THE SPENSER NOVELS
Robert B. Parker’s Kickback
(by Ace Atkins)
Robert B. Parker’s Cheap Shot
(by Ace Atkins)
Silent Night
(with Helen Brann)
Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland
(by Ace Atkins)
Robert B. Parker’s Lullaby
(by Ace Atkins)
Sixkill
Painted Ladies
The Professional
Rough Weather
Now & Then
Hundred-Dollar Baby
School Days
Cold Service
Bad Business
Back Story
Widow’s Walk
Potshot
Hugger Mugger
Hush Money
Sudden Mischief
Small Vices
Chance
Thin Air
Walking Shadow
Paper Doll
Double Deuce
Pastime
Stardust
Playmates
Crimson Joy
Pale Kings and Princes
Taming a Sea-Horse
A Catskill Eagle
Valediction
The Widening Gyre
Ceremony
A Savage Place
Early Autumn
Looking for Rachel Wallace
The Judas Goat
Promised Land
Mortal Stakes
God Save the Child
The Godwulf Manuscript
THE JESSE STONE NOVELS
Robert B. Parker’s Blind Spot
(by Reed Farrel Coleman)
Robert B. Parker’s Damned If You Do
(by Michael Brandman)
Robert B. Parker’s Fool Me Twice
(by Michael Brandman)
Robert B. Parker’s Killing the Blues
(by Michael Brandman)
Split Image
Night and Day
Stranger in Paradise
High Profile
Sea Change
Stone Cold
Death in Paradise
Trouble in Paradise
Night Passage
THE SUNNY RANDALL NOVELS
Spare Change
Blue Screen
Melancholy Baby
Shrink Rap
Perish Twice
Family Honor
THE COLE/HITCH WESTERNS
Robert B. Parker’s The Bridge
(by Robert Knott)
Robert B. Parker’s Bull River
(by Robert Knott)
Robert B. Parker’s Ironhorse
(by Robert Knott)
Blue-Eyed Devil
Brimstone
Resolution
Appaloosa
ALSO BY ROBERT B. PARKER
Double Play
Gunman’s Rhapsody
All Our Yesterdays
A Year at the Races
(with Joan H. Parker)
Perchance to Dream
Poodle Springs
(with Raymond Chandler)
Love and Glory
Wilderness
Three Weeks in Spring
(with Joan H. Parker)
Training with Weights
(with John R. Marsh)
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2015 by The Estate of Robert B. Parker
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Coleman, Reed Farrel.
Robert B. Parker’s the Devil wins : a Jesse Stone novel / Reed Farrel Coleman.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-15563-3
1. Stone, Jesse (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Police chiefs—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.O47445R64 2015 2015017369
813'.54—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
To Mel Farman and Jim Kennedy,
for taking me in as one of their own
CONTENTS
Also by Robert B. Parker
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter
83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Acknowledgments
1
Jesse Stone no longer felt adrift. No longer a man caught between two coasts, he had finally left his days as an L.A. homicide detective behind him. If not his private shame at how his life there had gone to hell. He was chief of police in Paradise, Mass. This was his town now. Yet there were still some things about the East Coast and the Atlantic he had never gotten used to and wasn’t sure he ever would. Nor’easters, for one. He found their brooding, slate-gray clouds and roiling tides a little unnerving. These late-fall or winter storms seemed to blow up out of spite, raking across whole swaths of New England or the Mid-Atlantic, leaving nothing but pain in their wake.
As was his habit, he drove through the darkened streets of Paradise in his old Ford Explorer before heading home. He wanted to get a few hours sleep before going back to work. Maybe a drink, too. The storm wasn’t supposed to make landfall until about midnight, but the winds were bending trees back against their will, sleet already pelting his windshield. Jesse shook his head thinking about that. About how storms in the east warned you they were coming. About how they told you when they were coming and then kicked your ass.
It was different out west. He remembered how, when he was a kid in Tucson, a few inches of unexpected rain would morph into the cascading wall of a flash flood, washing away everything before it. One minute people would be horseback riding or hiking through bone-dry arroyos and the next they’d be swallowed up by waters squeezed between canyon walls and ground sunbaked so mercilessly hard it could not soak up a drop of rain. Jesse remembered that he had once gone out with his dad, searching for some missing hikers after one of the floods. How they had come upon the body of a drowned horse. It had been many years since he had thought of that horse, its carcass rotting in the Arizona sun.
Then in L.A. there were the choking Santa Ana winds that would blow across the mountains, swoop down into the valleys and through the canyons from the Mojave. The Santa Anas brought destruction with them, too, sucking the moisture out of the vegetation, wildfires following in their path. Fires that would consume whole hillsides, one after the other. Sometimes the winds blew so strongly through the canyons that they howled. His ex-partner used to say it was Satan whistling while he worked. At the moment, Jesse felt about as far away from those Santa Anas as a man could get, but he thought he could still hear Satan’s whistling in the winds that buffeted his SUV.
There weren’t many cars on the road, but a few brave or stupid souls dared the weather. Jesse knew most of the vehicles. Robbie Wilson, the fire chief, was out in his red Jeep, looking for trouble. Jesse didn’t have much patience for men like Wilson, guys who liked being big fish in tiny ponds. Little men with big chips on both shoulders. Men with something to prove, always on the prowl for a chance to prove it. Jesse could never figure out what it was Robbie Wilson had to prove. He also hated that Wilson refused to call him by his first name, always calling him Chief or Chief Stone.
Alexio Dragoa, one of the few commercial fishermen who still sailed out of Paradise, was coming from the docks in his ancient F-150. That damned pickup was nearly all rust. The thing was like an old married couple who stayed together more out of habit than anything else. No doubt Alexio had been securing his boat, the Dragoa Rainha, in anticipation of the storm. Jesse gave the fisherman a wave in passing. Dragoa, a gruff Portuguese SOB, couldn’t be bothered to return the gesture. Par for the course, Jesse thought. Par for the course.
Bill Marchand was out in front of his insurance brokerage on Nantucket Street, wrestling the wind for control of a storm shutter. Jesse pulled over to lend him a hand. Bill and Jesse were friendly, if not exactly friends. Jesse didn’t have friends, not the way other people had friends. But Marchand sponsored the police softball team and was generous with local charities. In all the years Jesse had served as chief, there hadn’t been many town selectmen who’d earned his respect. Most selectmen had proven themselves craven and spineless, rarely backing Jesse or the department in tough situations. Bill Marchand was the exception. He was a thoughtful man who had usually based his support not on the direction of the political currents but on the facts before him.
“Let me get that for you,” Jesse said, pinning the shutter to the wall.
“Thanks, Jesse. It’s gonna be a bad one, this nor’easter. You been through enough of these, you can smell it on the wind.”
“One is enough of these.” Jesse used his free hand to lift up the fleece-lined collar of his jacket against the sleet. The wind was gusting more intensely. “Ready for the shutter?” Jesse asked.
“I’ve got the latch ready.”
Jesse forced the shutter closed, Marchand helping the last foot or two. When the shutter was in place, the insurance broker latched it closed.
“I hope the damned thing holds. I’ve had to replace these shutters twice,” Marchand said, raising his voice above the wind.
“I’m sure your insurance will cover it.”
“You’re a funny man, Jesse Stone. Thanks again,” Marchand said, offering Jesse his gloved right hand. “It’s gonna be a bad one, all right. I’ll be busy for weeks after this. We’ll have to call adjusters in from all over the States. You watch yourself out there.”
But it was Jesse’s job to watch out for everyone else. He waited for Marchand to get into his massive Infiniti SUV and drive off before pulling away himself. As Jesse was about to turn for home, he caught sight of another vehicle he recognized. It was John Millner’s beat-up Chevy van. Millner was a career criminal, a petty thief who’d been in and out of commonwealth correctional facilities during Jesse’s tenure as chief. Millner was from the Swap—Southwest Area of Paradise—the only rough part of town. But even the Swap was changing. It was turning into a hipper, more ethnically diverse part of Paradise. Millner’s family was old-school Swap and John was more a lowlife than a tough guy. A parasite, an opportunist, not a mastermind.
Jesse followed the white van at a distance up into the bluffs that overlooked the ocean and the rest of town to the south. The Bluffs were where the rich founders of Paradise had built their big fussy houses more than a century and a half ago. Most of those families were gone, their manses knocked down, properties long since sold off. A few, like the Salter place, remained as summer homes. Many had fallen into disrepair.
Millner’s van pulled off the road by a darkened behemoth of a house: the old Rutherford place. It had been vacant for Jesse’s entire tenure in Paradise. For years there had been efforts by the town’s historical society to get it named to the commonwealth’s register of historical places, but those avenues had finally been exhausted, and come spring the Rutherford place would be demolished. Jesse had a pretty good idea of what Millner meant to get up to. Giant old houses were lined with miles of copper wiring and other metals that could be sold off to scrap dealers at good prices. The problem for crooked scavengers like Millner was opportunity. You needed time to break through plaster walls and lath to get to the wiring. And a big storm had opportunity written all over it. Emergency situations stretched the cops thin, especially small-town forces like the Paradise PD.
Normally, Jesse would have given Millner enough rope to hang himself. He would have let him break into the condemned house before arresting him, but Jesse didn’t have time for that now, not with the storm blowing in. When Millner, all six-foot-six of him, got out of his vehicle and went to swing open the van’s side door, Jesse shined his Maglite in the thief’s face.
“Who the hell is that?” asked Millner, holding his hand before his eyes to block the light.
“It’s Chief Stone, John. What are you doing here?”
Millner hemmed and hawed, thinking of any reasonable lie.
“Don’t bother,” Jesse said. “I’m not in the mood for your crap. C
onsider yourself lucky I don’t want to deal with you tonight. Now, get out of here and don’t let any of my people catch your ass up here again.”
Millner didn’t say a word, just got back into his van and drove away down toward town. Jesse watched the van’s taillights until they disappeared. Then he stepped to the edge of the bluff on which the Rutherford house stood. He looked out at the vast blackness of the Atlantic. He listened to the bones of the old house creak in the wind, listened to the wind whistling through the broken windows. He thought he heard the devil at work. He decided he really needed that drink.
2
He supposed they were all thinking the same thing: This can’t be happening. Not again. Not after all these years. But it was happening, only this time they weren’t a bunch of kids with too much Southern Comfort and Thai stick in them. That first time, it was some innocent fun gone sideways. Severely sideways, plunging them into a paralyzing hell with slick, jagged walls from which there would be no escape. None. Not ever. That they were here to kill their old friend proved as much.
They had been given a temporary reprieve, a cruel reprieve, lasting just long enough to fool them into believing they had put real distance between that old evil and the fragile lives they had built in the meantime. Lives that included wives and lovers, children, careers, small successes, and grander failures, but haunted lives just the same. Haunted because distance from evil is a myth of time, because they were never more than one restless night or, worse still, a tainted moment of joy away from it.
The wind rattled the windows and the loading bay door. The plinking of sleet was less urgent now that the snow was falling in sheets and collecting on the corrugated metal roof. Raw, cold air seeped into the maintenance shed like an accusation and made heaving clouds of their breath. Small plumes of breath came from the mouth of the nude man on the floor at their feet. His wrists and ankles were trussed behind him and his sun-streaked brown hair was caked with the drying blood that had leaked from the welt at the base of his skull. His broken lower jaw was unhinged, his mouth a wreck of splintered teeth and bone. After the pipe had been laid into him, the spray of blood had given the air a coppery tang that the two other men could almost taste. But the blood had settled out of the air like silt out of water. Now the place smelled only of burnt black motor oil, gasoline fumes, and antifreeze.
“What’d you do with his clothes?”