Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Sixty-Eight

Dr. John Melvin had drugged me once, but I had been ready for it that time, had taken an antidote before he did, and knew that Richie Burke, gun in hand, was waiting outside the door to help me take him down. Which we did.

This was different. I had been out cold. Now I was awake again, facing Melanie Joan, both of us duct-taped to chairs, duct tape over her mouth and not mine. Samantha Heller, or whatever her real name was, had been pacing and talking in a manic way for a while, about being abandoned and about the foster-home hell of a childhood, always circling back to how it all began when Melanie Joan stole her mother’s book and ruined her life.

Every time she would say that, Melanie Joan would violently shake her head.

Samantha still had the long razor in her hand, waving it in the air occasionally to emphasize one of her points.

“I was going to wait a little while longer, Sunny,” she said. “But when you said last night you were going to find the baby, I knew you were telling the truth. And you would find your way to me eventually.”

She laughed and seemed to become even more manic.

“The thing is,” she said, “I needed you to understand. Because I like you, Sunny. I think you are a good, well-intentioned person, even if I can’t let you leave here. But I needed you to understand. You understand that, don’t you?”

She stopped in front of me and spoke next in a soft voice.

“You can scream if you want to,” she said. “No one will hear. I just taped up her mouth because I am so sick and fucking tired of listening to her.”

“I don’t scream,” I said.

I looked at Melanie Joan. I noticed the way Samantha had tied her wrists to the arms of the chair.

Facing up.

There was a stack of yellow pages on the table in what had been the kitchen once.

My own wrists were taped so tightly to the sides of my own chair my hands were starting to lose circulation.

Samantha walked over to Melanie Joan now and said, “I am going to take the tape off your mouth. But if you continue to annoy me, I will cut you now and let you bleed out the way my mother did.

“Are we clear?” Samantha continued.

Melanie Joan’s eyes were as crazy as Samantha Heller’s, just with fear. But she nodded. Then Samantha reached over and ripped the tape off her mouth, the sound harsh, echoing in the small front room where perhaps Jennifer Price had once rocked Samantha to sleep.

Samantha turned back to me.

“You want to know the amazing thing, Sunny?” she said. “She’d still rather die than admit she stole my mother’s book.”

“I told you I didn’t steal it!” Melanie Joan yelled. “Charles gave it to me!”

And there it was.

“He told me he had written it!” Melanie Joan said. She sighed. “It’s why I paid him all those years.”

Samantha slapped her hard across the face, Melanie Joan’s head whipping to the side. Then again.

“Liar,” she said in the soft voice again.

“It’s the truth,” Melanie Joan said. She started to cry now. “He told me that it wasn’t very good, but I had the talent to make it into something.”

“And why would he do something like that?” Samantha said.

“To sleep with me!” Melanie Joan said, crying harder now.

“Well, isn’t that ironic, if it is true?” Samantha said. “Since the one whose life got fucked because of it was me.”

Then she was pacing again, and rambling, about how long it took her to find out who her birth mother was, and how she finally tracked her here, and how she convinced them that she and Jennifer Price had been friends back in upstate New York. And how it was after she took possession of the belongings that she found the manuscript.

“She died before she even saw Melanie Joan’s book, didn’t she?” I said.

“But I found her book,” she said. “In with some others she started and abandoned. It looks like she became almost obsessive about her writing the last couple years of her life.”

I said, “And some of those pages were similar to Melanie Joan’s book.”

“It wasn’t Melanie Joan’s book! It was my mother’s!”

Keep her talking.

“But how did you find out everything that had happened to Jennifer Price?”

“That’s the best part!” she said, too brightly. “My fucking father told me!”

She said, “Even after what he did to her, she dedicated the book to him. And when I went back to that shitty little college to find him, the old fool was so far around the bend that he thought I was her and spilled his pathetic guts.”

“He didn’t think I was your mother when I showed up at his house,” I said. “He thought I was you.”

“Who knows what people are thinking when they’re not thinking,” she said.

“You got yourself a job at the publishing house,” I said. Almost talking to myself now.

“Chaz Blackburn was as much of an old lech as my father,” she said. “It was like shooting fish in a barrel, to use a tacky cliché, getting him to hire me. I was like one of my father’s girls.”

I said, “And then you became an agent, you were already in that world.”

“Good girl, Sunny!” Samantha said. “And then I, lo and behold, I was the agent to the great Melanie Joan Hall, who wanted someone she could trust.”

She smiled. But there was nothing normal about it. It was more like a Halloween mask smile.

“People like me, Sunny,” she said. “You did.”

“So this was all about revenge,” I said. “For you and for John Melvin.”

“Spike was right about the best way to serve it,” she said.

She looked at me.

“Stop twisting your wrists, Sunny. Or I will cut you.”

“Why haven’t you just killed us already and left?” I said.

“Because you both need to understand, for fuck’s sake!”

“John Melvin lied about being behind it all,” I said.

“Like a champion,” Samantha Heller said. “Made it so much easier for me to get her in the trunk after I went to the needle with her.”

She paced and talked a little more, some of it impossible to follow and some of it making her pathology completely logical, at least to her, about how Melanie Joan needed to suffer the way she had. And how she was going someplace where nobody would ever be able to find her. She had wanted this. Her big scene. And I had walked right into it.

I thought: She makes John Melvin look sane.

I remember being in a room like this once before, listening to Bobby Toms, Felix Burke’s son, tell us all about it, as if he was the one who had waited his whole life to do that. Susan Silverman told me at the time about that particular pathology, the need for people to explain themselves and be the heroes of their own dramas, which always made perfect sense to them. I thought I was going to die that night, too, and didn’t. Maybe you got lucky that way only once.

I heard something outside then.

But so did she.

Samantha walked past Melanie Joan and casually cut one of her wrists.

Melanie Joan began to shriek, staring down at the blood.

Then Samantha was quickly behind me and had the razor to my throat.

“Whoever is out there needs to come inside now,” she called out. “And if I see a weapon, I will sadly be forced to slit Sunny’s throat.”

Thirty seconds later Hawk came walking through the door, tossing his Magnum in ahead of him.