Now and then - By Robert B. Parker Page 0,54

gonna fi nd something,” Hawk said.

“Erie too,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“And then we can stop hanging round here, watching Vinnie clean the weapons,” Hawk said.

“I know it,” I said.

“So,” Hawk said. “You going to see Epstein today?”

“Not today,” I said.

“When?” Hawk said.

“I’m thinking about it,” I said.

Hawk nodded. Today’s snack special was raspberry turnovers in a cardboard box. Hawk stood and walked over to the table and selected a turnover from the box. He looked at me. I nodded. He selected another one and came back and handed it to me, and sat down with his. In silence we ate our turnovers and drank our coffee and looked at Susan’s door. Vinnie got the sear and trigger reassembled and flexed the trigger gently and nodded to himself and continued with the reassembly.

“Russell Costigan,” Hawk said.

“Russell Costigan,” I said.

“Guy Susan ran off with back then.”

“I know who he is,” I said.

“We both know, this about him.”

I shrugged.

“We both know you couldn’t kill him like you wanted,”

Hawk said.

“Wouldn’t have taken me where I wanted to go,” I said.

“So you sat on it,” Hawk said. “But it didn’t go away; and now here’s Doherty. Wife runs off with someone turns out to be a bad man, and this time it gets him, and her, killed.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Maybe I’m just looking for justice,” I said.

“Maybe you looking for revenge,” Hawk said.

“Maybe they’re the same thing.”

“Now you thinking like me,” Hawk said.

“Uh-oh.”

“So we both know Alderson did them, or had them done. Whyn’t you just shoot him and get it done?”

“Because I’m not like you,” I said.

“Tha’s right,” Hawk said.

I looked at him. He smiled.

“I need to get him the right way,” I said.

“Tha’s right,” Hawk said.

“Lemme think about it,” I said.

60.

I stayed with the rest of the posse in a state of high readiness while Susan had her fifty-minute hour with Alderson or Turner or whoever he really was. When they were through and he had uneventfully gone, she came into the spare room. She was in her understated, for Susan, shrink garb. Today it was a dark blue velvet blazer over designer jeans.

“Anything?” I said.

“Interesting,” she said. “Nothing that can’t wait. I have my next client in a minute.”

“Can you give me a one-sentence slug line, on ‘interesting’?”

“I think there’s some kind of masturbatory mental sex going on,” she said.

Vinnie turned his head to look at her. Chollo smiled. Hawk showed nothing. Which was what Hawk always showed.

“In whose mind,” I said.

Susan grinned at me.

“I have a Harvard Ph.D.,” she said.

“So, only in his mind,” I said.

“Exactly,” Susan said.

“You think he’s still trying to seduce you?” I said.

“I think he thinks he has.”

“Which is why he keeps coming?” I said.

“He has not forgotten that he wants to use me against you.”

“But the tail has begun to wag the dog?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“And the fact that he has to walk past us when he arrives?”

I said.

“Half the fun,” Chollo said.

We all looked at him.

“You are his enemy,” Chollo said. “If he can walk past you on his way to having mind sex with the señorita . . .”

“Ay, caramba,” I said.

Chollo smiled.

“Sí,” he said.

All of us stared at Chollo. Except Vinnie, who might have been sleeping, or might have been listening to his iPod, or both.

“How you know that?” Hawk said.

“It is a trick we hot-blooded Latins often play in my village,”

Chollo said.

“There’s probably a lot of that going on where you live,”

I said.

“Mucho,” Chollo said.

“And part of my charm, for him,” Susan said, “is that he gets to strut past you and have his imaginary way with me, and strut back out, under, so to speak, my protection . . .”

She looked at her watch.

“You have other charms,” I said as she started across the hall.

She turned and her smile gleamed with possibility.

“And don’t you forget it,” she said.

61.

Behind captain quirk’s desk in the kind of new offices of the Homicide Unit was a picture of a very young Ted Williams, in a Minneapolis Millers uniform. He was beautiful. Nineteen years old then, and it was all ahead of him.

“I need a safe house for Susan,” I said.

“And you think I’m a general contractor?” Quirk said.

“Three, four days,” I said, “keep her safe. At least four guys.”

“You and Hawk aren’t enough?”

“And Vinnie,” I said. “And a guy from LA named Chollo.”

“The four of you?” Quirk said. “Not enough?”

“We have something we have to do,” I said.

“Legal?”

“No.”

“So you want me to aid and abet you,” Quirk said, “in an illegal action, by protecting