Robert B. Parker’s Blood Feud

Nine

Richie was already asleep when I got out of bed, dressed, let myself out. Had I planned better for romantic possibilities, I would have arranged for Spike to take Rosie for the night. But I had not.

On my way back to River Street Place it had occurred to me that I hadn’t asked Richie whether Kathryn knew that he had been shot. But there was nothing unusual about that. We discussed his most recent ex-wife about as often as we discussed the opera. As far as I was concerned, it was as if he hadn’t as much divorced her as deleted her.

But I still didn’t know with either clarity or certainty if I wanted Richie all to myself. All I had ever known is that I didn’t want Kathryn to have him all to herself.

I got home a little before midnight. Rosie greeted me as joyfully and loudly as she always did, as if I’d just shipped home from a tour overseas. I put her on a leash, took her out, gave her a treat, put her on the small blanket at the end of my bed, and got ready for bed myself, this time alone.

But after I had washed and brushed and moisturized and hand-creamed, I fixed myself a glass of Jameson and took it over to the Eames armchair that I knew must have cost Melanie Joan thousands. It was situated underneath an antique reading light and at the corner of the wood-burning fireplace. Melanie Joan had told me it was her favorite chair in the whole place for reading.

“And,” she had told me with a wink as theatrical as everything else about her, “it can be used in other creative ways.”

“That chair?” I said.

“Oh, God, yes,” she’d said in a husky voice.

I sat uncreatively in the chair now, in cotton sweatpants and a “Boston Strong” T-shirt I’d bought after the Boston Marathon bombing, feeling the warmth of the whiskey making its way through me. Who was it that had said that whiskey had done more for him than he had ever done for it? Someone. Spike would know. Or Richie, who read Gabriel García Márquez, would know.

Public lives, private lives, secret lives.

What was I going to find out about Desmond Burke’s secret life, if I could find out anything? How many enemies were still alive, and still out there?

What kind of history was involved here, history about the Irish Mob that could not be learned from Google?

All these things I thought as I sipped Irish whiskey, moving up on twenty-four hours exactly when I had gotten the call from Felix Burke about Richie being shot, and I had been on my way to the hospital.

Who had done this?

And, far more important, why?

I finished the last of the Jameson. By now it was past one in the morning. Rosie barely stirred as I got under the covers. I had set the alarm for eight because I wanted to take a class at the Exhale Spa on Arlington Street. My Glock was in the top drawer of the bedside table to my right. I told myself I wasn’t being paranoid, just extremely alert.

I slept, soundly, until I was awakened by the old-fashioned ringtone I used on my iPhone. At first I thought it was the alarm, then looked at the screen and saw that it was still only seven o’clock.

Caller ID said “Richie.”

“Are you all right?” I said.

“Somebody just shot my uncle Peter in the back of the head,” he said.