Robert B. Parker’s Fallout

Forty-Eight

Jesse invited Nellie to dinner at his place. He said he’d cook. She insisted that she wanted to cook, in one of her occasional bursts of domesticity. Sunny would have them, too. Nellie just had them less frequently. When she did want to prepare dinner for the two of them, Jesse would reluctantly agree, and just hope she didn’t try to punch above her weight in the kitchen.

Tonight she did not, going with a simple green salad and pasta with Rao’s marinara sauce. Jesse didn’t mention it to her, but even Nellie Shofner couldn’t screw up pasta with Rao’s.

She did allow Jesse to prepare the garlic bread.

When everything was ready, they both had iced tea with it. By now Jesse had made it abundantly clear to her that he didn’t mind if she drank in his presence. But didn’t fight her on that, either.

As they ate he told her about Hillary More’s visit to his office.

“You believe that Fortin just wanted to talk to her about getting her kid back on the baseball team?” Nellie asked.

“If he thought you could help him win the state title,” Jesse said, “I believe he’d try to recruit you. But if Kevin More was a good enough player, why didn’t his coach find another position for him before Jack died?”

“You tell me,” she said. “You’re the old ballplayer.”

“Just old.”

They ate in silence for a few moments. Nellie was a talker, but had slowly come to realize that Jesse hated small talk the way he hated bad guys. He didn’t mention that the pasta was slightly undercooked. But Rao’s sauce, as always, saved the day. Jesse had long since stopped calling it gravy, what his Italian mother had called it when he was growing up, and it had so often been just the two of them eating like this at the kitchen table.

He sometimes thought that the only time he hadn’t felt lonely in his life was when he was a shortstop, and had a team around him, even if he was the only one out there between second and third and in the batter’s box. Didn’t matter what team. It was the only family he really felt he had when he was growing up. The only thing that resembled a family for him until Molly and Suit.

Nellie finally said, “I’m not sure Kevin quit, by the way, even though that’s the story everybody goes with.”

“Fortin cut him?”

“It wasn’t a big thing at the time, because the team was so good,” Nellie said. “At the very least, it was a mutual parting of the ways. He didn’t like the coach and the coach didn’t like him.”

“So his mother having a dinner date or meeting to talk about him rejoining the team doesn’t make sense,” Jesse said.

“Does anything these days?” Nellie asked him.

They cleaned up together. He had decided that he didn’t want her to stay the night. Somehow he knew that she knew, without it having been discussed over dinner. Maybe Molly was right, and women really were smarter than men. They got a step or two ahead of you when you were young, and then you spent the rest of your life trying to catch up.

At least on stuff like this.

“I think I’m going to head home now, if you don’t mind,” Nellie said.

“You sure?”

She came over and kissed him almost chastely on the lips, pulled back, smiled. “No,” she said. “But you are.”

Jesse pulled her into him and kissed her now, with some follow-through.

“I hope you know how much I appreciate the way you’ve helped us out on Jack Carlisle,” he said.

“Not doing it for you, old ballplayer guy,” she said. “Doing it for me. Same as you’re doing it for you.” She smiled again. “Me being me. You being you. So far it seems to be working for us.”

“We’re doing it for Suit, too.”

“Yes,” she said. “We certainly are.”

“Can I get a rain check on us hitting the sheets?” he said.

“ ‘Hitting the sheets’?”

“What can I tell you. I’m a product of my times.”

“Which times?”

He stood at his front window and watched her go out the front door of his building and make the walk up the street to where she’d parked her car, never wanting to park it right in front of his place.

He was about to stop watching her when he saw the van come up the street. It was going too fast and then stopped with a screech of tires. Then the van’s side door was opening and a guy was jumping out and Nellie was turning in to him as he swung his right fist. He knocked her to the ground before grabbing her by the hair and pulling her up, his other hand over her mouth.

Jesse was already running, hoping he wasn’t going to be too late getting down there, grabbing his Glock off the table in the foyer, then out the door.

He was taking the stairs when he heard the shot.