“Yes,” Molly said. “I wonder if I’d have done what she did?”
“You were right when she asked you,” Jesse said. “No way to know until you’re in the situation.”
“I hope I’d be like her,” Molly said.
“Be a good woman, and a good cop, Moll,” Jesse said. “Whether you did or not.”
“Thank you,” Molly said.
“That’s what you are,” Jesse said. “And whatever you do in one specific situation doesn’t change what you are.”
“Even what I did with a certain Native American person?”
“Even that,” Jesse said.
36
THE WEATHER was pleasant, so Jesse took his first drink of the night out onto his balcony and sat and reread his new letter from the Night Hawk.
Dear Chief Stone,
By now you must know of my recent humiliation. The woman defied me. And I had to run.
Run away! I don’t know why I didn’t force her to do what I said. I wanted to, God knows. But somehow I seemed frozen by her. I couldn’t approach her. I wanted in the worst way to take her and strip her clothes off. But I didn’t. For reasons I don’t understand I fled, and am now in my home, frightened and enraged. What I wanted to do frightens me. That I couldn’t do it enrages me. And it is the rage that I really fear. I have never felt such rage. To be denied like this and humiliated in the process. It will drive me. I can feel it driving me, and if you do not stop me, I don’t know what it will drive me to. I am becoming ever more dangerous. What started out as a basically harmless adventure is turning into something monomaniacal.
Something—shall I say it? Yes!—something evil. So be warned, and be alert!!!
The Night Hawk
Jesse read it twice more. It seemed to him more a display of bravado than a call for help.
To be denied what? Jesse thought. A photo op? He’s embarrassed because the woman faced him down and he ran. He’s explaining to me and himself that he’s really a dangerous bastard and needs to be stopped. Jesse’s glass was empty. He stood and went back into his living room and made himself another one. He took it back out on the balcony and sat with his feet up on the rail and looked out over the dark harbor. Jesse felt some comfort in the fact that the Night Hawk had run. Maybe he wasn’t so dangerous. Maybe he protested that he was because he really knew he wasn’t. But why to me? He doesn’t need my approval. He needs the approval of the town. Jesse sipped quietly at his drink. And the chief is, for him, the face of the town. It was a clear night, but the moon was a slender crescent, and it shed very little light. Jesse took another sip of his drink. Approval isn’t quite it, Jesse thought. Fear? Respect? Fearful respect? Jesse drank again. Then he nodded to himself. He needs us to think he’s not a pathetic creep. He wants us to think he’s THE NIGHT HAWK! instead of the nasty little voyeur that he knows he is. Jesse finished his second drink and went back to the bar. As he mixed the third, he looked at his poster of Ozzie.
“Used to be simpler, Oz. Used to be whether you could go to your right and make the long throw. Used to be about could you sit on the fastball and adjust for the curve.”
Everything rode on questions like that, but not life or death. Baseball was the most important thing that didn’t matter that he’d ever known. Win or lose, you played again the next day, or the next year, as far ahead as you could see when you were nineteen and had an absolute cannon of an arm.
“Had a big arm, Oz,” Jesse said. “Bigger than yours, to tell you the truth. Didn’t have your hands. Didn’t probably have your bat. Couldn’t do a backflip. But I had a gun.”
He took his drink back to the balcony. Sixteen-ounce glass, lot of ice, lot of soda. The warm evening made the condensation bead up on the glass and run in tiny rivulets down the side.
Now I gotta worry about whether this guy needs respect enough to hurt one of these women.He drank.
“I guess we have to assume he might,” he said aloud in the empty stillness. “We got to assume he might.”
He drank some more.
37
SUITCASE SIMPSON came into Jesse’s office carrying a large paper bag.
“Seth Ralston,” Suit said.
He took a large Italian sandwich out of the bag and unwrapped it on Jesse’s desk.
“Is that a sub I see before me?” Jesse said.
“From AJ’s sub shop,” Suit said. “The best.”
“You have Daisy Dyke right up the street, who makes her own bread, and you’re buying mass-produced submarine sandwiches at AJ’s?”
“Yeah. I got one for you, if you want it.”
“You bet I do,” Jesse said.
Suit handed him a second sandwich, and Jesse unwrapped it on his desk.
“Seth Ralston?” Jesse said.
“And Hannah Wechsler,” Suit said. “Got ’em both for you.”
“And still managed to pick up some subs,” Jesse said. “What have you got.”
“I gotta get a Coke first,” Suit said. “You want one?”
“Just some water,” Jesse said.
Suit went out and returned in a minute with a Coke and a water from the refrigerator in the squad room.
