I THOUGHT ABOUT STOPPING by Buddy’s Fox to see if Tony might be around and willing to once again start speaking with the person he’d hired to find his missing girlfriend. But I was tired. Jake said he would have given me a ride home if he had more time, but did not.
“You have to see a guy,” I said.
“A guy I actually needed to see more than you tonight,” he said.
“Not sure need is the word you’re looking for here, at least not where I’m concerned,” I said.
“Speak for yourself,” he said.
He said he’d be in touch. He’d parked his unmarked at a hydrant in front of Shea’s. Clearly, cops got all the good parking spaces, even when they weren’t spaces. I’d parked in a small lot behind Al’s Discount, and experienced a thrill of excitement that my car was still there. I got in and cranked up the soundtrack from A Star Is Born and listened to it all the way home. How had Lady Gaga gotten to make out with the real Bradley and not me? Life wasn’t fair. But I already knew that.
I turned off the alarm when I was through the front door and was promptly greeted, and quite enthusiastically, by Rosie the dog. If Tony didn’t want to see me, at least she always did. I grabbed her leash and a waste bag and my gun out of my purse and took her out for her last walk of the evening. Poop bag and gun. I knew there was symbolism in there about the life I had chosen, the need to be packing when I walked my dog on the periphery of Beacon Hill. I wondered if any of the swells did the same over at Louisburg Square.
Rosie took her sweet time tonight. I reminded myself not to get impatient with her, that as wonderful and indispensable and even as humanlike as she could be—but only in the good ways—she was still a dog. Spike also reminded me of that all the time, especially when I would chastise him for saying hurtful things in front of the baby.
The first Rosie had been one kind of child for me. This Rosie felt the same way, only now there was a real child in my life. And as much as I told myself that the little boy was Richie’s and Kathryn’s, I knew he was going to be mine, too.
Rosie and I walked around back to what was known in the neighborhood as the Poop Loop. She still gave off none of her usual signs about getting busy anytime soon, so we walked up River Street a bit and then back. The street was empty except for the cars parked on the west side. We returned to the back of my building. The area was well lit back here. And I was armed, after all. Sunny and Rosie, Neighborhood Watch Patrol.
I heard a noise to my right near the basement art studio belonging to the woman who lived directly behind me.
We stopped. Maybe it had been my imagination. Maybe it had been the wind and the snow and the night and my own jangled nerves.
Or not.
Rosie did not growl, but the sound had gotten her full attention. And mine. I already had the .38 out of the side pocket of my vest. Maybe it really was my imagination. Or it was my friend from Harvard Stadium back for Round 2.
A figure stepped away from the shadows, out from behind the shelter of two SUVs parked against the wall. Light shone faintly onto the street from windows at the dead end of River Street.
Now Rosie low-growled.
I had her leash in my left hand and the gun in my right, pointed and steady. The .38 wasn’t much for shooting anybody or anything at a distance. But this wouldn’t be about distance shooting, if it came to that, and I had to fire off a shot that would scare the neighborhood.
“I have a gun,” I said.
“I can see that,” she said.
Lisa Morneau, lowering her hands, stepped fully into the light.