Robert B. Parker's Slow Burn (Spenser, #44)(16)

“If they were his best,” I said, “he might’ve traded up.”

Hawk nodded. He wore a pair of dark Oakleys, but I felt a hard stare behind the Oakleys. He’d set his gym bag on the brick wall, the zipper open, showing a pair of blue Lonsdale mitts.

“Insurance racket?”

“Nope,” I said. “Jackie’s casting a hand over some property in a bad part of the South End.”

“Someone wouldn’t pay up.” Hawk continued to stare from behind his sunglasses. As he chewed, a fleck of shaved coconut dropped on his shirt. He flicked it away as if it were a gnat. “We need to pay Jackie a visit?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I’m still in the gathering phase. I’d prefer him not knowing about it.”

Hawk shook his head. “Someone like DeMarco ain’t stopping with what he got,” he said. “If he’s moving out of Southie, man has delusions of grandeur. Wants to be his daddy or the new Joe Broz.”

“He’ll have to work on his wardrobe.”

Hawk snorted.

“Only one?” I said. I nodded to the box with ten left.

“The rest are for you, white boy,” Hawk said. “After all, it’s your day.”

“You ever hear anything about DeMarco burning people out?”

“Not my line of work, babe,” he said. “I’m not into subtlety.”

Hawk reached for another donut anyway, a maple-bacon one. He smiled as he ate. It must’ve been good. Hawk rarely smiled.

“Vinnie?” I said.

Hawk licked his fingers. “Or Gino Fish.”

“Gino isn’t what he used to be,” I said. “But Vinnie is more.”

I rested forearms on the high wall looking over the harbor. When Hawk and I had been young, it was sometimes tougher outside on the street than in the boxing gym. A man had to walk with purpose if he wanted to keep his wallet. Now the expressway was a Greenway and blight was a thing of the past.

Hawk hoisted his gym bag on his shoulder and left. I turned and kept looking out at the Boston Harbor, the light sailboats zipping to and fro without much effort. The sails full of wind and energy, speed, and power.

In an effort to double my strength, I reached into the box Hawk had left for a second donut. Always prepared.





14


Vinnie Morris ran the business from an old bowling alley right off the Concord Pike. When I walked in, a fat guy in a Hawaiian shirt was cleaning rental shoes and singing an old Bonnie Tyler song. “‘Turn around, bright eyes,’” he sang. And then he continued the chorus. He didn’t need to contemplate his day job.

He stopped singing, looked me over from head to toe, and then pointed up the staircase. The staircase was wide, metal, and mid-century mod. There were plastic plants and a painted mural of a ball hitting a strike. The pins exploding around it. The fat man kept on singing the same lines as I climbed the steps.

Upstairs, Vinnie sat at an empty bar, talking on a landline. Two cell phones sat near a spiral notebook. A cigarette twirling smoke up into a paddle fan.

He pointed to a nearby seat. I walked behind the bar and helped myself to a cup of coffee. Last time, he’d offered me grappa. I’d accepted and hence learned my lesson.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. Fucking do it,” Vinnie said into the phone. He turned to me. “Hello, Spenser. Why don’t you just help yourself?”

“Service with a smile.”

He hung up the phone.

“Bar opens at five.”

“I never knew the bar to be open.”

“It’s a new thing,” he said. “I mean, what the hell. Why not?”

Vinnie was the most distinguished-looking thug I’d ever met. Salt-and-pepper hair. Clean-shaven lantern jaw. A medium-sized guy in middle age who kept himself trim. During a divorce, his wardrobe had devolved into track suits, but in the past couple years he was back to his old self. Today, he wore a tailored navy linen shirt, with linen pants the color of vanilla ice cream. An alligator had died to make his belt and shoes.

I sipped some coffee. Terrible, but coffee nonetheless.

“What do you know about Jackie DeMarco?” I said.

“We’ve been over this before,” he said. “Right before Hawk shot a couple of his guys down in Southie.”

“We had a misunderstanding.”

“My advice is to leave alone whatever you have in mind,” he said. “DeMarco walked away from the flaming pile of shit you started. He won’t do it again.”

“I know he’s into stolen property and drugs,” I said.

Vinnie shrugged.

“How about arson?”

Vinnie looked away and scratched the back of his neck. He pulled his notebook close, scribbled in some figures, and then turned back to me. He picked up his half-burned cigarette, took a puff, and squinted through the smoke.

“Maybe,” he said. “If money’s involved, he’d set his mother’s house on fire.”

“And who might do that work for him?”

“What, you got some kind of Symphony Road situation?” he said. “That was a long, long time ago. No one burns for insurance anymore. Property in this town is worth too much f*cking money.”

“So I’ve been told,” I said. “This was about turf.”