Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Forty-One

My father was already acting as if the whole thing were some giant pain in the ass. Not getting himself shot. Having to talk about it. And being fussed over because of it.

At his age, he somehow still saw himself as Dirty Harry, even if he was currently being babysat by a mobster’s foot soldiers.

We were in my living room. Phil Randall, Richie, Rosie, me. And Melanie Joan, who was acting so solicitous about my father I thought she was on the verge of going out to buy nurse’s scrubs. She had even managed not to ask all the questions she wanted to ask about her first husband once Richie and my father had arrived.

“I’ve been shot before, for chrissakes,” Phil Randall was saying now. “Want to see the scars?”

“No!” Richie and I said at pretty much the same moment.

Melanie Joan smiled. “I do, Phil,” she said.

Jesus, I thought. Was she actually flirting with him? Maybe older guys really were still ringing her bell.

But then, why not? After having just encountered her first husband, I realized Phil Randall did fit a certain male demographic for her, or at least did at one time.

Richie had picked my father up after he’d been stitched and released at Mass General. He’d already been questioned by a couple BPD detectives by then. And by now he’d already tossed the sling they’d given him at the hospital into the backseat of Richie’s car.

He’d now been run off the road and been shot in the same week. If that wasn’t excitement for my old man, it sure was for his baby girl.

“Does it hurt?” Melanie Joan said.

“Only when he bitches,” I said.

Richie grinned. “If that’s true, he’s going to need a lot more pain meds than he left the hospital with.”

“Tell me again how it happened,” I said.

“I told you once,” my father said.

“Humor me,” I said.

“When don’t I?” he said.

He had called Doyle and told him they needed to end this, and that meant ending it face-to-face. If Doyle was man enough. Doyle had agreed. I told my father that of course he’d agree, how could he not honor the timeless codes of macho bullshit?

Phil Randall had made it happen, the meeting he’d scheduled at Farlow Park in Newton Center, by giving Desmond Burke’s men the slip.

“ ‘The slip,’ Dad?” I’d said.

“I know,” he’d said. “Outdated cultural reference.”

“Little bit,” I said. “How did you give them the slip?”

“Told the boys I was having chest pains,” he said. “They took me to that Brigham Urgent Care in Newton. They couldn’t go in with me because they’ve still got those COVID rules. I flashed my badge and walked out the back door.”

“You faked a heart attack?” I said.

“It was more of an implied type thing.”

He had the Uber he called drop him off near the Richardson Street lot, not much of a walk to the appointed place in the park. I knew there was a wide expanse of central lawn at Farlow because my father had taken me there a lot when I was a girl. There was even a pond and footbridge that reminded me of the Public Garden.

My father arrived fifteen minutes earlier than he’d told Joe Doyle to arrive. He didn’t think Doyle would try something in a public place. But he’d always told me that cops hated surprises even more than they hated paperwork.

Once Doyle arrived, the two of them finally sat down on the bench where my father and I had once eaten picnic lunches. Doyle told my father he was wasting his time, if he knew anything about grudges.

“And like I’ve told you before,” Phil Randall said, “I told him I was a cop, wasting time was one of our specialties. And he told me that didn’t mean I got to waste his.”

The two of them went around and around on that. Wasting more time. Finally Doyle told him to get to it. And my father told him that instead of Doyle holding a grudge against him, he should be asking for my father’s help to find out who was really behind Joe Jr.’s murder.

Doyle asked why in the world would my father do something like that. Because, my father said, he’d spent his whole life finding out who did it.

And then Joe Doyle surprised him by saying he’d think about it. They even shook on that. Before Doyle got ready to leave, my father asked him about John Melvin, thinking he could do me a solid. Doyle told him that he’d defended a lot of snakes in his life, but that Melvin was one who gave copperheads and water moccasins a bad name. And that he was finally well done with Melvin, taking consolation only in how many billable hours he’d ended up with at Melvin’s expense, despite having failed, and spectacularly, on his appeals.

It was then that someone dressed like some kind of ninja, all in black, mask over his face, came riding down the bike path at full speed. My father didn’t see the gun until it was almost too late, but when he did see it being raised, the man in black was pointing it at Joe Doyle. Sitting there at the other end of the bench.

He’d already told me this part, but seemed to relish telling it again.

“I have just enough reaction time to throw myself across the bench and push Doyle off it,” Phil Randall said. “I get hit right before I end up on top of him.”

Getting to his favorite part now.

“The guy would have probably come over and finished us both off if I hadn’t cleared my weapon the way I did and got off a couple shots,” he said. “The only reason I didn’t hit him was because it was my right arm that had been hit, so I had bad aim. And I rushed the shot.”

He’d heard a woman screaming then, and the ninja guy had taken off on what my father said was one of those fancy red racing bikes.

Phil Randall turned to Melanie Joan then and said, “I generally hit what I’m aiming at.”

“Of course you were carrying,” I said.

“Like I told Mr. Doyle when we were waiting for the squad car and the ambulance to show up,” he said. “Once a cop, always a cop.”

I turned to Richie.

“Reminds me of something my father once said about yours,” I said.

“He’s said a lot of things about Desmond,” Richie said. “Which one?”

“Some people cannot be rehabilitated,” I said.