Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Fifteen

He’d already been stitched and released at Mass General, only a few minutes away from where the accident occurred, by the time he called and told me what had happened and asked me to come pick him up.

My father described it as an “accident that wasn’t really an accident.”

“You’re saying somebody tried to run you off the road intentionally?” I said.

“Let’s just say that whoever it was didn’t do very much to keep me on the road,” Phil Randall said.

“Are you okay, Dad?” I said.

“Better than my poor little Jetta,” he said.

I picked him up at the emergency room entrance on Fruit Street. If he was scared, or even shaken, about what had happened, he wasn’t going to let on to me. Old habits. When I got out and came around to the passenger side, he waved me away.

“I can get into the car on my own, driver,” he said, and winked.

The small butterfly bandage was on the left side of his forehead. I asked how many stitches. “Four too many,” he said.

It had happened, he said, at the end of Storrow, where you got off for the North End. He had been on his way to meet an old cop friend for a Celtics playoff game.

“You think this was Doyle’s doing?” I said.

“Probably no way of knowing that for sure,” he said.

“Don’t be so sure,” I said.

The last time I had rushed to the emergency room at Mass General was when Richie had been shot a few years earlier. The shooter was just delivering a message that night. Perhaps the same thing had happened to my father. Except my father was an aging man who I didn’t even want driving at night anymore, who could have been killed.

“Have you told Mom?” I said.

“I have not,” he said. “She still thinks I’m at the game.”

“What are you going to tell Mom?” I said.

“I am going to tell her that someone ran a red light,” he said. “And you’re going to back that version of things until the cows come home.”

“Let me take you home,” I said.

“After a whiskey at yours first,” he said.

Irish whiskey with my father and my former father-in-law on the same night, I thought. Sunny and the boys. Just sunshine boys in this case.

Spike was watching an Ultimate Fighting event in the living room. He said it was pay-per-view, but knew I wouldn’t have wanted him to miss it. Melanie Joan, whom he said had been slightly overserved at Spike’s, had long since gone up to bed.

My father was behind me when we came through the front door. When Spike saw him, he shut off the television. After hearing what had happened, he said, “We need to pay a visit to Mr. Doyle, I’m thinking. Like first thing.”

“And tell him what?” my father said. “That my car got hit by another car in the North End? The bastard is probably looking for a reaction, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to give him one.”

I went and poured Jameson for him and Spike. A small one for me, since I’d already had my fill at Desmond Burke’s, and still had to drive my father home. He sat at the end of the couch. Rosie was already curled up next to him. Acting as an emotional therapy dog was just one of her greatest talents, when she wasn’t acting like a treat whore.

He described again the exact spot where the accident happened, where you got off on Nashua Street for what was now known as the TD Garden.

“At first I thought it was just some knuckleball trying to get ahead of me,” he said.

“We know who the knuckleball is,” I said. “At some point we just have to prove it.”

“And we will,” he said.

I grinned. “Because you’re you, and I’m just like you,” I said.

“Dog with a bone,” he said.

“There must be a better way to describe me.”

He drank some of his whiskey and said, “Ahhh.”

“It actually could have been worse,” he said.

“This has to stop,” I said.

“I could put a charge into Doyle,” Spike said. He grinned. “With gusto.”

“I’m telling you,” my father said, “it would only make things worse. And he’d deny he had anything to do with it.”

“Until the cows came home,” I said.

My father winked at me again and idly scratched Rosie behind one of her ears. He had worn his lucky green Celtics sweater under his blazer. I noticed a few flecks of dried blood on the front. Somehow I had to convince him to accept help from an old Mob guy because a famous Boston lawyer was acting like one.

Just not tonight.

“I think I’m ready to go home, kiddo,” my father said.

He had settled deep into the couch with Rosie. But when I tried to help him up, he ignored my hand and said, “I’m fine.”

He wasn’t. I wasn’t. I asked Spike to stay until I got back.

“We’ll come up with a plan in the morning,” Spike said to both of us.

I was way ahead of him.