Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Sixty-Eight

Joseph Marchetti continued to point his gun at Richie and me, which gave me no opening or opportunity to reach for my own, as Felix Burke seemed to be talking to himself as much as he was talking to his brother, or to the rest of us.

“It wasn’t just Albert who loved her,” Felix said. “So did I.”

I remembered the night in his brother’s living room now, when he had practically begged me to walk away from it all. I remembered the photographs I had seen about how much Desmond and Felix had looked alike when they were younger.

In this room now, Felix could no longer hold his brother’s gaze and so stared out the window closest to him instead, at the night or the water or the dark nowhere.

“It was just the one time, that spring,” he said to Desmond. “The two of you had broken it off. She called me, hysterical, already a little drunk, to tell me she was leaving Boston forever. She came over to my apartment. And I swear on your own son’s head that it was my intent to console. But then more drink was taken, by both of us.” He ran out of words then.

“And you betrayed me,” Desmond said, finishing the thought for his brother. “The both of you.”

“I loved her first,” Felix said.

I wondered what Desmond would have done in the moment if his hands were not bound behind him.

“She called me a few months later, without telling me where she was,” Felix said. “She told me she was pregnant, and that it had to be my child, and that her father was making arrangements. I didn’t ask what the arrangements were, and she didn’t tell me. What she did tell me was that she never wanted to see me, or you, ever again.”

“You’re all lying!” Bobby Toms shouted now.

“I’m not,” Felix said.

In a much quieter voice, Bobby Toms, talking only to himself now, said, “Fuck it. Time to end this.”

“Yeah,” Joseph Marchetti said, and turned away from Richie and me and shot Bobby Toms in the forehead.

Marchetti took a step back then, slightly away from the window, so he could see us all at once and said, “The old man told me to tie up as many loose ends as I had to.” He grinned. “Starting with the loose cannon.”

He looked at Desmond and Felix and said, “Now who wants it first?”

Then everything seemed to happen at once, Joseph Marchetti pointing his gun at Desmond and Felix throwing himself and his chair sideways to put himself in the line of fire, in the instant before Marchetti pulled the trigger. Then I was clearing my own gun and rolling off the couch as the window behind Marchetti and behind Richie and me shattered, and a bullet from outside hit Marchetti in the back of his head and he went down next to Bobby Toms.

Richie was already across the room, kneeling next to his uncle Felix, the one who’d raised him more than his own father had, the one who’d just taken a bullet intended for Desmond Burke in the back.

Then Vinnie Morris was kicking in what was left of the shattered side window and stepping through it, saying, “I didn’t have a clear shot because the two of you were in the way, but I figured I couldn’t wait no longer. Then the guy moved just enough.”

Richie was holding his uncle Felix in his arms. I went and got a kitchen knife and cut loose the rope tying Desmond’s hands, and then Desmond was lying next to his brother on the floor, saying something that I could not hear and feared Felix could not hear.

Blood was blood.

I called 911, and then Pete Colapietro.