Robert B. Parker's The Devil Wins Read online

  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

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2015 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

  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?”