Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Fifty-Eight

“People keep dying,” I said to Hawk.

“You don’t miss nothin’ now, do you?”

“What I’m mostly doing,” I said, “is spinning my wheels.”

“Like that Peloton,” Hawk said. “Workin’ your ass off and goin’ nowhere. Never could understand that shit.”

“Feel the burn,” I said.

“ ‘Feel the burn’?” he said. “You really want to sound older than Jane Fonda?”

We were drinking in the bar at The Newbury, which we both still called the old Ritz. Hawk had ordered a $200 bottle of Taittinger. I was drinking Bushmills neat. My father was babysitting Melanie Joan. She was probably developing a crush on him at this point. All women, of all ages, did eventually.

Hawk was wearing a double-breasted navy blazer, a white V-neck T-shirt underneath, gray jeans, and black cowboy boots. We were at the table centered at the window facing out onto Arlington Street and the Public Garden.

I told him I’d been with Susan earlier in the day.

“Means you smarter than when you woke up this morning,” he said. “Always a good thing.”

“Isn’t it, though,” I said.

“People always be talkin’ about class this and class that,” Hawk said. “Only two classes of people that matter, you ask me. There’s the class tryin’ to smarten the world up, and every asshole tryin’ to dumb it down.”

“Lately I am feeling as if I belong to the second class,” I said. I grinned. “Second-class citizen in all ways.”

“ ’Cause you ain’t figured it all out yet, like you think you should. Spenser gets the same way.”

“The bodies do keep piling up,” I said. “The only one dead by natural causes is the professor.”

“You more worried about Doyle getting Melvin done?” Hawk said. “Or who else Melvin might’ve gotten done?”

“It was interesting,” I said to Hawk, “that as much as he wanted me to think he was masterminding everything, he wouldn’t cop to sending the shooter after Melanie Joan and me.”

“Sounds to me like the old fuck lived to play his damn games,” Hawk said.

“Or die playing them.”

“You believe him?”

“No.”

“Two people close to Miss Mellie get they throats cut,” Hawk said. “Even I don’t run into a lot of that.”

“Same,” I said.

I sipped some whiskey. Hawk poured himself more champagne. I had already seen him drink an entire bottle at Spike’s, and that had no discernible effect on him. Other than immediately making him order another bottle.

“I go back to the beginning,” I said to Hawk. “Somebody wanted to torture Melanie Joan.”

“ ’Fore they kilt her.”

“But when somebody did come after her,” I said, “it was with a gun and not a knife.”

“Hard to get near enough with a knife with all of us stayin’ close like we are to that old ass of hers,” he said.

“She’s pretty proud of that ass,” I said. “And I actually think she looks pretty good back there.”

“Only a practiced eye like my own would notice gravity starting to do its thang on her.”

I grinned.

“That settles it,” I said. “I’m walking behind you when we leave.”

We drank for a few moments in silence. Hawk occupied himself smiling at a tall redhead at the bar. Up to now, she had remained clothed.

“Who’s got the most skin in the game?” Hawk said.

“That much hasn’t changed,” I said. “Whoever thinks they had a book stolen from them.”

“Yowza,” Hawk said.

“Sounds like the money is about to be cut off with the widow Hall,” I said.

“Maybe you need to have another talk with her,” Hawk said.

“I’ll put her on my list.”

He smiled again. The only time he changed expression was when he smiled. But it was worth the wait, every time. Now the redhead at the bar knew.

I said, “I keep thinking it has to be more than just Susan asking for you to help me like this.”

“No,” he said. “It don’t.”

He paused and said, “Other than me being bored.”

“You couldn’t take a vacation?”

“Not alone,” he said. “And I is, as they say, currently between engagements.”

He nodded at the bar.

“Though that could be about to change,” he said. “Im-i-nent-ly.”

“Look at you,” I said. “About to make a new friend.”

“ ’Fore I go, listen up,” he said. “You do what you got to do and not worry about Miss Mellie. Me and the Pink Panther got this.”

I smiled now, fully.

“Spike know you call him that?”

“Sho’ nuff,” Hawk said. “He can’t be the Black Panther, on account of that bein’ me.”

“Four people dead in this thing,” I said.

Hawk winked at me.

“Check your math, you get home,” he said.

He waved for the check and signed it and told me he could walk me home. But I knew he didn’t mean that, and so did he.

“You like redheads?” I said.

“Like all of what you call your womankind,” he said.

And then he was heading for the bar.

I let him go first. No way I was letting him talk about my butt the way he talked about Melanie Joan’s.