Robert B. Parker’s Fallout

Eighty

Richie Burke helped him out again. Pretty soon they’d be organizing their own poker night.

Technically it was Richie’s father who’d helped him. As secretive, and elusive, as Liam Roarke wanted to be as he moved from house to house, Desmond Burke had come to know that Roarke’s primary residence was at Monument Square in Charlestown.

Not all that far, Richie told Jesse on the phone, from where Desmond himself lived.

“You’re really planning to show up there alone?” Richie asked.

“I want to tell him what I know.”

“How much of what you know can you prove?”

“Hardly any without a full confession.”

“Anticipating one out of Liam Roarke?”

“Not in my lifetime, or his,” Jesse said. “Maybe I can make it a race to see whose lasts longer.”

“But you know things.”

“Lots.”

The red-brick town house, three stories, was at the end of the block. Biggest in the neighborhood, but not looking terribly different from the other town houses in the row. There was no signage letting the neighbors know that there was a career scumbag in their midst.

But there was.

Desmond had assured Richie that Roarke was home tonight.

“How does he know for sure?” Jesse asked.

“Because he’s Desmond and because he is,” Richie said.

One last time he asked Jesse if he was sure he knew what he was doing.

“This isn’t the Old West,” Richie said.

“Crow says everything is in the end,” Jesse said, and ended the call then.

He drove past Roarke’s house once, saw two black Navigators parked in front. He kept going and went around the block, found a parking place, left his Glock and his phone in the glove compartment. They weren’t going to let him in without patting him down.

The Old West, maybe, just minus a shoot-out.

At least that was what Jesse was hoping.

Maybe this would be more of a high school stare-down, to see who backed up first.

High school again.

When he walked up the block and turned to head up the front steps, the door to the front Navigator opened and two guys in black suits got out. One blew right past Jesse on the steps, turned around at the door. The other got ahead and stopped Jesse with a forearm.

“Before you do something you’re going to regret, I’m a cop,” Jesse said.

“The one who’s going to have regrets if you don’t get your ass out of here is you,” the taller of the black suits said.

Jesse was wearing his old Red Sox hat, jeans, running shoes, and a lightweight black leather jacket that was possibly the nicest article of clothing he owned, a gift from Sunny.

“Beat it,” the guy guarding the door said.

“Not just yet.”

The guy closest to Jesse said, “You want to get in our car, maybe?”

“I don’t get in cars with strangers,” Jesse said.

The man patted him down.

“Now that we’ve got the preliminaries out of the way,” Jesse told them, “one of you ferocious guys go inside and tell your boss that Jesse Stone is here, and that he wants to talk about Tayshawn Leonard. And about the aria Steve Marin just sang for Tony Marcus.”

Nobody said anything until Jesse said, “It’s a solo number at the opera.”

Five minutes later he was inside.