Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Sixty-One

I met Richie at Felix’s now-repaired home at the marina in Charlestown.

“The boys were waiting to drive him to Mass,” Felix said. “My brother is always ready at ten minutes to seven. He’s one of those. Thinks even being a minute late is a mortal sin. When I’m a few minutes late, he looks at me like he wants to give me a good smack.”

“And the house had been watched all night,” I said.

“Yes,” Richie said.

“But when they finally went inside to check on where he was, he was gone,” I said.

“Yes,” Richie said.

There were three Dunkin’ Donuts cups on the table in front of us. Felix picked up his and drank some of his coffee. I could see his ruined boxer’s hands shaking as he did.

“They use the key they have,” Felix said, “and go inside and call out to him. But like Richie said. He’s gone.”

“Didn’t he set the alarm at night?” I said.

Felix looked at Richie, then back at me.

“Sometimes he does,” Felix said. “Sometimes he doesn’t.” He shrugged. “We’re old. We forget.”

“The one who took him could have come from the water side,” Richie said. “And in through the back somehow.”

I thought of how easily Ghost Garrity had gotten inside Maria Cataldo’s house, and how the gadget he’d brought disarmed what had been her alarm. How easy he said it was to disarm them in general.

“This is war now, Richard,” Felix said. “If that fuck Antonioni is the one who ordered this, I will kill him with my own hands.”

“It could be one of his people who took Desmond,” Richie said.

“I think I know which one,” I said, and told them both everything I had learned about Bobby Toms, and how Pete Colapietro and I had followed him to the house in Mount Pleasant. Richie looked at me. “You were going to tell me this when?” he said. I told him I was about to call him when he called to tell me about his father.

“Albert knows,” Felix said. “That’s the way it would work with us. That’s the way it would work with them.”

Us. Them. To the death.

“Is there anything you’ve not told us?” Richie said to his uncle.

It took a longer time than I would have liked for Felix Burke to say that he had not.

“Uncle Felix,” Richie said, as if talking to a child.

“Have I ever lied to you, Richard?” he said.

“Often,” Richie said.

“About anything important?” Felix said.

“Less often,” Richie said.

I sipped coffee that had gone cold. Even cold was better than none.

“Desmond’s alive,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

“You can’t be sure,” Felix said.

“This ends the way it started with me,” Richie said. “If the guy wanted him dead, he’d be dead. Come into the house with a silencer and do it and leave, maybe even by boat.”

I looked at Felix Burke. I couldn’t remember a time when I had ever seen him scared. But he was scared now, and it showed. It had always been him and Desmond against the world. Their other brothers were gone. Now Desmond had been taken.

“You don’t know,” Felix said again.

“I do,” I said. “So much of this has been an elaborate production. He wanted to torture Desmond and, as a by-product, the rest of us. I believe he’s known the endgame from the beginning. But ultimately this is something between him and Desmond. I believe he wants to kill him. But wants it to be a slow death. He might even want an audience.”

“I could go down there and take that fuck Antonioni,” Felix said, as if it were the old days, as if he were young and not afraid of anything or anybody.

“And get yourself killed in the process,” Richie said.

“We have men, too,” Felix said.

“Who didn’t help us a whole hell of a lot today,” Richie said.

“You know the resources I have,” Felix said. “You remember the time I found a killer for you.”

“Tommy Noon,” I said. “I remember.”

He had been the killer in a case on which I had once worked for a young woman named Sarah Markham, who had hired me to find out who her birth parents were.

“We may need those resources before we’re through, Uncle Felix,” Richie said. “But let us handle this for now.”

“‘Us’?” he said.

“Sunny and me,” Richie said.

I looked at him.

“Sunny and I will find him,” Richie said.

“Yes,” I said. “We will.”