Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Three

To be any closer to Mass General when he was shot, Richie would have had to have taken a bullet at the front door.

The distance from his saloon to the hospital was less than a mile. Maybe a few minutes with no traffic and if you hit all the lights.

The doctors were still working on closing up the wounds, front and back, when I got there. Richie’s father, Desmond, and his uncle Felix were in the ER’s waiting area. They immediately walked me past the admittance desk and through some double doors, nobody saying anything to us, nobody making any attempt to stop us. It was as if the most famous hospital in Boston, one of the most famous in the world, was now being run by them.

“My son’s wife,” Desmond said to the first nurse he saw, as if somehow that explained everything.

The last thing Felix Burke had told me before we’d ended our phone call was “Through and through.”

Meaning the bullet.

Now Felix said, “It was underneath his right shoulder. He was walking to where he’d parked his car after he closed up.”

“Why was he even there on a Sunday night?” I said.

I was trying to process all of this at once. Why Richie was even at the saloon was a good enough place to start.

“Mickey, his regular weekend guy, called in sick. Richie knew he could watch the Sunday-night football game and thought it would be fun to work the stick.”

We were about twenty feet down the hall from the room where Richie was.

“They cleaned him out with the kind of rod they use if the bullet doesn’t stay in you,” Felix Burke said.

“When the cops finished, they came over and asked if they could talk to Felix and me,” Desmond Burke said. “I told them there was a better chance of Jesus stopping by tonight.”

He was staring past me with his dark eyes, toward the room where his son was, or maybe past that, and into the darkness of his entire adult life, a life from which I knew he had worked mightily to insulate his only son. I had always thought he looked like some pale Irish priest.

Felix Burke was different. Richie had shown me pictures of his father and Felix when they were teenagers, skinny, slicked-back black hair, all the brio in both of them staring out at you from the grainy black-and-white photographs. They could have passed for twins in those days. But that was a lifetime ago. While there was such an ascetic look to Desmond now, somehow Felix had grown broader as Desmond had become all hard angles and planes. He had been a heavyweight boxer in his youth, and you didn’t have to look very closely to see the scarring around the eyes and that his nose was far more crooked than the one with which he had been born.

“One shot,” Felix said. “Richie never heard him coming.”

Desmond Burke said, “The shooter spoke to Richie after he put him down.”

“The fucking fuck,” Felix said.

I looked at Desmond. “What did he say?”

“‘Sins of the father,’” Desmond Burke said. “He didn’t want to kill him. If he had, he would have put one in the back of his head. He wanted to send a message. To me. About my sins.”

“Tell the fucking fuck to send an email next time,” Felix said.

In a quiet voice Desmond Burke said, “Richard has never been a part of this.”

“The family business,” I said.

“Which has now brought him to this night and this place,” Desmond said.

“Which will bring consequences,” Felix said.

It went without saying. Felix had decided to say it anyway.