring himself to sell it, he told Jesse one time, because there was too much history inside that house, and too much love.

“Does that make me sound like some kind of sap?” Charlie had said.

“Just makes me love you even more,” Jesse had said.

As they were walking across the Gull’s parking lot, Charlie had said, “I can drive after just one glass of vodka.”

“Not as well as I can after none,” Jesse had said.

“I still have seniority on you,” Charlie Farrell said.

“So you do,” Jesse said. “But look at me, I’m the one with the keys.”

It was a little over a mile from Jesse’s condo to the Gull. Jesse had walked there because he liked walking more and more, and had been running less and less now that his knees felt as if somebody had taken a baseball bat to them. It was the shoulder injury that had ended his career. But somehow it was his knees, both of them, that had become arthritic over time.

You pay and you pay, Jesse thought.

For something you’d pay anything to have back.

After dropping off Charlie he walked through town, hardly anybody on the streets tonight. The ones who recognized him nodded. Some said hello. Some wanted to talk about the Paradise Pirates beating Marshport.

He walked past the movie theater that Lily Cain had restored after it had burned down. That was before Jesse found out that she was someone other than the Queen Mum of Paradise that everybody had always thought she was, and ended up with a bullet in her head that Jesse was sure her son, Bryce, had put there, but was still unable to prove, to his everlasting regret.

He took a slight detour and then there were the More Chocolate buildings in front of him, upstairs lights in the old firehouse still on. Jesse really did like Hillary More, liked her a lot, actually, if not as much as she seemed to want him to. She was pretty and had a good laugh and could swear like a ballplayer and could hold her liquor.

A skill I never mastered.

But a skill, for some reason, he still found admirable, in men or women.

Jesse kept telling himself that someday, when he was old, he would drink again. But how old? As old as Charlie Farrell? He stared up at the second-floor lights and wondered if Hillary might be up there working late. Hillary. Who continued to make it crystal clear that she was right here if Jesse wanted her.

“We need to keep church and state separate now that you’ve become a civic leader,” Jesse said. “And especially if you do run for mayor.”

“What about on weekends?” Hillary More said.

She reminded him a little bit of his ex-wife, Jenn. Just smarter. By a lot. With a much better sense of humor. Jenn had ultimately turned out to be a bad decision that had taken up too much of his goddamn life. Maybe Hillary was another mistake waiting to happen. But not all of his decisions, or relationships with women, had been bad. Sunny hadn’t been. Things hadn’t even ended bad between them. They’d just ended.

Jesse was through town and passing the house that had once belonged to Mayor Neil O’Hara, someone else who had been shot to death in Jesse’s town, for the crime of getting in the way of a land deal.

Naming of the dead, Jesse thought.

The older you got, the longer you stayed on the job, the more you found yourself doing that. He wondered if Charlie Farrell did the same thing when he was alone and awake in the night. Charlie had told him one time that you developed plenty of scar tissue if you did this kind of work long enough, mostly out of necessity.

Jesse had told himself he was going to take the long walk home after he dropped off Charlie.

But now knew he was not.

So he made a right off Main Street and then another, and walked another half-mile or so, and finally stood in front of the small white cottage with the green shutters and the well-kept front lawn.

Knocked on the door.

She opened it, smiling.

“Evening, Gidget,” he said to Nellie Shofner.

“Can’t you get Molly to stop calling me that?” she said. “Because maybe if she does, you will.”

She was actually older than Jesse had thought when she first started working at the Crier, thirty-two now.

She stepped forward quickly and put her arms around him and kissed him. He told himself it would have been less than gentlemanly to not kiss her back.

When they stepped back, Jesse grinned.

“First I’ve got to get Molly to stop calling me Moondoggie,” he said.

“I looked it up,” Nellie said. “That TV show where Sally Field played Gidget came out in 1965.”

“Original movie’s older than that,” Jesse said. “Sandra Dee was the original Gidget.”

“Who?” Nellie said.

“I basically think Molly is just making a more general cultural reference,” Jesse said.

“Should I point out to Molly that calling me Gidget is a way of making her look old?” Nellie said.

“Sure,” Jesse said. “Why don’t you call her fat while you’re at it.”

Nellie pulled him inside, shut the door, pushed him up against it, and kissed him far more enthusiastically than she had before.

“Well, you’re in luck,” Nellie said. “Tomorrow’s not a school day.”

The next morning, Jesse awakened even earlier than he usually did, five-thirty today, dressed quietly, left Nellie sleeping soundly, was having his first cup of coffee at home, best of the day the way the first drink always had been, when he got the call about the first body.