Robert B. Parker’s the Hangman’s Sonnet

“Hump, I’m glad I cleared that up for you, but why’d you come up here in the first place?”

“The old gal.”

“What about her?”

“I don’t think she’s doing too good.”

King raced right past Hump, taking the steps two at a time, and barreled into the spindly-legged table at the base of the stairs. The collision knocked a white-and-blue-speckled ewer and basin off the table. The antique porcelain smashed onto the wide plank flooring and cracked into a hundred nasty-looking shards. He didn’t stop to check out the mess he’d made, hoping the job wouldn’t end up the same way. He turned down the hallway and headed for the rickety basement stairs. They creaked and moaned under his weight.

“Hey, lady! Lady, you all right?” he called out to her even before he reached the basement slab.

She didn’t answer. They’d been pretty gentle with her, up to a point. Sure, they’d made a show of their handguns, threatening to use them on her if she didn’t behave. Maybe Hump had tugged her white hair a little too hard and King had had to slap her when she started squawking. The blow split her lip and she bled a lot more than he expected a dried-up old prune like her to bleed. Her skin was so brittle, so papery and white, she didn’t even look like she had any blood in her. But they’d been gentler with her after that, careful not to break her birdlike bones when they tied her to a lally column. They’d used duct tape to bind her hands behind her and to wrap her ankles to the base of the pole, making sure not to cut off her circulation. When she started squawking again, Hump had shoved a balled-up sock in her yap and covered it with a strip of tape.

King called to her again. “Lady!”

But when his eyes adjusted to the dim light and he saw her head slumped, body sagging, he knew it was a waste of breath. The only voice she would hear now was St. Peter’s. King felt her neck for a pulse even though he knew he wouldn’t find one. When he pulled the tape away from her mouth, King was sickened by the stink of vomit. The old lady had puked into her gag and choked to death, or maybe it had been a combination of things. Maybe it had just been her time. What the hell did he know about it?

There was a loud pounding as Hump came down the stairs.

“She okay?” he asked.

“Dead.”

He crossed himself. “Oh, jeez, King. We killed the old lady. You said this wasn’t that kinda job.”

“Well, pal, she’s dead, and unless you know how to unscramble eggs or raise the dead, we better find what we came to find.”

“What should we do with the old lady?”

“We’ll figure that out later. For now, leave her. She’s not going anywhere.”

Hump shrugged, turned, and went back upstairs.

When Hump was gone, King prayed. Not for the old lady, but for himself.

4

There were probably places Jesse wanted to be even less than here, but he just couldn’t think of any at the moment. When he pulled his new Ford Explorer into the church parking lot and took his hands off the wheel, he noticed they were shaking worse than they had been when Bascom, White, and Bella were in his office, or earlier when he’d been standing before his steam-clouded bathroom mirror. Then he’d been studying the three-day growth of salt-and-pepper stubble along his angular jawline and square chin and the taut skin of his still-handsome face. He ran his fingers through his thick hair, found the gray creeping in there, too. He’d looked everywhere in the mirror except directly into his own eyes, because all he saw there was condemnation.

Stepping out of the black SUV, Jesse ignored the brilliant sun in the flawless, achingly blue skies above Paradise. Somewhere, a part of him recognized it was a perfect day for a wedding, but it was a muted, distant part of him, a part that ached nearly as much as the skies. He shoved his hands into his tuxedo pants pockets as he walked, not because he didn’t want to see them shaking, but because he didn’t want anyone else to see. He had the rings in his right jacket pocket. He’d checked before leaving the station house. Twice since. Jesse Stone had rarely dropped ground balls hit at him a hundred miles an hour on iffy minor-league infields, so he knew he could handle giving the preacher two wedding bands without making an error.

As skilled as Jesse had been at narrowing his focus to a laser point, at shutting out crowd noise or chatter from the opposing catcher, at ignoring competing theories about a crime, he had taken it to a whole new level. For the past several months, since witnessing the love of his life murdered right in front of him, Jesse had pared his existence down to three stark essentials: grief, regret, and Johnnie Walker Black. They had become like a noose around his neck to the exclusion of everything else, including his job as police chief.