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

House. But he assumed he wasn’t getting a glowing recommendation from the LAPD, and Paradise was the only one to offer him a job. He remembered the march of Chicago cityscape along the lake front, but the New York skyline was different. Chicago had been exuberant. This congregation of spires was far too reserved for exuberance. There was nothing exultant in their massed height. There was something like contempt in the brute grace of the skyscrapers standing above the river.
    The memory of the interview embarrassed him. He had been drinking scotch in the bar downstairs and his memory was the embarrassing memory of all drunks, he thought, the struggle to seem sober undercut by the half-suppressed knowledge that you were slurring your words. What bothered him even more was that he had needed to drink even though he knew it would jeopardize the job. His face felt hot at the memory. But they hadn’t noticed. The two interviewers, Hathaway, the selectman, and a Paradise police captain named Burke, seemed oblivious of the times when he couldn’t stop slushing the s’s in Los Angeles. It was late afternoon. Maybe they’d had a couple before the interview themselves. They’d talked in a one-bedroom suite that Hathaway was in. The police captain had a single room down the hall. Jesse remembered the room being too hot And he remembered that Burke hardly spoke at all, and that Hathaway didn’t seem to be asking the right questions. He’d had to excuse himself twice to go to the bathroom, and each time he had splashed cold water on his face from the sink. But drunk is drunk, as he well knew, and cold water didn’t change anything. Hathaway had sat in front of the window eleven stories above the loop with a manila folder in his lap, to which he occasionally referred. Hathaway asked about his education, his experience, his marital status.
    “Divorced,” Jesse said.
    He didn’t like saying it. It still seemed to him somehow a shameful thing to admit. It made him feel less.
    Hathaway, if he thought it shameful, made no sign. Burke was silent in the shadow near the window to Hathaway’s left.
    “What do you think, Jesse,” Hathaway said, about fifteen minutes into the interview, “about the right to keep and bear arms?”
    “Constitution’s clear on that, I think.” Jesse had trouble with all the t’s in constitution .
    “Yes,” Hathaway said, “I think so too.”
    They talked a bit about Jesse’s life in the minor leagues and how it was too bad that he couldn’t make the throw anymore. They talked of how many cases he had cleared in L.A.
    “Nobody clears them all,” Jesse said with a smile, trying to enlist Burke, who remained silent, his arms folded. Clears came out clearth .
    “We talked with your Captain Cronjager,” Hathaway said, referring to his folder.
    Jesse waited. Cronjager was a decent enough guy, but he believed in police work and he might not recommend a cop who drank on duty.
    “He speaks very well of you, though he said you might have been developing a drinking problem when you left.”
    Jesse made a minimizing gesture with his right hand.
    “I probably went off the deep end there for a bit during the time my marriage was breaking up,” Jesse said. “But I’m fine now.”
    He had started to say I am , and then wasn’t sure he could transit between the two vowels, and changed it to I’m . Did they hear the stutter?
    “All of us like a drink,” Hathaway said. “And in times of personal anguish, many of us need one. When one sees a man with your record applying for a job like this one, questions occur. I think I can speak for Lou when I say it is a relief really to hear that you maybe drank a little too much at a time when most of us would. I don’t have a problem, do you, Lou?”
    Burke’s heavy voice came from the shadow where he sat.
    “No problem, Hasty.”
    And that had been it. They had hired him on the spot and brought out a bottle and had drinks to seal the bargain. It had worked