Night Passage (A Jesse Stone Novel) Read Online Free PDF Page B

the slopes. The big trailer trucks roared through it, sending up a sheet of water as they passed him on the down slopes. On the next hill they would slow, and he would either have to slow to their speed or pass them, only to have them roar past him again as they made up the time on the downgrade. Time was money to truckers. He sympathized with that. But, especially in bad weather, trucks were a pain in the ass. It was part of his own problem, he thought, that he understood Jennifer’s behavior only in terms of himself. She wouldn’t do that to me. But it was human. He didn’t condemn himself, though his one-wayness, too, embarrassed him sometimes when he thought of it. He’d been a cop too long not to understand the limits on human empathy. I thought she didn’t like sex anymore, when in fact, she didn’t like sex anymore with me. Even the sex she liked, as he thought about it, had, maybe, been about getting what she wanted, which, at one time, had been him. Maybe she never really liked sex as much as she seemed to. Maybe once she had used it to catch what she was fishing for, she didn’t enjoy it anymore. Because she liked fishing didn’t mean she had to like fish. The rain came now so thickly that it nearly overwhelmed the wipers. He shifted the Explorer into four-wheel drive as the gleaming interstate wound slickly through the hills. She denied Elliott when she left him, saying she had to get away and wasn’t leaving him for anyone. It was probably meant as a kindness. It probably was a kindness at the time, and by the time she dropped the other shoe and talked about Elliott, he had already begun the process of shoring up his self and could hear it. The night she left and he was alone in the house he looked at his service pistol and picked it up and thought about where to shoot himself. A lot of cops shot themselves. They had the means at hand, and they knew how. Put them ahead of the general populace, he thought, in suicide efficiency. Probably putting the muzzle in his mouth and shooting up and back would be the way most likely to take him out instantly. Cops called it eating your gun. He sat on the bed and hefted the gun and felt comforted by it. If he couldn’t stand her leaving, if she didn’t come back, it was always there. It was a comfort to know it was there. Like booze. If it got bad enough he could always drink. He put the gun back in the drawer by his bed and went and looked out the window…. The rain was a constant. Sometimes it intensified as he drove through the north spur of West Virginia. It was never gentle and sometimes it was intense, and Jesse drove mostly by focusing on the taillights of the car ahead. He had a momentary fantasy of a ten-mile-long line of cars, each driver following the taillights ahead of him going one by one over a cliff as the first driver in the long line missed the turn…. After she had left and he decided to at least postpone shooting himself, he found that it was bad enough to drink. At first nobody noticed much. Then his partner, a fifty-two-year-old guy named Ben Romero, talked to him about it. Jesse listened and shrugged and went about his drinking. After an incident at night when Jesse couldn’t seem to get the handcuffs on a perp, Romero asked for a new partner.
    “I got five kids,” Romero said. “Two of them in college. I can’t risk it with you anymore, Jesse.”
    Jesse nodded and shrugged. Romero shook hands with him, opened his mouth to say something, and closed it, and shook his head and walked away. When his new partner quit him in less than a week, Jesse was transferred inside to records. When he started not showing up for work, Cronjager called him in and talked to him and sent him to the police doctor. The doctor got him to AA. He thought the meetings were full of self-satisfied assholes, and he hated the higher power crap. After the second meeting he went home and drank nearly a fifth of scotch and slept through most of the next day. The day