“Find any weapons?”
“Two twenty-two long target pistols,”
Gordon said. “Unloaded and
disassembled and packed away in their luggage. You been looking for those?”
“I have.”
They stood silently looking through the window at the man and woman holding hands.
“I’ll talk to them alone,” Jesse
said. “Though it’s possible
that the man may assault me and I’ll have to defend myself.”
Gordon was a short thick bald man with enough stomach to make the buttons pull a little on his shirt. He nodded thoughtfully.
“You got a right to defend yourself,” he said.
Jesse nodded. Gordon unlocked the door and went in and nodded his head to the uniform to leave.
“A visitor,” he said to the man and woman.
Jesse came into the interview room. Gordon went out and closed the door behind him. Jesse stood and looked at them.
“Jesse,” the man said.
“We’re so glad to see you,” the
woman said.
Jesse didn’t say anything. He stood motionless on the other side
of the table, looking down at them.
“Jesse,” the man said,
“what’s going on? They didn’t even tell us why they arrested us, just that we were wanted in the States.”
Jesse looked straight down at them and didn’t say anything.
“Wanted for what?” the man said.
“Jesse, what is it?” the woman said.
Jesse gestured with one hand at the man to stand up. When the man was standing Jesse called him closer with his crooked forefinger. The man was compliant. He walked closer. Jesse put up both hands to tell him to stop, then Jesse stepped in closer to him and drove his knee into the man’s groin. The man screamed and staggered backward, bent over, and fell on the floor. He brought his knees to his chest and lay with his hands between his legs and moaned. The woman jumped up and ran around the table toward him and Jesse hit her, a full swing, across the face, with the flat of his open hand. She staggered backward and bumped the wall and slid down and sat hard on the floor, with her face pressed into her hands, and began to cry. Jesse looked at both of them for a moment and then turned and looked at the opaque one-way window and jerked his thumb toward the door. In a moment Gordon came in.
“Lucky to escape with your life,” Gordon said.
“Eh?”
75
It was snowing softly. Jesse had parked his Explorer at the town
beach, and he and Jenn sat in the front seat looking at the ocean through the clear quarter circle made on the windshield by the sweep of the wipers. A hundred yards out the snow and the ocean became indistinct. There was no one else in the parking lot, no one on the beach. Jesse could feel how isolated the car would look from a far distance, alone in the snow at the edge of the sea.
“You all right?” Jenn said.
“Yes.”
“You’d say that even if you
weren’t,” Jenn said.
“I know.”
“This has been an especially difficult time for you.”
“It’s why I get the big bucks,”
Jesse said.
Behind them a plow clattered across the causeway toward Paradise
Neck. When it had passed, the silence was broken only by the sound of the wipers and the low fan sound of the heater.
“Did they tell you why they did it?” Jenn asked.
“No.”
“Did you ask?”
“No.”
Jenn put her hand out, and Jesse took it. Holding hands, they looked silently at the snow and the ocean.
“I have not really been happy,” Jenn said,
