Small Vices

One morning I ran up the hill.

All the way.

Chapter 40

WE COT BACK to Boston in the late summer. I weighed 195 pounds, fifteen less than I had when I went into the water, and about what I weighed when I was fighting. But I could walk, and run, and shoot. My right hook was nearly ninety percent, and gaining. I had an impressive beard and my hair was long and slicked back. Hawk was driving.

We got off the Mass. Turnpike in Newton and cruised in along the last stretch of the Charles River that was navigable before you reached the falls near Watertown Square. The shells moved back and forth as they had for all the summers I'd looked at it. We cruised past the MDC Rink, and Martignetti's Liquors. In back with Susan, Pearl began to snuffle at the car window on the side near the river. Susan cracked the window slightly and Pearl snuffled harder.

"I think she knows she's home," Susan said.

"Smart," I said. "Who knows I'm alive."

"Me and Susan," Hawk said. "Quirk, Belson, Farrell, Vi

"And Rita Fiore," Susan said.

"Why Rita?"

"She sold the Concord house for me," Susan said. "You were presumed dead."

"Sold?"

"Where do you think we got the money to spend ten months in California with none of us working?" Susan said. "Rita arranged, or had someone from her firm arrange, to sell the Concord house in my absence. I was sure we could trust her, and she was quite upset when she thought you were gone."

"Did we make a profit?"

"Yes. We cashed in all that sweat equity," Susan said.

"I never thought about money," I said.

"You had other things to think about," Susan said. "Rita sold it and wire transferred the money to a bank in Santa Barbara where I had opened an account."

"I was a kept man for all this time?"

"Un huh."

"Me too," Hawk said.

"Yeah," I said. "But you're used to it."

"I deserve it," Hawk said.

"I feel like a jerk. I never thought about the money."

"Well, you probably are a jerk," Susan said. "But you're the jerk of my dreams, and whether you deserved it or not, you needed it."

"True," I said. "Thank you."

"The house was half yours anyway," Susan said.

We were on Greenough Boulevard on the Cambridge side of the river. Pearl was now clawing at the window and snuffling vigorously. Susan let it down a quarter and Pearl stuck her head out as far as she could, her tail wagging very fast.

"We going to your place?" I said.

"Yes," Susan said.

"Instead of my place," I said.

"We sublet your place," Susan said.

I nodded slowly. We stopped at the light near the Cambridge Boat Club. The light changed and Hawk drove on past the Buckingham, Brown and Nichols school. There were kids playing baseball on the field.

"Because otherwise the whole deal would have looked phony," I said.

Susan nodded.

"And you sublet my office?"

She nodded again.

"Gray Man had any doubts, first thing he'd do," I said, "would be check to see if the rents were being paid."

"And it would alleviate his doubts," Hawk said, "to find that they were not."

Hawk was very precise about all the syllables in "alleviate."

"Glad some of you were thinking for me."

"You were thinking about what you needed to think about," Susan said. "Not very many people would have been able to come back from where you were."

"Susan's place clean?" I said to Hawk. He nodded.

"Vi

"And when do I see Marinaro?" I said.

"Day after tomorrow," Susan said. "Ten A.M. at his office."

"He'll probably break into applause," I said.

"Almost certainly," Susan said.

"Assuming he say you okay," Hawk said, "then what you going to do?"

"I'm going to finish up the Ellis Alves case."

Hawk nodded. Susan was quiet. We turned down Li

Hawk said, "Sometimes you looking for somebody, you set yourself up so the somebody make a run at you. You let him find you 'stead of you find him. You figure you going to be good enough to take him when he does."

"Yeah?"

"And usually you are," Hawk said. "But don't do that with the Gray Man. You might be good enough, one on one. But you ain't good enough, he got the edge."

"Sure looks that way so far," I said.

"You find him," Hawk said.

"He's a hunter," I said. "He doesn't expect to be hunted."

"And he thinks you dead."

We pulled into the driveway beside Susan's house.

"Once he's out of the way, I can finish the Alves thing," I said.

"You'll be with him," Susan said to Hawk. "When he goes after the Gray Man."

Hawk shook his head.

"He won't want me with him," Hawk said.

Susan opened her mouth to speak, and didn't speak. She looked at me with her mouth still open and back at Hawk and back at me, and clamped her mouth shut without having made a sound.

Hawk shut off the car. We got out. Susan held Pearl straining on her leash.

"You guys bring in the luggage," she said. "I'll take the baby."

Then she turned and headed for her front door, fumbling in her purse for the key.

Hawk let out a deep breath that he appeared to have been holding.

I did too.

Chapter 41

HIS NAME WAS Ives. And he worked, as he liked to say, for a three-letter federal agency. Ten or twelve years ago, when Susan was in trouble, I had done some pretty ugly stuff for him, to get her out of trouble. I hadn't liked it then, and I didn't like remembering it now. But Ives didn't seem to care, and, as far as I could tell, neither did the universe.

Ives had an office in the McCormick Federal Building, in Post Office Square. There was no name on the door when I went in. And no one at the reception desk. The blank door to the i

"Spenser, isn't it?" Ives said.

"Yes, it is," I said.

"The beard threw me," he said. "Your Lieutenant Quirk said you might be coming by."

"He's not mine," I said. "And he's a captain now."

Ives had one of those red rubber erasers in his hands and he kept turning it slowly in his thin fingers as he talked.

"Well, good on him," Ives said. "You look well."

"I'm looking for a guy," I said.

Ives smiled. He slowly turned the eraser on its axis.

"Gray-haired man," I said. "Gray eyes, sallow complexion, forty to sixty, six feet two or three, rangy build, athletic, when I saw him he was dressed all in gray."

"And what does this gray man do?" Ives said.

"He's a shooter," I said.

"And where does he do his shooting?"

"Boston and New York, to my knowledge, but I assume he goes where his vocation takes him."