Robert B. Parker: The Spencer Novels 1?6

by Robert B. Parker

  Vinnie drank a little more coffee, staring at the rain. He took another donut, and automatically gave Pearl a piece, and ate the rest.

  “I’m getting out,” Vinnie said. “I’m quitting Joe.”

  I stared at him. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “You do what you gotta do,” Vinnie said. “You have to kill them, you have to kill them. I won’t come around asking you about it. I’m out of it.”

  He drank the last of his coffee. He took the final donut out of the bag and looked at it for a moment, then put the whole donut back for Pearl to take. Which she did. Vinnie opened the door and put one foot out onto the ground.

  I put out my hand. Vinnie took it. We shook hands. Then he got out and closed the door. He turned the collar up on his raincoat and walked back to his car and got in. I saw the wipers start. The headlights went on. And he drove away. From the backseat Pearl nosed at my ear. Her breath smelled of donuts.

  CHAPTER

  35

  WITH a pronounced limp, I was walking Pearl on a leash in the Public Gardens when Gerry made his try. He came across the footbridge over the Swan Boat Pond with the low morning sun shining on his left, making his shadow splash long and peculiar across the railing toward Beacon Street. He was walking stiffly, and very slowly, and he held his right hand close in against his right thigh. I stopped near the monumental statue of George Washington and took the Browning out from under my arm.

  “You’re not going to like this,” I said to Pearl, “but there’s nothing to be done.”

  I was surprised at the way he came. I had thought he’d try to shoot me in the back. People on their way to work didn’t pay much attention to the fact that there were two men with guns approaching each other in the Public Gardens. It wasn’t quite that they didn’t see the guns. It was that, hurrying toward work on a pretty morning, they didn’t really record them.

  The flower beds had been banked for the winter, and the swan boats stored up on the dock. But the grass was still green from the rainy autumn, and the trees, without leaves now, still arched elegantly. The leafless twigs looked lacy in the morning light.

  Pearl was pointing a pigeon near the base of the statue.

  Gerry kept coming, mechanical, almost spectral, somehow less than human, a disjointed, clumsy, fantastic figure in the bright new day; driven by things I could guess at but would never know, he came.

  And behind him from a big car double-parked on Charles Street his father came, wearing a big loose overcoat, holding something under it, hurrying with his head ducked a little and his shoulders hunched, the way people do when they are trying not to be noticed.

  Pearl’s pigeon flew away and Pearl glanced around at me, annoyed that I hadn’t responded to her point. She saw, or maybe smelled, the gun and her ears flattened, and her tail went down.

  “Hang on, babe,” I said. “I don’t like this either, but it will be over quick.”

  I made sure the leash was looped over my left wrist. I held the stem of the leash tightly in my left hand. Joe was maybe thirty yards behind Gerry. Gerry was in range. I should plug Gerry now so I’d have time to deal with Joe. If I let them both get up on me it was going to be harder.

  Gerry kept coming. He moved as if his joints hurt and wouldn’t bend properly. He was close enough so I could see his face, shrunk tight, the cords visible in his neck, tension bunching his narrow shoulders.

  “Gerry,” I said.

  He shook his head and kept coming. As he came he raised the gun. It was an automatic, foreign maybe, a Beretta or a Sig Sauer. He held the gun straight out in his right hand as he walked, and hunched his head down a little to squint along the barrel.

  For the first time people noticed. They scattered soundlessly. No one spoke, or yelled, or screamed, or sighed. They moved. Behind Gerry, Joe rushed slowly forward. If Gerry could do it, he didn’t want to spoil it by interfering. If Gerry didn’t do it, he wanted to be able to save him. I had other things to think about, but for a moment I knew how awful this must be for both of them.

  Then Gerry fired and missed, as somehow he would have to miss. I’m not sure he even saw me over the gunsight, and I turned sideways and brought the Browning up carefully. Lurching as he was, trying to shoot while coming at me, Gerry didn’t have much chance of hitting me. I sighted with my left eye, along the barrel of the gun, and let the middle of his chest sit on the small white dot on the front sight. I cocked it with my thumb and took a careful breath, and dropped the sight and shot Gerry in the right knee. He went down as if his legs had been scythed. Behind him his father screamed, “Gerry, Jesus Christ, Gerry!” and flung himself forward on top of his son, shielding him with his body. The sawed-off shotgun he’d been holding under his coat clattered onto the hot-top walkway and skittered maybe six feet.

  “My leg,” Gerry said in amazement. “My leg, Papa—he shot me in the leg.”

  “Don’t shoot him,” Joe was saying, quite softly. “Don’t shoot him.”

  I dropped to one knee, still holding the Browning, and put my arm around Pearl. She was shaking and trying to run at the same time she was trying to climb into my lap.

  “I had to shoot him, Joe,” I said. “I won’t shoot him again if I don’t have to.”

  Gerry began to cry. It was shock mostly. It was too soon probably for the pain to start. In the distance I could hear a siren. If Gerry were lucky there’d be an ambulance soon and somebody could give him a shot before it got bad. Joe was crouching on the sidewalk beside Gerry, patting his face and smoothing his hair.

  “You’re going to be okay,” he said. “I hear the ambulance. It’s going to be okay. You’re not bleeding bad.”

  “Papa, I’m scared.”

  “You’ll be okay,” Joe said. “You’re going to be okay.”

  Pearl was quieter, but she leaned very hard against me as I knelt beside her. At what probably seemed to them a safe distance, people had stopped and were gazing back at us. The sirens were louder.

  Joe looked at me. We were both kneeling.

  “You could have killed him,” Joe said.

  I nodded.

  “It was a hell of a shot with somebody chopping away at you.”

  “Hard to shoot while you’re walking fast, and scared,” I said.

  Joe nodded and looked down at Gerry. Gerry was sniffling, trying not to cry, shifting as the shock began to wear off and the first hint of pain began to come.

  “He’s my only kid,” Joe said.

  “Kid doesn’t belong in this business, Joe,” I said.

  “I thought he could learn,” Joe said. “If he doesn’t take it, who does?”

  “Get him into something else, Joe. Landscaping, chorus girls, something. If he takes over the business, he won’t last a month.”

  “Vinnie’s gone,” Joe said.

  “I know.”

  “Vinnie coulda run it.”

  “I know.”

  Gerry moaned. “It’s starting to hurt, Papa,” he said. “It’s starting to hurt like a bastard.”

  Joe, hunched on his knees, bent awkwardly over with the stiffness of age, and pressed his face against Gerry’s.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” he said.

  “I came for him, Pa,” Gerry said. “I wasn’t afraid of him.”

  “I know,” Joe said. “I know.”

  The sirens were right on us now, and the first prowl car came swerving up the walkway and halted beside us. The two cops in it got out with guns drawn but not leveled. Behind them came another one. On Arlington Street, near the entrance to the Public Gardens a big yellow and white ambulance parked, its lights flashing as an unmarked police car swung out around it and came in behind the two prowl cars.

  “He’s not a shooter, Joe,” I said.

  “He ain’t like me,” Joe said
. “He’s like his mother.”

  “Let him be, Joe. If he comes after me again I might have to kill him. If it’s not me, it’ll be somebody else. He’s not a shooter, Joe. Let him try to be something else. Keep him alive.”

  “Yes,” Joe said and kept his face pressed against Gerry’s until the EMTs showed up.

  CHAPTER

  36

  THE ambulance took Gerry to the hospital. Joe and two detectives went with him. I knew one of the detectives who stayed with me, a guy named J. Clay Lawson, who was once a cop in Las Vegas before he got serious. He let me take Pearl home and then he and I spent the day with Quirk and Belson and a guy from the DA’s office in the homicide squad room.

  When they were through discussing my failings, albeit temporarily, I went home and had dinner with Susan, which I cooked, even though she’d wanted to, because I needed to do something.

  “You’re all right,” Susan said.

  “Yes.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  We ate chili and corn bread in front of the fire in my apartment and drank beer with it. Even Susan drank beer with chili, though she didn’t drink much.

  “Paige called me today,” she said. “She said Paul seems—how did she put it?—‘remote,’ since he came back to New York.”

  I nodded, staring at the fire.

  “Finding his mother made it more complicated, not less. He thought it would make it less.”

  “You probably can’t help him with that,” Susan said.

  “I know.”

  Pearl lay in front of the fire, looking back frequently to check the status of chili and corn bread. Susan ate a small forkful of chili and nibbled the edge of a small piece of corn bread. With the chili and corn bread we had some corn relish that Susan and I had made as an experiment last Labor Day.

  Outside it had begun to rain again. The sunny morning had been an illusion.

  “You told me how you started to cook,” Susan said. “You never have said why you like it.”

  “I like to make things,” I said. “I’ve spent a lot of my time alone, and I have learned to treat myself as if I were a family. I give myself dinner at night. I give myself breakfast in the morning. I like the process of deciding what to eat and putting it together and seeing how it works, and I like to experiment, and I like to eat. There’s nothing lonelier than some guy alone in the kitchen eating Chinese food out of the carton.”

  “But cooking yourself a meal,” Susan said, “and sitting down to eat it with the table set, and maybe a fire in the fireplace . . .”

  “And a ball game on . . .”

  “And a half bottle of wine, perhaps.”

  I nodded.

  Susan smiled, the way she does when her face seems to get brighter.

  “You are the most self-sufficient man I have ever known,” she said.

  “Except maybe Hawk,” I said. “Hawk’s so self-sufficient he doesn’t need to eat.”

  “Perhaps,” Susan said.

  “It’s like carpentry,” I said. “I get pleasure out of making things.”

  “But not in groups,” Susan said.

  I thought about that for a moment.

  “True,” I said.

  “You like to read,” Susan said. “You like to cook, you like to lift weights, and jog, and do carpentry, and watch ball games. Do you like to go to the ballpark?”

  “I like to go to the park sometimes, keep in touch with the roots of the game, I suppose. But mostly I prefer to watch it on television at home.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes. Unless you develop an interest.”

  Susan didn’t even bother to comment on that possibility.

  “See what I mean?” she said.

  “Autonomy?” I said.

  “Yes. You only like things you can do alone.”

  “There are exceptions,” I said.

  “Yes. And I know the one you’re thinking of. Me excepted, your interests are single.”

  “True,” I said.

  “You couldn’t stand being a member of the police force.”

  “No. I hate being told what to do.”

  “You certainly do,” Susan said.

  “I’m cute though.”

  “You’re more than cute,” Susan said. “You’re probably peerless, there’s a kind of purity you maintain. Everything is inner-directed.”

  “Except the part about you,” I said.

  “Except that.”

  “That’s a large part.”

  “I know that. Sometimes I’m sort of startled at the, ah, honor I’m the one you let in.”

  “Might be something of a burden sometimes, being the only one.”

  “No,” Susan said. “It’s never a burden. It is to be taken seriously, but it is never burdensome.”

  “You are the woman in my life,” I said.

  “Surely not the first.”

  “No, not in that sense,” I said. “But remember how I grew up.”

  Susan nodded. “All men.”

  “Yeah, all men. It seemed right. Even looking back it seems right. It doesn’t seem as if anything was missing. I knew women and had girlfriends, and so did my father and my uncles; but home was male.”

  Susan looked around the apartment. Pearl made a small snuffing sound in front of the fire and lazed over onto her side.

  “And that is still the case,” Susan said.

  “No,” I said, “no more. This is where I live. But home is where you are.”

  Susan smiled at me. “Yes,” she said. “We are home.”

  We put plates down for Pearl, and cleared the table and put the pre-lapped dishes in the dishwasher.

  “I need dessert,” I said.

  “You certainly do,” Susan said.

  “There’s nothing here,” I said.

  “What would you like?”

  “Pie?”

  “Where is the closest source?” Susan said

  Which is how we ended up walking close together underneath a multicolored golf umbrella along Arlington Street and into the Public Gardens where, so lately, I had been with the Broz family.

  “Place near the Colonial Theater,” I said, “will sell you pie and coffee almost any time of the day or night.”

  “Mark of an advanced civilization,” Susan said.

  She had her arm through mine and her head against my shoulder as we walked through the rain, sheltered by the umbrella. She had her cobalt raincoat on, the collar turned up around her black hair. The lining of the raincoat was chartreuse, and where the collar was up and open at the neck it showed in gleaming contrast under the streetlights. We walked past the statue of Washington, facing up the Commonwealth Avenue Mall across Arlington Street. If there were bloodstains on the sidewalk, the rain had washed them away, or masked them with its gleaming reflections. The garden was empty on a rainy night, and still, except for the sound of the rain. There was light from the lampposts. And the ambient city noise made the silence of the garden seem more complete. In the Swan Boat Pond the ducks were huddled under their feathers among the rocks along the shore of the lagoon.

  The Common was ahead, across Charles Street, where once the inner harbor had washed against the foot of Beacon Hill, before they dumped in all the landfill and created the Back Bay and pushed the sea back into the harbor and the basin of the Charles River. Once it had really been a back bay, a mix of river water and ocean into which the oldest part of Boston had pushed like the bulge in a balloon.

  Across Charles Street, not waiting for the light because there was no traffic, we moved uphill gently, across the Common, angling toward Boylston Street where an all-night diner served things like pie,
and coffee in thick white mugs with cream and sugar. The winding walkways that bent through the Common were shiny with rain, and the unleaved trees glistened blackly. Around the lamps there formed a dim halo of mist that softened the light and made it elegant. To our left Beacon Street went up the hill to the State House, its gold dome lit and visible from everywhere, its Bulfinch front pretending that what went on inside were matters of gravity and portent. The wind that had, in the late afternoon, slanted the rain in hard as I left police headquarters, had died with the daylight, and the rain, softer now, came down in near perfect silence.

  There were no pigeons about the Common at this hour, no squirrels. There was a fragrant bum sleeping on one of the benches under some tented cardboard which shed most of the rain. And, further along, several others slept, or at least lay still, wrapped in quilts and sleeping bags and newspapers.

  “Are you in a pie reverie?” Susan said.

  “Cherry,” I said. “Blueberry, apricot.”

  “No apple?”

  “Rarely do they make good apple pie,” I said. “Usually they don’t cook the apples enough, and sometimes, too often, they leave, yuk, some of the core in there. Cherry is my favorite.”

  “And coffee?”

  “Decaf,” I said sadly.

  “How embarrassing,” Susan said.

  “Caffeine, like youth,” I said, “is wasted on the young.”

  We passed the ancient burial grounds, the little cemetery near Boylston Street where earnest Calvinists had settled into the ground, relaxed at last.

  “Are you planning on pie?” I said.

  “No,” Susan said. “I think I’ll just have a cup of hot water, with lemon, and watch you.”

  “You walked a mile in the rain to drink hot water?”

  “To be with you,” she said. “You’re better than pie.”

  And I turned under the umbrella and embraced her with my free arm and pressed my mouth against hers and held her hard against me and smelled her perfume and closed my eyes and kissed her for a long time in the still rain, and even after we stopped kissing, I held on to her and we stood together in the dark under the umbrella, until finally I didn’t need to hold on anymore, and it was time to go across the street and have some cherry pie. Which we did.