Robert B. Parker's Colorblind Read online

  THE SPENSER NOVELS

  Robert B. Parker’s Old Black Magic

  (by Ace Atkins)

  Robert B. Parker’s Little White Lies

  (by Ace Atkins)

  Robert B. Parker’s Slow Burn

  (by Ace Atkins)

  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 The Hangman’s Sonnet

  (by Reed Farrel Coleman)

  Robert B. Parker’s Debt to Pay

  (by Reed Farrel Coleman)

  Robert B. Parker’s The Devil Wins

  (by Reed Farrel Coleman)

  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 Revelation

  (by Robert Knott)

  Robert B. Parker’s Blackjack

  (by Robert Knott)

  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

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by The Estate of Robert B. Parker

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Coleman, Reed Farrel, author.

  Title: Robert B. Parker’s Colorblind : a Jesse Stone novel / Reed Farrel Coleman.

  Description: New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2018. | Series: Jesse Stone ; 17

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017025834 | ISBN 9780399574948 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780399574955 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Stone, Jesse (Fictitious character)—Fiction. | Police chiefs—Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3553.O47445 R633 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025834

  p. cm.

  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

  FOR ACE ATKINS AND TOM SCHRECK

  CONTENTS

  Also by Robert B. Parker

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  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

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

  —SCHILLER

  1

  She thought she might pass out from the ache in her side or that her heart might explode in her chest as she ran barefoot along the dunes. Her beautiful long beaded braids, of which she was rightfully proud, slapped against her shoulders, her face, and fell in front of her eyes. She stopped, trying to catch her breath and to listen for them, for their heavy footfalls, but the low roar of the waves swallowed up all the sounds of the night, much as they had overwhelmed her cries for help.

  Too tired to think, she bent over at the waist, sucking in huge gulps of crisp sea air. Her throat was raw from screaming. Sweat rolled down her forehead, stinging her eyes. It covered her dark black skin and soaked through her sports bra, panties, and torn warm-up pants. As her wind returned to her and the stitch in her side subsided, she felt the burn of her sweat seeping into the nicks and cuts around her ankles caused by the brambles and sharp dune grasses. Her jaw was throbbing from where one of them had smashed his fist into her face. And as she pressed her fingers to the swelling, the absurdity of the situation rushed back in like the waves on the beach below. This can’t be happening to me. Things like this happen to other women.

  She reached into her pocket to feel for the cell phone that she knew wasn’t there, the image of it on top of the nightstand as clear to her as if she were back in the room at the bed-and-breakfast. Her skin was suddenly gooseflesh, her perspiration turning cold with fear, and she wished she’d listened to Steve and taken her phone, wished she’d been able to hang on to her Harvard hoodie. But the man who’d laid her out with that one punch, the man who’d torn at her pants and climbed on top of her, grunting, pawing her, had clutched it even after she’d kneed him in the groin. It was only when she rolled out from under him and ran, hearing laughter in the night, that she realized the man who’d attacked her wasn’t alone. She ran down to the beach, hoping, praying, that she’d come upon another runner or a couple, maybe some kids around a campfire. But there was no one, not in either direction, not as far as she could see.

  There were tears in her eyes. She was shaking and her heart was doing a fluttery thing she wasn’t sure she had ever felt before. She’d been able to hold it together until then, until she saw that she was very alone on that stretch of Massachusetts beach. She decided to double back and head north along the shore toward the B-and-B in Swan Harbor. She prayed the men chasing her had gone south, trying to get ahead of her to wall her off and pin her in. Besides, she had no idea what was down the beach beyond the edge of darkness. At least she had some sense of the beach in Swan Harbor and knew that at one point the beach became rocky. Maybe there was a cave or a cove she could hide herself in until sunup. The thought of that, of the sun rising over the Atlantic, stopped the tears and filled her with hope. It was short-lived.

  There they were, above her, to her left along the dunes. She ran faster, then stopped dead in her tracks at the sight of a shadowy figure thirty yards ahead of her on the beach. She turned the other way, but it was no good. Two of them were there. She ran to the dunes, her churning feet sinking into the cool sand as they came around slowly behind her, their sneering laughter filling the night. One of them yanked her braids so that her head snapped back and she lost her balance, the sand slipping out from under her feet. She fell awkwardly onto her neck and shoulder, landing so hard that pain shot down her whole left side, the jolt of it taking her breath away.

  When she came back into the moment a few seconds later, she wished she hadn’t. They had her pinned and he was on top of her again. Only this time his knees were on either side of her. She swung her head wildly from side to side, writhed beneath him, fighting to break free of the hands holding her down, but it was no good. He clamped a powerful hand under her chin to force her to look up at him.

  “You just had to go and knee me, didn’t you?” he said, squeezing her face so hard that her teeth cut into the insides of her cheeks. The taste of copper and iron flashed across her tongue. Her body steadied as much out of exhaustion as anything else. “You made a mistake doing that. A very big mistake. Get her damned pants off. Time to teach her a lesson.”

  She was at it again, her muscles giving absolutely everything they had left to give, and she screamed for all it was worth. But her voice was nearly gone, as was all of her strength.

  “You done now?” he said in a whisper, his lips close to her ear. “Are you done?”

  She was crying too fiercely to answer him, and before she could even think what to do next she felt his fist crash into her face again and again. Her body went limp and her mind empty. When she roused, she’d retreated into a peaceful world so deep inside her own head that she wanted to stay there forever. It was strange, she thought, how she could still hear the sea and could feel them dragging her by the feet, the sand and dune grasses tearing at her face. Then, just before she slipped completely away, she remembered that tomorrow was Columbus Day. The Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. The Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. The Niña . . . She could no longer hear the ocean.

  2

  Everything was completely different, yet just the same. Paradise was as it had always been in the fall, the trees exploding with color, the wind blowing in off the Atlantic biting with sharper teeth. Jesse Stone wasn’t a man given to deep philosophical thought. He knew up from down, which base to cover when throws came in from the outfield, and, most important, right from wrong. His sense of right and wrong was like his North Star, guiding him through the wilderness of a world that had lost its way. Yet as he looked at the windblown swirl of reds, yellows, browns, and greens on the trees outside his new condo that morning, he could not help but think it strange that the beauty of the leaves was an expression of their deaths. As far as he could tell, there was only inevitability in human death and not much beauty in it. There was certainly no beauty in murder, the kind of death he was most familiar with.

  He didn’t waste any more time contemplating the leaves or why the familiar now seemed strange. There was th
e fact that his house had been sold that summer and that he’d moved into a two-bedroom condo in a development at the edge of the Swap. That wasn’t it. He had moved many times in his life without it shaking his foundation. Nor was it that today would be his first day back on the job after two months away. He had to admit that it had taken some getting used to, being away from Paradise. Jesse hadn’t taken any real time off since he’d been forced to walk away from baseball and joined the LAPD. That was strange, too, because it felt like it had happened both only yesterday and a million years ago. He knew exactly what it was that was causing him to see the world with new eyes, and he knew he was going to have to spend every day for the rest of his life getting used to it.

  Patricia Cooper at the donut shop raised her right eyebrow at the sight of Jesse standing before her. For an old Yankee like Patricia, a raised eyebrow was tantamount to a fainting spell.

  “Jeez, Jesse. Been a long time. Got so we were worried Molly would be warming your seat on a permanent basis.”

  “She would never let that happen.”

  One corner of Patricia’s mouth turned up. “No, I s’pose not. An assorted dozen for you?”

  “Better make that two dozen and a large cup of coffee. We’ve got that machine in the station now, but I’ve thought about the taste of your coffee every day since I’ve been gone.”

  The other corner of her mouth turned up.

  * * *

  —

  MOLLY WAS SEATED at the front desk, not in Jesse’s office as he’d expected. They’d spoken a few times since he’d returned, but like everything else since he’d come home, their conversations had been just a bit different. The usual rhythm of their banter seemed out of joint. He’d supposed that was a function of Molly’s anger at him for sticking her in a job she never wanted and for staying away a few weeks longer than he’d planned to be gone.

  Before he could open his mouth, Molly said, “Don’t you ever do that to me again, Jesse Stone. God knows why I love you in the first place, but it won’t last two more months of me sitting in that office.” She pointed over her shoulder at the door with CHIEF printed in black letters on the pebbled glass.