Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Forty-Eight

Spike said to Hawk, “I always wanted to be you when I grew up.”

“Black and straight?” Hawk said.

“Well,” Spike said, “the second piece would have been a deal-breaker.”

“Shit people do for love,” Hawk said. “Or don’t.”

Hawk sipped champagne. The bottle was next to him, at our table in the back room at Spike’s. The only one drinking from it was Hawk. Spike and I were having martinis with extra olives. For this one night Melanie Joan was back at River Street Place with Richie and his son.

Takes a village.

When Richie had introduced her to the little boy, looking more and more like his father with each passing day, Melanie Joan had studied Richard as if he were some kind of extraterrestrial being.

As Richie had walked me to the door, he said, “She doesn’t appear to have had much experience with children.”

“She considers herself an only child,” I said, “in just about everything.”

Now it was Spike and Hawk and me, attempting to format some kind of blueprint for keeping her safe. But I was already thinking that if Spike and Hawk and I couldn’t manage that, my next call would have to be private militia.

Spike wore a white dress shirt and jeans and the new pair of Thursday boots he’d been bragging on. Hawk was wearing a black open-necked shirt and a pale gray suit that appeared to be just part of the general magnificent sculpture that was him.

I hadn’t done any polling, but the vibe I was getting was that all of the women in the place wanted Hawk, and maybe half the guys. But my estimate could have been low with the guys.

I saw a young woman tall enough and pretty enough and in enough need of a hot meal to be a runway model excuse herself from the man with whom she was drinking at the bar and make her way directly toward Hawk.

In some kind of heavy European accent she said, “Didn’t I see you at Fashion Week?”

“ ’Course you did,” Hawk said.

She asked if anybody at our table had a pen. Spike did. She took it from him and wrote her number down on a napkin. Old school.

“Call me,” she said.

“ ’Course I will,” Hawk said.

She turned and walked back to the bar.

I said, “You ever been to Fashion Week?”

“ ’Course I haven’t,” he said, and poured himself more champagne.

I reminded him again that he could pretty much name his own price with Melanie Joan. He reminded me again that he was giving her his flat rate.

“Tell me again what that is,” I said.

“Soon as I come up with it,” he said, “you be the first to know.”

“Just be gentle,” I said.

“Always am, missy,” he said. “Always am.”

Over dinner I had told him everything that had happened in more detail than I had at Spenser’s office, everything I knew, everything I suspected. I shared that I was convinced that Melanie Joan knew more than she was telling. And I told him about John Melvin, and his connection to both Melanie Joan and Joe Doyle, and Doyle’s connection to my father.

When I finished, Spike said, “So who knows that Hawk’s in this?”

“The three of us,” I said. “Melanie Joan. Spenser and Susan Silverman. Richie. My dad. And I told Samantha Heller she might see Hawk on the perimeter from time to time.”

“As a matter of fact, dear girl, she won’t ever,” Hawk said in a British accent.

“Sorry, Watson,” I said.

He smiled again.

“Not your sidekick, either,” he said.

I loved listening to him lapse in and out of street talk, the way Tony Marcus did. Tony had a lot more money, a lot more power, was a lot more streetwise, in all ways. But I knew enough about their relationship to know that Hawk was one of the few people in town, on either side of the line, to whom Tony always gave as much room as possible. Or just backed off entirely.

There was something else. Hawk was smarter than Tony, and not just street-smarter. He always got the joke, whatever the joke happened to be.

“You gonna need me to watch you some?” Hawk said to me. “Not like you not gonna be in the line of fire at some point.”

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” Spike said.

“From what I see, over here on the perimeter you just spoke on,” Hawk said, “is that somebody pickin’ off people who’ve done good off Melanie Joan. And people she cares about, much as she’s capable. We need to worry about the agent?”

“She says the protection Quill House, her agency, was willing to set up for Melanie Joan is easily transferred to her,” I said.

“Not as good as us,” Spike said. “And if you thought outside security was necessary, you would have asked for it in the first place.”

Hawk said to Spike, “Just to be on the safe side, one of us ought to keep an eye on her time to time.”

“Done,” Spike said.

I said to Hawk, “Why are you doing this, really? We’d never even met until the other day.”

“Thought I already explained that,” he said. “When Susan Silverman tells me to jump, all’s I generally asks is how high.”

“Doesn’t that reinforce hurtful racial stereotypes?” I said, grinning at him.

“ ’Course it does,” he said.

“What do we always hear about murder?” Spike said. “That the first two boxes to check are love and money.”

“Before you get to the next one,” Hawk said.

“And that would be?” Spike said.

“Hate,” Hawk said. “You ask me, what we got goin’ here is a different kind of hate crime, against a white girl writes books for a living.”