Sea Change

“Hey,” Radborn yelled. “Run for your fucking life, it’s the Paradise cops.”

Radborn was 6'5" and weighed more than 300 pounds.

Standing on the bar he seemed too big for the room. Jesse smiled at him.

“Should have brought an elephant gun,” Jesse said.

“Shit,” Radborn said and jumped down off the bar, still holding the whiskey bottle. “You know who I am?”

4

S E A C H A N G E

“I always love that question,” Jesse said. “Yeah, I know who you are. Jonathan Ogden knocked you down and stomped on your face when you played the Ravens last year.”

“Fuck you,” Radborn said.

“Oh,” Jesse said, “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

A few people snickered.

“I don’t give a fuck. You a cop or what,” Radborn said.

“I’ll kick your ass and Fat Boy’s right here and now.”

Simpson reddened.

“A lot of that is muscle,” Jesse said.

“I play football,” Radborn said. “You play football, you’ll go with anybody. You ready to go?”

“Be better if you walked outside with us,” Jesse said.

“Fuck you.”

“I’ll take that as a no,” Jesse said. “Suit, gimme your stick.”

Simpson took the nightstick from the loop on his belt and handed it to Jesse.

“You think that fucking toothpick gonna matter?” Radborn said.

He was six inches taller than Jesse and more than 125

pounds heavier. Jesse took the stick from Simpson and with one motion hit Radborn in the testicles with it. Radborn gasped and doubled over. Jesse stepped around him quickly and hit him behind each knee with the stick. The legs col-lapsed. Radborn went to his knees. Jesse took a handful of hair and yanked him forward so that he was facedown on the floor. He glanced back at Simpson.

5

R O B E R T B . P A R K E R

“I played baseball,” Jesse said. “Cuff him, Dan-o.”

Simpson handcuffed Radborn. With help from the bouncer they got Radborn on his feet and stumbled him to the squad car and strapped him in. He’d been drinking all day. It was having its effect. He was half conscious, rocking in the backseat. He was so big that the squad car rocked with him. He bent forward suddenly against the seat belt and vomited. Some of the crowd had followed them outside. They applauded.

The two cops and the bouncer looked in at him for a moment without saying anything.

“Race Week,” the bouncer said.

“And it’s only the first day,” Jesse said.

Simpson got in to drive and Jesse sat up front beside him. They put the front windows down. Jesse looked back through the thick wire screening that separated them from Radborn in the backseat. As he looked, Radford threw up again.

“One of the perks of being chief,” Jesse said, “is you don’t have to clean the patrol car.”

“That be your driver’s job?” Simpson said.

“Yes,” Jesse said. “I believe so.”

6

2

J enn sat with Jesse outside, at a table on the deck of the Gray Gull restaurant, where

they could look at the harbor.

“Is it always like this during Race Week?” Jenn said.

“Has been since I arrived,” Jesse said.

“Just to watch a bunch of sailboats race?”

“And drink and eat and fornicate,” Jesse said, “and maybe snort a little something, bet some money. Maybe make a deal with somebody important. Big boats start arriving a month before. Lot of people come here for Race Week and never see a race.”

He was drinking iced tea. She had a daiquiri. She was R O B E R T B . P A R K E R

wearing Oakley wraparounds. The veranda looked east at the harbor, and the sun was very low in the west and entirely screened from them by the body of the restaurant. Jenn was a weather girl on a Boston television station and people occasionally recognized her. The glasses didn’t prevent that, and, he thought, that wasn’t why she wore them. She saw him looking at her and put her hand on top of his across the table.

“How we doing?” she said.

“So far, so good,” Jesse said.

The harbor was dense with racing sailboats, and beyond, in the deeper water near the point where the harbor opened onto the limitless ocean, the big yachts lay at anchor.

“Do they race those big ones?” Jenn said.

“Some of them,” Jesse said. “At the end of Race Week some of the yachts race from here to Virginia Beach. I’m told that the racing yachts are different than the yachts you just sail around in, but I’m not a seagoing guy, and I can’t tell you what the difference is.”

The waitress brought lobster salad for each of them and a glass of white wine for Jenn.

“It came in on the news wire that you had to arrest that huge football player yesterday,” Jenn said. “One of the sports guys told me.”

“He was drunk at the Dory,” Jesse said. “Broke the bouncer’s nose.”

“The sports guy said you subdued him with a nightstick.”

“I borrowed Suit’s,” Jesse said.

8

S E A C H A N G E

“I was with, what’s his name, Redford?”

“Radborn,” Jesse said.

“I was with Radborn at a charity thing,” Jenn said. “He’s enormous. Weren’t you intimidated? Even a little?”

“The bigger they are . . .” Jesse said.

“Oh God,” Jenn said. “Not that.”

Jesse smiled. “How about, ‘it’s not the size of the dog in the fight . . .’?”