Robert B. Parker's Blood Feud E-Book

Mike Lupica

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 360

Beschreibung

Robert B. Parker's iconic and irresistible PI Sunny Randall is back, and the stakes are higher than ever as she races to protect her ex-husband-and his Mafia family-from the vengeful plan of a mysterious rival. Sunny Randall is 'on' again with Richie Burke, the ex-husband she never stopped loving and never seemed to be able to let go, despite her discomfort with his Mafia connections. When Richie is shot and nearly killed, Sunny is dragged into the thick of his family's business as she searches for answers and tries to stave off a mob war. But as the bullets start flying in Boston's mean streets, Sunny finds herself targeted by the deranged mastermind of the plot against Richie's family, whose motive may be far more personal than she could have anticipated...

Leseprobe

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR ROBERT B. PARKER

‘Parker writes old-time, stripped-to-the-bone, hard-boiled school of Chandler… His novels are funny, smart and highly entertaining… There’s no writer I’d rather take on an aeroplane’ – Sunday Telegraph

‘Parker packs more meaning into a whispered “yeah” than most writers can pack into a page’ – Sunday Times

‘Why Robert Parker’s not better known in Britain is a mystery. His best series featuring Boston-based PI Spenser is a triumph of style and substance’ – Daily Mirror

‘Robert B. Parker is one of the greats of the American hard-boiled genre’ – Guardian

‘Nobody does it better than Parker…’ – Sunday Times

‘Parker’s sentences flow with as much wit, grace and assurance as ever, and Stone is a complex and consistently interesting new protagonist’ – Newsday

‘If Robert B. Parker doesn’t blow it, in the new series he set up in Night Passage and continues with Trouble in Paradise, he could go places and take the kind of risks that wouldn’t be seemly in his popular Spenser stories’ – New York Times

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR MIKE LUPICA

‘Lupica, an award-winning sports columnist, author of 40 books, and longtime friend of the late Parker, nails the Sunny Randall character and the Boston criminal milieu that Parker created’ – Booklist

‘Lupica does justice to the work of MWA Grand Master Robert B. Parker in this splendid continuation of the late author’s Sunny Randall series’ – Publisher’s Weekly

‘Mike Lupica mixes a heavy dose of suspense with a shot of nostalgia, effortlessly delivering a relentless thriller that might just be the best book in the series so far’ – The Real Book Spy

‘Lupica mimics the heroine’s voice, much less distinctive than those of Parker’s other leads, with ease’ – Kirkus Reviews

This book is for my old pal, the great Robert B. Parker, who came into my life with The Godwulf Manuscript and has been in it ever since. And for Esther Newberg, keeper of the flame.

1

I said to Spike, ‘Do I look as if I’m getting older?’

‘This is some kind of trap,’ he said.

‘I’m being serious,’ I said. ‘The UPS kid ma’amed me the other day.’

‘I assume you shot him,’ Spike said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But I thought about it.’

We were seated at one of the middle tables in the front room at his restaurant, Spike’s, formerly known as Spike’s Place, on Marshall Street near Quincy Market. It had started out as a sawdust-on-the-floor saloon, before there even was a Quincy Market. It was still a comedy club when Spike and two partners took it over. Then Spike bought out the two partners, reimagined the place as an upscale dining establishment – ‘Complete with flora and fauna,’ as he liked to say – and now he was making more money than he ever had in his life.

It was an hour or so before he would open the door for what was usually a robust Sunday brunch crowd. We were both working on Bloody Marys even though it was only ten-thirty in the morning, being free, well past twenty-one, and willing to throw caution to the wind.

Spike took a bite of the celery stalk from his drink. I knew he was doing that only to buy time.

‘Would you mind repeating the question?’ he said.

‘You heard me.’

‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that what you’ve asked is the age equivalent of asking if I think you look fat in those jeans.’

I looked down at my favorite pair of Seven whites. Actually, I had no way of knowing if they were my favorites, since I had four pairs in my closet exactly like them. When any one of them started to feel too tight, I doubled down on yoga and gym time, and cut back on the wine.

‘You’re saying I’m fat, too?’ I said.

‘You know I’m not,’ he said. ‘And in answer to the original question, you always look younger than springtime to me.’

‘You’re sweet,’ I said.

‘That’s what all the girls say. But, sadly, only about half the guys.’ Spike was big, bearded, built like a bear that did a lot of gym time, and able to beat up the Back Bay if necessary. He was also gay, and my best friend in the world.

‘Only half?’ I said.

‘I’m the one who’s getting old, sweetie,’ he said. ‘And probably starting to look fat in my own skinny-ass jeans.’

My miniature English bull terrier, Rosie, was lounging on the floor in the puppy bed that Spike kept for her behind the bar, thinking food might be available at any moment, the way it usually was at Spike’s. Spike called her Rosie Two. The original Rosie, the love of my life, had passed away the previous spring, far too soon. My father had always said that dogs were one of the few things that God got wrong, that they were the ones who ought to be able to live forever.

I’d asked Spike not to call her Rosie Two, telling him that it affected a girl’s self-esteem.

‘I love you,’ he’d say, ‘and by extension, that means I love your dog. But she’s still a goddamn dog.’

At which point I would shush him and tell him that now he was just being mean.

There was a sharp rap on the front window. Rosie immediately jumped to attention, growling, her default mechanism for strangers. There was a young couple peering in at us, the guy prettier than the woman he was with. They looked like J and Crew. Spike smiled brilliantly at them, pointed at his watch, shook his head. They moved on, their blondness intact.

‘Where were we?’ Spike said.

‘Discussing my advancing age.’

‘We’re not going to have one of those dreary conversations about your biological clock, are we?’ he said. He trained his smile on me now. ‘It makes you sound so straight.’

‘Pretty sure I am, last time I checked.’

‘Well,’ Spike said, sighing theatrically. ‘You don’t have to make a thing of it.’

‘You make it sound like we have these conversations all the time,’ I said.

‘More lately now that you and your ex have started up again, or started over again, or whatever the hell it is you two are doing.’

My ex-husband was Richie Burke, and had long since turned Kathryn Burke into his second ex-wife. He’d finally admitted to her that he not only had never gotten over me, he likely never would.

At the time Spike said it was shocking, Kathryn being a bad sport about something like that, and racing him to see who could file for divorce first.

Now Richie and I were dating, as much as I thought it was stupid to think of it that way. But ‘seeing each other’ sounded even worse. When we did spend a night together, something we never did more than once a week, we always slept at my new apartment on River Street Place so I didn’t have to get a sitter for Rosie. So far there had been hardly any talk about the two of us moving back in together, something I wasn’t sure could ever happen again. It wasn’t because of Richie. It was because of me.

The one time Richie had asked if I could ever see the two of us married again, I told him I’d rather run my hand through Trump’s hair.

‘I keep thinking that maybe this time you two crazy kids could live happily ever after,’ Spike said.

‘I’m no good at either one,’ I said. ‘Happy. Or ever after.’

‘I thought you said you were happy with the way things were going?’ Spike said.

‘Not so much lately.’

‘Well, shitfuck,’ he said.

‘“Shitfuck”?’

‘It’s something an old baseball manager used to say,’ he said. Spike was obsessed with baseball in general and the Boston Red Sox in particular. He frequently reminded me of the old line that in Boston the Red Sox weren’t a matter of life and death, because they were far more serious than that.

‘You know baseball bores the hell out of me,’ I said.

‘I can’t believe they even allow you to live here,’ Spike said.

We both sipped our drinks, which were merely perfect. I used to tell friends all the time that they could call off the search for the best Bloody Mary on the planet once they got to Spike’s.

‘What’s bothering you, really?’ Spike said. ‘You only have to look in the mirror to see how beautiful you still are. And having been in the gym with you as often as I have, we both know you’re as fit as a Navy SEAL.’

‘Remember when Richie told me it was officially over with Kathryn? He said it was because he wanted it all. And that “all” meant me.’

‘I remember.’

‘But the problem,’ I continued, ‘is that I’m no better at figuring out what that means to me than I was when we were married. Or apart.’ I sighed. ‘Shitfuck,’ I said.

‘You sound like the dog that caught the car,’ Spike said.

I smiled at him. ‘That’s me,’ I said. ‘An old dog.’

‘I give up,’ he said.

‘What you need to do is open up,’ I said, ‘and send me and my gorgeous dog politely and firmly on our way.’

‘You could stay for lunch,’ Spike said.

‘And have Rosie scare off the decent people? Who needs that?’

‘What you need,’ Spike said, ‘is a case. A private detective without clients is, like, what? Help me out here.’

‘You without a cute guy in your life?’

‘Some of us don’t need men to complete us,’ he said.

We both laughed and stood up. I kissed him on the cheek.

‘Go home and paint,’ he said. ‘We both know that is something that actually does complete you. Then get up tomorrow and somehow find a way to get yourself a client.’

‘What if the phone doesn’t ring?’ I said.

Spike said, ‘It always has.’

It did.

2

I’d loved the waterfrontloft in Fort Point that I’d shared with the original Rosie.

I’d loved the light it gave me to paint in the late afternoon, when I felt as if I usually did my best work. I’d loved that it was completely mine after Richie and I broke up, and even remained mine after some very bad and very dangerous men had done their best to ruin it when I was once protecting a runaway girl. Mine and the original Rosie’s, before and after the repairs. Ours.

But once Rosie died, there were simply too many memories for me to endure staying there. There was no place for me to turn without expecting to see her. She was supposed to be in the small bed next to where I painted, or sleeping at the foot of my real bed, or on the couch in the living room, or waiting at the door when Richie would come to get her for a weekend, back when the two of us shared custody of her.

So I’d moved, to a town house at the end of River Street, parallel to Charles, at the foot of Beacon Hill, a couple of blocks from the Public Garden and Boston Common, around the corner from the old Charles Street Meeting House. It was owned by my friend Melanie Joan Hall, an author for whom I’d once served as a bodyguard on a book tour, and then saved from a stalker who happened to be one of her ex-husbands.

Melanie Joan had bought the place not long after all that, falling in love with it the way she so frequently fell in and out of love with men. But now she had remarried again, to a Hollywood producer, and had moved Out There. When I’d mentioned the new Rosie and I were moving, she’d insisted that we make River Street Place our new home. At first, she wanted to let me have it rent-free. I insisted that I couldn’t do that. We’d finally agreed on a rent that was ridiculously low for the area, she’d put a lot of her stuff into storage, Rosie and I had moved in, with a lot of my stuff, but not all.

There were four floors. The place had been built in the nineteenth century, and legend had it that back then ship sails had been woven in the loft next door. It was all kind of funky and wonderful, built like an old railroad flat, not one of the floors more than twenty feet wide. Living room and kitchen on the first floor, master bedroom on the second, guest room on the third. The fourth floor became my art studio. I still thought of it all as Melanie Joan’s house, as if it were a halfway house before I would find something more permanent eventually. But Rosie and I were still doing the best to make it ours. For now we were content, if in an impermanent way, in our twenty-by-fifteen rooms, and it was doing both of us just fine, Rosie more than me. As long as I was around, she didn’t care if we lived in a shoe.

In the late afternoon she slept in a bed near the table where I was painting the small stone cottage Richie and I had come upon in the Concord woods last fall, when we had gone hiking up there. It was at the far end of a huge piece of property that belonged to a high school friend of Richie’s who had gotten extremely wealthy in the real estate business.

‘He’s always telling me that there’s a Thoreau inside me waiting to bust out,’ Richie said that day.

I told him that knowing what I knew about my city-boy ex-husband, busting out of a prison would be easier.

Richie’s friend had told him about the cottage, which he said had been originally built in the early part of the twentieth century by a writer whose name Richie couldn’t remember, and had gone empty for years. But I thought it was perfect, the masonry still beautiful, the place framed by autumn leaves and birch trees, and, beyond that, sky and God.

I had snapped some photographs with my iPhone but hadn’t gotten around to finally painting the cottage until a month ago. I was still going slowly with it, still experimenting with which colors I wanted to dominate the background and which ones I wanted to mute, how dark I wanted the gray of the cottage to be setting off the leaves around it, how much contrast I needed between the stones of the cottage and the lone stone wall in front.

For the next few hours, I existed only in that world, trying to imagine what it must have been like to live in those woods nearly a hundred years ago, lost in the satisfied feeling of the work finally coming together, the shapes and color and proportion almost assembling themselves, as if exploring all of their own possibilities.

Over the years I had managed to sell a fair amount of my paintings. But it had never felt like a job to me, or work. It was nothing I would ever say out loud, not to Spike or to Richie or to anyone, but it was about the art in me. It had always been about the joy the feeling of a brush in my hand and then on the paper had always brought to me once I had gone back to working with watercolors.

There was also the sense of clarity and purpose it gave me, a completeness that my real job had never brought to my life, or my marriage.

‘Rosie,’ I said when I finally put down my brush, pleased with the work I had done today, ‘why can’t the whole world be like this?’

Rosie raised her head. Sometimes I thought that whatever I said to her always sounded the same, as if I were asking her if she wanted a treat.

I cleaned my brushes, put them away, took one last look at what I’d accomplished today. And smiled.

‘Sunny Randall,’ I said, ‘you may be getting older. But this is one goddamn area where you’re getting better.’

I showered, changed into a T-shirt and new skinny denims, rewarded myself for a good day’s work with a generous pour of pinot grigio. Then I inserted one of my favorite jazz CDs into Melanie Joan’s player, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk at Carnegie Hall.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t thought about dinner until just now. It was, I decided, a good thing. Spike said another marker for getting older was when you started thinking about what you wanted to have for dinner as soon as you finished lunch.

‘Once you’re doing that,’ he said, ‘the next stop is the home.’

I reviewed my takeout options in the neighborhood, finally settled on chowder and a Cobb salad from the Beacon Hill Hotel and Bistro.

I took Rosie with me when it was time to pick it up, brought the bag back to Melanie Joan’s, and ate at the small kitchen table closest to the television in the downstairs living room. I stayed strong and didn’t turn on the TV until I’d finished eating. I wasn’t an animal.

When I finished cleaning up, I poured myself another glass of wine. There was no music now, just the sound of Rosie’s snoring. And an aloneness, an aloneness that I had chosen for myself, that still swallowed me up sometimes in the night.

I thought about calling Spike, knowing he would find a way to make me laugh and feel less alone. I could call Richie, but I knew better than doing that. You had to have a purpose for calling him; he was built less for small talk than anyone I had ever known.

Did I want him to come over? Did I want him to drink wine with me and make love later and share the ridiculously big bed upstairs? There was a part of me that did. But I knew that sometimes being with him that way made me feel even more alone afterward. As if there was an impermanence to that happiness, too.

I called Spike.

‘Are you calling to tell me that since we parted you have somehow found gainful employment,’ he said, ‘even on a Sunday?’

‘I am calling to tell you that I love you,’ I said.

‘Red or white wine?’ he said.

‘White.’

‘I knew it!’

‘How, might I ask?’

‘White usually makes you sentimental,’ Spike said.

‘What about a good bottle of red?’

‘Melancholy,’ he said. ‘Or maybe it’s horny.’

Neither one of us spoke. He said he’d left the restaurant early.

‘I’ll die on the hill of you needing a client to make you feel better about things,’ Spike said. ‘But you’ll never need a man to be fabulous.’

‘How come when you say “fabulous” it doesn’t sound gay?’ I said.

‘Because I’m fabulous!’ he said, gaying it up as much as he possibly could.

I laughed.

‘Now take two more slugs of wine and call Dr Spike in the morning if you’re not feeling better.’

I didn’t drink more wine, took Rosie out for one last walk, washed up, got Rosie settled in at the end of a bed that really did look large enough to be a helicopter pad, turned off the lights.

I slept until Richie’s uncle Felix called me from Mass General a little after two in the morning to tell me that someone had shot Richie in the back.

I sat up in bed, feeling all of the air come out of me at once, instantly awake, knowing this wasn’t a dream, knowing the nightmare was real, processing what I had just been told.

Richie.

Shot.

‘Alive?’ I said to Felix Burke, my voice loud and brittle. I could see Rosie up and staring at me from the end of the bed.

‘Alive.’

I told him I would be there in twenty minutes, got dressed, blew up Storrow Drive, and parked at the Emergency entrance to the hospital, and realized I had made it in fifteen.

Richie.

Shot.

But alive.

3

To be any closerto Mass General when he was shot, Richie would have had to have taken a bullet at the front door.

The distance from his saloon to the hospital was less than a mile. Maybe a few minutes with no traffic and if you hit all the lights.

The doctors were still working on closing up the wounds, front and back, when I got there. Richie’s father, Desmond, and his uncle Felix were in the ER’s waiting area. They immediately walked me past the admittance desk and through some double doors, nobody saying anything to us, nobody making any attempt to stop us. It was as if the most famous hospital in Boston, one of the most famous in the world, was now being run by them.

‘My son’s wife,’ Desmond said to the first nurse he saw, as if somehow that explained everything.

The last thing Felix Burke had told me before we’d ended our phone call was ‘Through and through.’

Meaning the bullet.

Now Felix said, ‘It was underneath his right shoulder. He was walking to where he’d parked his car after he closed up.’

‘Why was he even there on a Sunday night?’ I said.

I was trying to process all of this at once. Why Richie was even at the saloon was a good enough place to start.

‘Mickey, his regular weekend guy, called in sick. Richie knew he could watch the Sunday-night football game and thought it would be fun to work the stick.’

We were about twenty feet down the hall from the room where Richie was.

‘They cleaned him out with the kind of rod they use if the bullet doesn’t stay in you,’ Felix Burke said.

‘When the cops finished, they came over and asked if they could talk to Felix and me,’ Desmond Burke said. ‘I told them there was a better chance of Jesus stopping by tonight.’

He was staring past me with his dark eyes, toward the room where his son was, or maybe past that, and into the darkness of his entire adult life, a life from which I knew he had worked mightily to insulate his only son. I had always thought he looked like some pale Irish priest.

Felix Burke was different. Richie had shown me pictures of his father and Felix when they were teenagers, skinny, slicked-back black hair, all the brio in both of them staring out at you from the grainy black-and-white photographs. They could have passed for twins in those days. But that was a lifetime ago. While there was such an ascetic look to Desmond now, somehow Felix had grown broader as Desmond had become all hard angles and planes. He had been a heavyweight boxer in his youth, and you didn’t have to look very closely to see the scarring around the eyes and that his nose was far more crooked than the one with which he had been born.

‘One shot,’ Felix said. ‘Richie never heard him coming.’

Desmond Burke said, ‘The shooter spoke to Richie after he put him down.’

‘The fucking fuck,’ Felix said.

I looked at Desmond. ‘What did he say?’

‘“Sins of the father,”’ Desmond Burke said. ‘He didn’t want to kill him. If he had, he would have put one in the back of his head. He wanted to send a message. To me. About my sins.’

‘Tell the fucking fuck to send an email next time,’ Felix said.

In a quiet voice Desmond Burke said, ‘Richard has never been a part of this.’

‘The family business,’ I said.

‘Which has now brought him to this night and this place,’ Desmond said.

‘Which will bring consequences,’ Felix said.

It went without saying. Felix had decided to say it anyway.

4

‘Fancy meeting you here,’ Richie said when we were finally alone.

He was in a room of his own. I didn’t know how many private rooms were available in Emergency at Mass General at this time of night, but I assumed that even if it had been an issue, Desmond and Felix would have handled it. If they’d gotten it into their minds to put Richie’s bed in the office of the chief of staff, I further assumed they would have made that happen, too.

By now I knew that the doctor who had cleaned out the wound and done the stitching preferred that Richie at least stay around for a couple hours. Richie had told him that wasn’t happening and to please start the paperwork.

‘Did you actually say “please”?’ I said.

‘It was more an implied type of thing.’

I had pulled a chair over near his bed and was holding his hand.

‘They said you were lucky that the angle of the shot was up and not down,’ I said. ‘If he’d fired down, the damage could have been much worse.’

‘I gather luck had very little to do with this,’ Richie said.

‘Meaning?’

‘You know my meaning,’ he said. ‘If he’d wanted me dead I’d be dead.’

We both let that settle until I smiled at him and said, ‘I thought we had an understanding that I’m the one who gets shot at.’

‘Shot at,’ he said, ‘but never hit.’

‘Yet.’

‘You know how I like to be first,’ he said.

‘Are we still talking about shooting bullets?’ I said.

Richie offered a weak smile of his own.

‘Tell me what happened,’ I said. ‘Your father and Uncle Felix told me what they know. Now you tell me.’

‘It’s not a case, Sunny.’

‘Isn’t it?’ I said.

He started from the beginning, with Mickey Dunphy calling in sick. Richie said that because his social calendar happened to be wide open on a Sunday night, he decided it might be fun to cover for him. Sunday night was for regulars and, besides, he said, he still liked to bartend from time to time to keep himself in the game.

He had closed up, counted up, put the cash part of the evening’s take in his office safe, set the alarm, and was walking to where he’d parked his car on Portland Street.

‘And you heard nothing.’

‘Saw nothing,’ he said. ‘But I wasn’t looking.’

‘And when you were on the ground, he said what he said about the sins of the father.’

Richie nodded.

‘Is there any current trouble between your family and, uh, competing interests?’ I asked.

‘My father says no.’

‘But this was no random shooting,’ I said. ‘This was done with purpose, and planning.’

‘Evidently.’

‘He had to have followed you to the bar and waited,’ I said. ‘Because he had no way of knowing that you’d even be there on a Sunday night.’

‘Maybe he had been to the bar before,’ Richie said. ‘He picked a spot on the street with no cameras, according to the police. After I was hit, I tried to roll over to get a glimpse of him, or maybe a car. But he had just walked off into the night.’

I leaned closer and said, ‘Who would do this? You’ve never been a part of that world.’

‘But I’m a part of their life,’ Richie said.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I do,’ Richie said. ‘My father always talked about boundaries. Now someone has decided to cross them.’

‘As a way of sending a message,’ I said.

‘Evidently,’ Richie said.

‘But about what?’

‘Maybe that someone is coming for him,’ Richie said. ‘But we’re not going to figure that out right now.’

‘Let me drive you home,’ I said.

‘My father and my uncle have already insisted, I’m afraid.’

Another weak smile.

‘But feel free to engage them in a lively debate about that.’

I squeezed his hand, in the quiet room in the quiet of the big hospital in the time before dawn. ‘Pass,’ I said.

‘And you, always tough enough to charge at an automatic weapon,’ Richie said.

‘There are boundaries that even I won’t cross,’ I said.

‘You should go,’ Richie said.

‘When you go, big boy.’

‘Okay.’

‘Do you need anything?’

‘As a matter of fact, I do.’

‘Name it,’ I said. ‘As long as it doesn’t involve me locking the door and disrobing.’

‘Some Florence Nightingale you are,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to assume you dressing up like a candy striper is out of the question as well.’

‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘Is there anything you need?’

‘For you to leave this alone,’ Richie said.

‘You know I can’t do that.’

‘I mean it,’ Richie said.

‘Me, too,’ I said.

But the good news now that he was a client, I told him, is that he was looking at a whopping family discount.

5

The last thing Richie had told me was that he wanted to sleep. So I didn’t call him until late the next morning, to ask how he was feeling. He said that, all things considered, the biggest being that he’d been shot, he felt all right. I asked him if he was armed. He said that he was, with pain meds, and that he was going back to sleep.

An hour later I was sitting in Tony Marcus’s back office at Buddy’s Fox, his club in the South End. He had briefly changed the name to Ebony and Ivory. But now it was back to Buddy’s Fox, and was as I remembered it, booths along both walls as you walked in, bar in the back. There were a handful of customers when I walked in, some in booths, some eating lunch, some seated at the bar. All of the customers were black. As always at Tony’s place, I felt whiter than the Republican National Convention.

A new bodyguard of Tony’s, who introduced himself as Tayshawn, was waiting for me at the bar. He did not ask to pat me down, just simply said, ‘Gun?’ With the firepower on the premises, Tayshawn had clearly decided we could go with the honor system.

‘Not to Tony’s?’ I said, and opened the Bottega Veneta bag that Richie had paid far too much for last Christmas to show him.

He walked me back to Tony’s office. Tony’s two main sidemen were back there with him. One was a small, jittery young guy of indeterminate age named Ty Bop. He was Tony’s shooter. Today he was wearing a black baseball cap with a yellow P on the front, and the skinniest pair of skinny jeans I had ever seen on a man or woman. Even those hung down off his hips. His high-top sneakers were bright white. We had met plenty of times before, but he gave no sign of greeting or recognition, just leaned against the wall and swayed slightly from side to side, as if listening to music that only he could hear.

Ty Bop was to my right. To my left, opposite wall, was Junior, Tony’s body man, one roughly the size of Old Ironsides. The threat from both of them was palpable. There had been a time, with two badass men in pursuit and fully intending to shoot me dead, that I had come running into Buddy’s Fox, where Tony’s guys had dissuaded them.

Tony ran prostitution in Boston, and was involved with other criminal enterprises when they suited his interests, much like a street venture capitalist. He was as much of a badass as anybody in town, no matter how much he liked to present himself as a gent. He had always reminded me of what Billy Dee Williams looked like when he was young, a light-skinned black man with a thin mustache, bespoke tailoring at all times, day or night, a soft-spoken manner that was nothing more than a front.

Tony Marcus had his cut in Boston, and the Burke family had theirs, and the Italians, what was left of them, had theirs. Eddie Lee still controlled Chinatown. Two of the old bosses, Gino Fish and Joe Broz, were long gone. Joe had died of old age. Gino had not.

Tony and I were not friends. Tony didn’t have friends, unless you counted Ty Bop and Junior. But we had managed to do favors for each other from time to time when our interests had coincided. I still trusted him about as far as either one of us would have been able to throw Junior. I was sure he felt the same about me.

He did not get up from behind his desk when I entered the office, just studied me up and down as if I were auditioning to be one of his girls.

‘Sunny Randall,’ he purred. ‘You are still one fine-looking piece of ass, girl.’

I sat down in the chair across from him and crossed my legs. The black skirt I was wearing was already short enough to show off my legs. Crossing them showed off more. Tony noticed, in full. But that had been the point.

‘Don’t make me file a complaint with Human Resources, Tony,’ I said.

It made him laugh.

‘Girl, in my world, I am Human Resources,’ he said.

‘How’s business?’ I said.

‘Busier business than ever, Sunny Randall,’ he said. ‘Tryin’ to keep up with the modern world. Lookin’ to do some of that di-ver-si-fi-cation shit.’ Then he proceeded to give me more information than I wanted or needed about how he planned to do that, with what he described as his ‘new fucking business model,’ and his plans for expansion out of state. As always, he went back and forth between talking street and trying to sound as if in training to become Warren Buffett.

He was wearing a gray pinstriped suit, a pale lavender shirt, a lavender tie just slightly darker than the shirt, and a pocket square that matched both. But he was looking older than he had the last time I saw him, softer underneath the chin, his face a lot puffier than I remembered, as if he had put on weight.

‘So,’ he said, ‘to what do I owe the pleasure?’

‘Somebody shot Richie Burke on Portland Street last night,’ I said.

‘So I heard,’ Tony said. ‘ Back-shot him, I heard.’

‘Before the shooter left him there,’ I said, ‘he told Richie it was about his father.’

Tony nodded.

‘I was wondering,’ I said to him, ‘if you know what might have precipitated such an event.’

Tony chuckled. ‘I do love listening to you talk, Sunny Randall,’ he said.

‘I’m just trying to get a handle on why somebody would not just make an aggressive move like this on the Burkes, but on the Burke who has nothing to do with the family business,’ I said.

‘So ask them.’

‘I wanted to ask you,’ I said, and smiled. ‘Didn’t you once tell me that you know everything in Boston except why the Big Dig took so long?’

‘Was just being modest,’ Tony said. ‘Knew that, too. The Italians just asked me not to tell.’

He leaned back in his chair now, made a steeple with his fingers and placed them under his chin.

‘Is this a professional matter with you,’ he said, ‘or personal?’

‘Both,’ I said.

‘But more personal.’

‘Yes.’

He nodded. ‘And knowing what a hard people Desmond and Felix Burke are, even though they old as shit, we can assume that if there is some kind of dispute going on that they would prefer to a-ju-di-cate it theyselves, and for you to keep that fine ass of yours out of it.’

‘Listen to your own bad self,’ I said. ‘A-jud-i-cate.’

He shrugged modestly. ‘Lot of layers to me, Sunny Randall, even the way I talk and all. You ought to know that by now.’

‘Lot of layers like an onion,’ I said. ‘But you haven’t answered my question. Is there something going on that would make somebody ballsy enough to shoot Desmond Burke’s son?’

Tony shook his head. There was still the faint smell of cigar in this room, even though Tony had told me the last time we were together that he had quit.

‘Haven’t heard anything, much as my ear is always to the ground,’ he said. ‘Got no idea why somebody would involve your ex. There’s always been an understanding with the rest of us at the table, so to speak, that your man Richie had been granted diplomatic immunity. Not like in the past, when Whitey Bulger’s crew didn’t give a fuck who they took out. Sometimes it wasn’t no more than Whitey waking up on the wrong side of the fucking bed.’

‘Until now,’ I said.

‘But they didn’t shoot to kill,’ Tony said.

‘Guy knew what he was doing,’ I said.

‘Even from point blank, you could make a mistake.’

‘He didn’t,’ I said.

‘If he wanted him gone, he’d be gone,’ Tony said.

‘That’s what everybody’s saying,’ I said, ‘all over town.’

I stood up.

‘You’ll ask around?’ I said to Tony.

‘What’s in it for me?’ he said.

‘What about a good deed being its own reward?’

He laughed again, more heartily and full-throated than before, slapping a palm on his desk for emphasis.

‘Gonna be like always,’ Tony said. ‘If I do for you, you do for me. Cost of doing business.’

‘Think of it this way, Tony,’ I said. ‘Maybe this time I’m the one pimping your ass out.’

‘I see what you did there,’ he said. ‘You ask me, it sounds like somebody wants old Desmond to know they coming for him, through people close to him.’

‘Nobody closer than Richie.’

Tony nodded. ‘Best you be careful, too,’ he said.

‘Always,’ I said.

‘’Fore you go,’ Tony said, ‘how’s your boy Spike?’

‘As you remember him.’

‘Toughest queer I ever met,’ he said.

I told him he was going to make Spike blush.

Then I told him not to get up. Tony said he had no fucking intention of getting up. At the door I turned to Ty Bop and grinned and pointed and pulled an imaginary trigger with my thumb.

In a blur, he had pulled back the front of the leather jacket he was wearing and showed me the .45 in the waistband of the skinny jeans, without changing expression.

Oh, Sunny, I thought to myself, the places you’ll go.

6

It turned into my version of Take a Crime Boss to Work Day.

After I left Tony Marcus I arranged to meet Desmond Burke at Durty Nelly’s, an Irish pub on Blackstone Street in the North End that said ‘circa 1850’ on the sign in front and ‘Old Time Traditions’ on another sign behind the bar.

Richie had taken me there once, after a Celtics game.

‘Being here makes me want to burst into “Danny Boy,”’ he’d said.

I’d offered to pick up the check if he promised not to.

Now his father and I were sitting at a table on the second floor. There was the last of the lunch crowd downstairs, all men, as white as Buddy’s Fox had been black, eating hamburgers and hot dogs and egg sandwiches at the bar, watching a rugby game on the television sets above them.

There were, I’d also noticed, two men I always saw with my former father-in-law, and whom I’d seen standing near the entrance to Mass General about twelve hours before, whose names I knew were Buster and Colley. They took turns driving Desmond Burke around and acting as bodyguards. Richie had once told me that there was enough of an arsenal in the trunk of the black Town Car to invade New Hampshire.

‘I’ve always liked it here,’ Desmond said. ‘Used to take Richie and his late mother here when he was a little boy for Sunday brunch.’

‘He told me.’

I told him Richie and I had been here recently.

‘Was there live music?’ he said. ‘I’ve never been much for that.’ He wore a blazer and a navy polo shirt underneath it buttoned all the way to the top and dark gray slacks and gray New Balance running shoes that he said eased the pain in his knees. His gray-white hair was cropped close to his head. It matched the color of his skin today. At the hospital and now here, he looked as old and tired as I’d ever seen him. I wondered if he’d slept at all.

‘He’s resting now,’ Desmond said.

‘I spoke to him.’

‘You would.’

‘I assume you have people watching his apartment,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ Desmond Burke said.

He was drinking Bewley’s Irish Tea, plain. I was drinking coffee with cream and sugar. The cream and sugar made me feel soft. It wasn’t the only thing about Richie’s father that could make you feel that way.

We sat with the afternoon sun coming through the windows and on Desmond like a spotlight, and as we did I could recall only a handful of times when I’d ever been alone with him, when Richie and I were still married and then when we were not. Our relationship had been complicated from the start, because of my father being what Desmond still called a copper.

But we had always shared the bond created by our love for Richie, one that was not broken even after the divorce, especially when he could plainly see that Richie still loved me, and always would, even later, when he was married to someone else.

‘I am sure you have spent the time since we were last together asking yourself who would do something like this,’ I said. ‘To him and to you.’

He lifted his cup to his mouth and sipped some of his tea. It was not the first time it had occurred to me that his movements were as spare as the rest of him, the same as Richie’s were.

‘I have no answer,’ he said. ‘At least not yet.’

He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms in front of him and closed his eyes, and then there was just silence between us, as if he were alone. I knew some of his history, from what Richie had told me and from what my father had told me, about how he came out of the Winter Hill Gang in Somerville, after he and his brothers had made their way to America from Dublin. It was before the gang had been taken over by Whitey Bulger.

By the time Whitey did take over the gang, Desmond and Felix Burke had gone off on their own, according to my father, and somehow Bulger had let them, partly out of respect for Desmond, and partly because of the Irish in him.

‘I think it was the Irish Mob version of Verizon and AT&T,’ Phil Randall told me one time. ‘As batshit crazy as Whitey was, pardon my French, they thought there was enough of a market share for both of them.’