Robert B. Parker’s the Hangman’s Sonnet

She didn’t like it and it showed. This was always the nature of her interactions with Jesse Stone. He always wanted to cut corners but always came armed with a valid reason to do so. The last time they’d done business, she had had to help the chief sneak a man who’d been hit by a truck out of his room.

“The best I can do is to call Dr. Marx. If he says you can go in, then I won’t stop you.”

“Fair enough.”

Jesse waited. He could tell by the expression on Nurse Holt’s face that Marx had given his blessing for him to show the photo arrays to Walsh. And if that didn’t give her away, her slamming down the phone certainly did. Even her stride was angry.

“The doctor says that if Mr. Walsh is awake and agrees to see you, then you are to be permitted to talk with him, but that if he is asleep or doesn’t feel up to it, you are to come back in the morning. Understood?”

“Uh-huh.”

Sixty seconds later, she waved Jesse into Walsh’s room.

The room was dark. Jesse had had a concussion or two and knew that bright light and loud noises could trigger awful headaches. But he couldn’t risk Walsh misidentifying the suspects or leaving any doubt in his identifications because the lighting was poor. So he stood beside Walsh, laid out each array on the movable food table, and shone his keychain LED flash onto the photos. He made sure to keep direct light out of Walsh’s eyes. The photos were all the same size and were all in color. The subjects were all roughly the same size in the photos, the same race, and within a fair age range. Jesse had seen judges throw out IDs because the arrays had been done in such a way as to influence the witness’s choices. Not in Paradise, not on Jesse’s watch. And just to make doubly sure, he had Nurse Holt stay to confirm the IDs.

“This guy was the guy who clocked me,” Walsh said, pounding his index finger on Kirk Kingston Curnutt’s photo. “He tried to hide his face with his shirt, but it slipped off him and I got a good look. And this fella here, he’s the one who tied me up.” This time Walsh was pounding Humphrey Bolton’s head shot. “I hope you find an excuse to shoot these two bastards.”

Jesse let that pass without comment. Instead he wished Walsh a speedy recovery, thanked Nurse Holt, and left. He had calls to make and business to do.

34

King was on his way to the meet, visions of blondes and Porsches dancing in his head. The man on the other end of the phone hadn’t sounded pleased at having to cough up all that money. That was just too damned bad for him, King thought, smiling as he downshifted the stolen Outback and turned past the WELCOME TO PARADISE sign at the edge of town. When his contractor demanded they get together back in Paradise, King was tempted to up the payoff back to a million dollars. But impulsiveness had gotten him into trouble before and he wasn’t going down that path again. Not this time, not when he was finally going to hit it out of the park. He shook his head, remembering how he’d done time in various state pens for boosting cars on the spur of the moment or the one time he pistol-whipped a gas-station attendant over seventy-eight dollars. Seventy-eight freakin’ dollars! Even his greed had been small-time. Petty and small-time... not anymore.

That was not to say he wasn’t totally pissed off that the exchange was happening in Paradise. It was risky and just plain dumb for him to go back to the town where he was likely going to be charged with felony murder. He had hoped that the DA would see the old biddy’s death as an accident and that they had meant the woman no harm. But he guessed the cops had spotted her split lip and that their attempt to clean her up and to place her back in her bed hadn’t gone a long way in putting things right. With all that was hanging over his head, there was only one option: make the exchange and get gone.

He’d left Hump behind earlier that day while his ex-cellmate was snoring up a storm. King left him a note with two grand extra from the ten thousand they’d earned. He’d already given Hump his five large for the job. Surprisingly, King felt crappy about leaving Hump on his own with just seven thousand dollars and cutting him out of the big money, but prison friendships went only so far. Truth be told, he hoped the extra two grand would encourage Hump to do the favor King had asked of him in the note. He wanted Hump to stay in the motel room a few more days and to keep as low a profile as possible. Besides, Hump was a guy who could make seven grand go a long way. He was an uncomplicated man without a lot of needs.