Robert B. Parker’s the Hangman’s Sonnet

“What are you doing, Jesse?”

“Boston’s fifteen miles that way. Easy not to be lonely there.”

Thompson took in a deep lungful of smoke and let it out slowly, a wry smile on her face.

“I take it that’s a no,” she said.

“It’s a not today.”

She flicked the cigarette down and tamped it out under her shoe. “Fair enough.”

He nodded and pulled open the Explorer’s door. When he got in, Thompson tapped on the driver’s-side window. Jesse lowered it.

“You’re wrong about Boston,” she said. “I went to school there. Sometimes it can be the loneliest place on earth.”

Jesse watched her retreat back toward town hall and thought about how hard most people worked at hiding who and what they really were.

37

It was the phone. It sounded far, far away, and when it stopped ringing he wasn’t sure he hadn’t dreamed it. Its ring, real or imagined, roused him just enough to make him aware of the pounding in his head and the intense nausea welling up in him. He thought about trying to get up to get water, to swallow some aspirin, or to just throw up. But he couldn’t move, pinned to the sofa like a bug catcher’s specimen waiting for the jar or to be framed for a spot on the wall next to Ozzie.

Ozzie. Ozzie had been his only company last night as he slowly drank himself into the state he found himself in now. He forced his eyes open. That hurt almost as much as the pounding in his head, but he had to look at the poster. Jesse liked the sight of the soft-handed, acrobatic shortstop suspended in midair, liked to imagine how he might’ve handled the same play. He was a different kind of shortstop than the Wizard of Oz. Jesse’s hands weren’t as soft. Nobody’s were. He hadn’t been nearly as acrobatic, and though his range was above average, it couldn’t touch Ozzie’s. But as all the scouts had said of him, Jesse had the most powerful infield arm they had ever seen, better even than Shawon Dunston’s. That meant Jesse could position himself more deeply in the hole and had more time to make the hard plays than other shortstops. He remembered thinking he couldn’t get more deeply in the hole than he already was when he slipped back into unconsciousness.

This time it wasn’t the phone that roused him, but someone shaking him. Tamara? No, it had been just Ozzie and him last night. Had he misremembered? He went into fight-or-flight mode. For Jesse it wasn’t ever much of a choice. It was always fight. He jumped off the sofa, swinging his left arm in front of him to sweep away the immediate threat and to create space between himself and his attacker. Only the actions that seemed to him to be lightning-fast were, in fact, laughably slow and disjointed. His left arm missed his perceived attacker by a mile and his leap off the couch was more of a stumble and fall over the coffee table. And when he hit the floor, the pain in his head nearly split him in two.

“Jesse! Jesse! Get up! Get up.” He heard a woman’s voice call to him from the top of the well into which he’d fallen.

“Jesse. Jesse.” Another woman was at the top of the well, calling to him.

Then he blacked out.

When the cold water hit him he startled. He reflexively shook his head, but the pain of it nearly drove him back into his stupor, cold water or not. The water stopped.

“Jesse, for chrissakes, c’mon. Get up!”

When he didn’t open his eyes, the water came back on and stayed on until Jesse opened his eyes and they stayed open.

“All right. All right. Shut it off,” he said, holding his right hand up in front of his face. “Shut it off.”

The water stopped.

“You among the living now?” Molly asked, kneeling down beside the tub in Jesse’s downstairs bathroom.

He didn’t answer, his eyelids flickering, shutting. When they shut, the water came on again and Molly let it run until Jesse had lifted himself up onto his knees. And when he got on his knees, that sensation he hated hit him. It hit him hard, the bathroom spinning off into space. He climbed out of the tub, crawled over to the toilet, and heaved up the contents of his stomach.

“You can wait for me in the living room,” Molly said to someone standing beyond the bathroom door.

Now Jesse lay on the cold tiles, grabbing his head, but at least the spins had stopped. Molly picked up Jesse’s head and cradled it in her lap. She opened his mouth and slowly poured a bottle of water into him. He coughed some up, but he got most of it down. When that one was finished, she poured another one into him.

“Aspirin,” he said, pointing to the medicine cabinet. “Aspirin.”

“Here. Take these. The ME said they’ll do you more good than aspirin or any of that other stuff.”

Jesse swallowed them with more water, but they still went down hard. He sat up, gingerly, leaning his back against the tub.

“Who else is here?”

“Alisha.”

“You shouldn’t have brought her.”

“And you shouldn’t need me to wake you up out of a drunken stupor to save your job. It’s not like I had a big choice about who to bring.”