Death in Paradise

"Maybe," Jesse said.

They were walking the beach at the margin where the sand was hardest. The ocean eased up toward them as they walked and almost reached them and lingered and shrank back, and eased up toward them again. Lilly stopped and stared out at the ocean. Jesse stood beside her.

"Long way out," Jesse said.

They stood silently together looking at the horizon.

"Where are we going, you and I?" Lilly said.

"Back to your place?" Jesse said. "Where I show another hard side of myself."

Lilly smiled. "Probably," she said.

The easy wind off the ocean blew her silvery hair back from her young face and pressed her white cotton dress tight against her chest and thighs.

"But I meant where are we going? more like, ah, metaphorically."

"You mean what about our future?"

"Yes."

"Like walk into the sunset?"

"Yes."

Jesse put his head back so that he was squinting up at the sky. He chewed his gum slowly. The tide was coming in. The reach of the ocean water had forced them back a step.

"I think I love you, Jesse."

Jesse's jaw moved gently as he chewed the gum. The two terns that had been shadowing them flew up suddenly and slanted out over the ocean.

"If I can be with Je

Out from shore, a lobster boat chugged past them heading toward Phillips Beach.

"Even if you are together again," Lilly said at last, "maybe we could still have our little… arrangement."

Jesse took a deep breath. He liked Lilly a lot. In bed she was brilliant. With her he felt less alone than he had since Je

"Maybe not," he said.

Chapter Sixty-six

Jesse still used a wooden bat. The ball jumped off the aluminum ones much farther, but they didn't give the feeling of entirety, in the hands and forearms, that a wooden bat did. Jesse was playing tonight in shorts and a sleeveless tee shirt. His gun and badge were locked, with his wallet, in the glove compartment of his car. There was a league rule against wearing spikes, so they played in colorfully ornamented sneakers. And Jesse didn't wear batting gloves. He had worn them when he played in the minors, because everyone did, and it hadn't occurred to him not to. But in a twilight soft-ball league they seemed pretentious to him.

Jesse planted his feet in the holes that had already been worn there. But Jesse wasn't uncomfortable. He had never been uncomfortable playing ball. Playing ball was like being home.

He took a pitch wide for a ball.

When you were going good, he remembered, the ball had come up there slowly, looking the size of a cantaloupe. He smiled to himself. Now it was about the size of a cantaloupe. He took a shoulder-high pitch for a strike. He glanced back once at the umpire. The umpire shrugged. Jesse gri

He's pitching high and low, Jesse thought. Next time he'll be down.

The wind off the lake swirled a little dust between home and the pitcher's mound. Jesse stepped out. The infield was well over to the left side. The outfield was around to the left and deep. In this league he was a power hitter. Jesse got back in the box.

The next pitch came in thigh high, where Jesse was looking for it, and when he swung he could feel the exact completeness of the contact up into his chest. He dropped the bat and, without looking, began to trot slowly toward first.

Suitcase Simpson, coaching at first, said to him, "Three trees back toward the restaurant."

The opposing third baseman said, "Nice home-run trot."

There were a half dozen people in the stands behind third base. As he came into third, Jesse looked at them. One of them was Joni Shaw. She waved at him. He gri

Robert B. Parker

Robert B. Parker is the author of nearly forty books, including two other Jesse Stone novels, Night Passage and Trouble in Paradise. He lives in Boston.