Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Four

“Fancy meeting you here,” Richie said when we were finally alone.

He was in a room of his own. I didn’t know how many private rooms were available in Emergency at Mass General at this time of night, but I assumed that even if it had been an issue, Desmond and Felix would have handled it. If they’d gotten it into their minds to put Richie’s bed in the office of the chief of staff, I further assumed they would have made that happen, too.

By now I knew that the doctor who had cleaned out the wound and done the stitching preferred that Richie at least stay around for a couple hours. Richie had told him that wasn’t happening and to please start the paperwork.

“Did you actually say ‘please’?” I said.

“It was more an implied type of thing.”

I had pulled a chair over near his bed and was holding his hand.

“They said you were lucky that the angle of the shot was up and not down,” I said. “If he’d fired down, the damage could have been much worse.”

“I gather luck had very little to do with this,” Richie said.

“Meaning?”

“You know my meaning,” he said. “If he’d wanted me dead I’d be dead.”

We both let that settle until I smiled at him and said, “I thought we had an understanding that I’m the one who gets shot at.”

“Shot at,” he said, “but never hit.”

“Yet.”

“You know how I like to be first,” he said.

“Are we still talking about shooting bullets?” I said.

Richie offered a weak smile of his own.

“Tell me what happened,” I said. “Your father and Uncle Felix told me what they know. Now you tell me.”

“It’s not a case, Sunny.”

“Isn’t it?” I said.

He started from the beginning, with Mickey Dunphy calling in sick. Richie said that because his social calendar happened to be wide open on a Sunday night, he decided it might be fun to cover for him. Sunday night was for regulars and, besides, he said, he still liked to bartend from time to time to keep himself in the game.

He had closed up, counted up, put the cash part of the evening’s take in his office safe, set the alarm, and was walking to where he’d parked his car on Portland Street.

“And you heard nothing.”

“Saw nothing,” he said. “But I wasn’t looking.”

“And when you were on the ground he said what he said about the sins of the father.”

Richie nodded.

“Is there any current trouble between your family and, uh, competing interests?” I asked.

“My father says no.”

“But this was no random shooting,” I said. “This was done with purpose, and planning.”

“Evidently.”

“He had to have followed you to the bar and waited,” I said. “Because he had no way of knowing that you’d even be there on a Sunday night.”

“Maybe he had been to the bar before,” Richie said. “He picked a spot on the street with no cameras, according to the police. After I was hit, I tried to roll over to get a glimpse of him, or maybe a car. But he had just walked off into the night.”

I leaned closer and said, “Who would do this? You’ve never been a part of that world.”

“But I’m a part of their life,” Richie said.

“You know what I mean.”

“I do,” Richie said. “My father always talked about boundaries. Now someone has decided to cross them.”

“As a way of sending a message,” I said.

“Evidently,” Richie said.

“But about what?”

“Maybe that someone is coming for him,” Richie said. “But we’re not going to figure that out right now.”

“Let me drive you home,” I said.

“My father and my uncle have already insisted, I’m afraid.”

Another weak smile.

“But feel free to engage them in a lively debate about that.”

I squeezed his hand, in the quiet room in the quiet of the big hospital in the time before dawn. “Pass,” I said.

“And you, always tough enough to charge at an automatic weapon,” Richie said.

“There are boundaries that even I won’t cross,” I said.

“You should go,” Richie said.

“When you go, big boy.”

“Okay.”

“Do you need anything?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Name it,” I said. “As long as it doesn’t involve me locking the door and disrobing.”

“Some Florence Nightingale you are,” he said. “I’m just going to assume you dressing up like a candy striper is out of the question as well.”

“Seriously,” I said. “Is there anything you need?”

“For you to leave this alone,” Richie said.

“You know I can’t do that.”

“I mean it,” Richie said.

“Me, too,” I said.

But the good news now that he was a client, I told him, is that he was looking at a whopping family discount.