Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Twenty-Four

I went home and spent the rest of the afternoon painting on the third floor, with Rosie at my feet.

I often had more than one piece going at a time. Today I was at work on a watercolor I had begun months ago before moving on to my stone cottage, one that had been inspired by a photograph I had taken last winter when Richie and I had decided to spend a weekend at an inn we both loved in Litchfield, Connecticut.

On the way there we had been blessed with a spectacular December sunset, the clouds a bright red, a sunset unlike any I had ever seen at that time of year. Richie had been driving. He had pulled the car over and I had gotten out and taken some shots with my phone. I started painting that spectacular red sky the next day when we returned to Boston, as much as I had always been more comfortable with old buildings. But the other day there had been a similar sunset, though not as colorful or vivid, when Rosie and I had been walking along the Charles. I had come home and gone through old blocks stacked on the floor in the corner, in various stages of completion. There was my sunset, or ours, Richie’s and mine. I had resumed working on it and was doing the same, happily, today.

This was one of the afternoons when I shut off the phone, took off my watch, purposefully lost myself in the work and the expanse and possibilities of the moment. It was twilight when I finally stopped.

I cleaned my brushes and put them away and fed Rosie and walked her over to the park and back. And decided to make spaghetti and broccoli, which was one of my specialties, goddamn it, whatever a cynical person like Spike said. I made just enough for one. I knew how much that was by now. I was used to cooking for one.

I cleaned the dishes and put them away and felt suddenly restless, as I frequently did these days, as if I were spinning my wheels, wondering if Desmond Burke was right, wondering whether or not I should just walk away from this and leave him to clean up his own mess, I hoped before someone else close to him ended up dead.

Desmond had strayed out of the faith, Felix had said.

Was it Romeo and Juliet, or more like the Hatfields and the McCoys?

But if the Burkes were the Hatfields, who the hell were the McCoys?

I’d noticed when walking Rosie that the temperature had dropped and I had seen rain in the sky and felt it. But I liked walking in the rain. If it ruined my hair tonight, so what? So I threw on a rain jacket, put a faded red Boston University ball cap on my head and a very stylish belt that doubled as a holster for the handgun I decided to bring with me.

I had no real destination in mind. I thought I might walk all the way to Joe’s on Newbury Street for a drink, and screw what my hair looked like when I got there. I knew the bartender, and was not intimidated by being a single woman alone at a bar. Sometimes I went to places like Joe’s for the sheer sport of it, just waiting to see and hear what the pick-up lines might be, if there were any. Pick-up lines? Was I dating myself even thinking about pick-up lines? Or should I think about it as hooking up, the way the kids did?

The last man I’d hooked up with seriously, other than Richie, was Jesse Stone, up in Paradise. We had finally drifted apart, mostly because of the force of his lingering feelings for his ex-wife and mine for Richie, even after both his ex-wife and Richie had remarried.

But it had been serious while it lasted, for both of us.

I took a right on Beacon and then a left on Arlington, and walked to Newbury and took a right. The rain started to come as I crossed Berkeley, and was coming much harder by the time I was passing Joe’s. I revised my thinking about looking like a drowned rat at the bar. Kept going.

The rain came even harder.

This was usually a busy time of the night on Newbury, stores closed but bars and restaurants fully coming to life. Or nightlife. I’d stopped briefly in front of the long window at Joe’s, noticed a pretty sizable bar crowd. For a moment, I thought I saw Richie looking over at me from across the street, but when I turned there was no one there. It wasn’t the first time I thought I saw Richie, on the street or across a crowded room, and had been wrong.

Richie on the brain, I thought.

Along with all the other Burkes.

It was raining too hard now for me to continue walking away from home. I took a right on Exeter to head back, the sudden storm at full pitch and roar. If I’d had Rosie with me, the scene would have started to feel like something out of The Wizard of Oz. I was now wetter than Jacques Cousteau, and wondering if I should head back to Joe’s and call an Uber to take me home.

I never heard him behind me, or sensed his presence.

Just felt the first hard blow to the side of my head, an openhanded slap that made me feel as if I’d been hit with a board. The punch didn’t knock me out but would have been enough to put me down if he wasn’t dragging me down the alley, halfway between Exeter and Dartmouth, and into a small, sheltered construction site, the concrete walls blocking us from anyone’s view.

I had enough presence to try to reach down and clear my gun from the belt, but he had his arms around me and his lips close to my ear.

“Don’t even fucking think about it,” he said.

We were sheltered now from the rain, but it was still at full howl. I wondered if anyone would even hear me if I were able to scream, which I was not, with his hand clamped over my mouth. As I tried to break free, he hit me again, this one a blow to my kidneys that would have made me cry out in pain if it hadn’t knocked all the air out of me.

He had me up against one of the walls now, just inside the wire fencing to the makeshift entrance to whatever this room was someday going to be. Even if someone were walking down the Public Alley, it was unlikely they’d be able to see us. Now he grabbed the ponytail coming out of the back of my cap and gave it a good yank. I could now feel the gun in my back.

“Try to turn around again,” he said, “and I will shoot you.”

There was nothing for me to say, his hand still over my mouth. I feebly tried to reach down again for my gun. As I did, he shoved me harder into the wall.

“You need to leave this alone,” he said.

I felt my knees start to go, felt myself start to fall, but then he jerked me up.

He turned around then, perhaps to see if there might be someone in the alley, and his hand was briefly away from my mouth and I was able to say “Why didn’t you kill Richie?”

To my great surprise in the moment, he answered me.

He said, “Because we’re alike.”

What the hell? I wanted to ask him what that meant, but then his hand was back over my mouth.

“I will kill him next time if you don’t leave this the fuck alone,” he said. “Now go tell them all how easy this was. Tell Desmond we keep fucking with him because we can.”

Then I felt one last blow, this one to the top of my head. I went down but was still not out as I lay on the ground, feeling the intense pain in my head and in my side, thinking that the asshole had been right about one thing.

It had been easy.

When I finally managed to get into a sitting position, waiting for the wave of nausea that would mean I had been concussed, I got out my cell phone. I thought about calling Frank Belson or Lee Farrell, probably my best friend in the department. But I didn’t want to talk to cops right now. Or even Richie. I didn’t want to go to the hospital.

I called Spike and told him what had happened and where I was.

“Shit,” he said.

I said, “My thoughts exactly.”

“You don’t want to call an ambulance?”

“No,” I said. “But you know what a cockeyed optimist I am.”

“Cockeyed, anyway.”

He said he’d be there in five minutes if he had to drive straight across the Public Fucking Garden.

“Don’t hit the little ducklings,” I said.

“Fuck the ducks,” Spike said.