Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Twenty-Six

The pain, in both my side and my head, wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be when I awakened.

There was bruising in the rib-cage area, I noticed when I took another hot shower. No bruising on the side of my face, though it felt tender near my right ear. It was official that I’d lost the fight. But the bastard hadn’t knocked me out. Spike left after I came out of the shower. He told me that if I didn’t check in with him every couple hours, he planned to call a cop. Preferably a cute one.

The guy had said what he’d said to me last night. In the text message to Felix, the guy had told him to ask Desmond how it felt when it was someone he loved. He had not mentioned a gun deal. It didn’t mean that the deal wasn’t a part of this.

What if it wasn’t just about one thing?

What if it was somehow about love, in some way I still couldn’t begin to understand, and money?

I considered that as I walked Rosie up Charles Street, gun in one pocket of my hoodie, a taser in the other pocket. As ever: Not being paranoid. Just alert.

“What if it really is about both?” I said to Rosie on Charles Street. “What if, as they used to say in the old movies, it’s heaters and a broad?”

Rosie looked up at me, always optimistic herself, as if a treat might be forthcoming. Which it was. When we got home I called Frank Belson and told him what had happened to me, and asked if anybody in the department could tell me more about a possible gun deal with the Burkes than Albert Antonioni had.

“First off, you’re all right?” he said.

“Is that concern I hear from you, you big lug?”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said.

“I’ll live,” I said.

“Shit,” he said. “I was afraid of that.”

“I’m trying to assemble the pieces to a puzzle here,” I said, “but I’m starting to think it might be more than one puzzle.”

“I’ll call Quirk,” Belson said. “He still knows everybody. Including guys from ATF.”

“I would be most grateful,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. “Our relationship continues to be give and take. I give. You take.”

Said he would get back to me and hung up.

I made myself coffee and sat there at the kitchen table drinking it, still nagged by the feeling that I had missed something the night before.

It only made my head start to hurt all over again.

I reviewed everything he’d said to me one more time, including the part about telling Desmond he was fucking with him because he could. And made a promise, to myself, that I would do the same to him, first chance I got, the sonofabitch.