Crimson Joy by Robert B. Parker Read Free Book Online Page B

living."
    Susan smiled and patted my hand with hers. She was still wearing the twisted bandana that she used to hold her hair back when she worked out.
    On most people I thought it hokey. It looked exactly right on her.
    "Eat your fucking salad," she said.
    We ate dinner and cleaned up and Susan settled in on the couch beside me to read the American Journal of Therapeutics. I watched the Braves and the Reds on cable.
    "It's Skip Carey and John Sterling," I said to Susan.
    "So?"
    "They have a four-man broadcast crew and they do radio and television and they rotate the crew so that the same two guys are never together, and I'm trying to figure out the pattern."
    Susan put her magazine down and looked at me silently.
    "Really?" she said.
    "And," I said, "there's a pattern within the patter in that each guy does some play-by-play and some color on both radio and television."
    Susan looked at me some more and breathed deeply and exhaled slowly and went back to her magazine.
    By the time the ball game ended Susan had fallen asleep with her magazine still open before her. I bent over and picked her up and carried her to bed and put her down on it. It woke her up and she gazed up at me with her big eyes.
    "What made you think I was sleepy?" she said.
    "I'm a trained investigator," I said.
    She smiled and made a kissing motion with her mouth. I bent over and kissed her goodnight and headed home. As I started down the stairs I heard the front door shut softly. I froze, listening. The front door should have been locked. I felt the adrenaline surge and I went down the stairs in a rush. The front door had been jimmied. I pulled it open. There was the hint of movement past one of the big shrubs in Susan's yard. I went over the porch railing and landed five feet below, next to the shrub. Something, probably a fist, hit me in the forehead.
    It wasn't a major league punch but it jarred me, and a figure burst from behind the bush and headed up Linnaean Street, toward Mass. Ave. I went after him with my chimes still ringing. I had run five miles a day for the last twenty years and planned to run him down. In a block, I hadn't closed the gap. He hurdled a waist-high fence on the corner of Aggassiz Street and cut across the lawn and turned up Aggassiz. I went over the fence after him and trailed my left leg and the fence caught it and I sprawled onto the lawn. He was up the little hill and rounding the corner on Lancaster by the time I got running again, and by the time I got to Lancaster, he was out of sight. I ran down to Mass. Ave., but I ran without enthusiasm because I knew he was gone. Mass. Ave. leading into Porter Square in Cambridge is busy in the evening, full of street life and traffic. The sprinter had disappeared into the crowd. He'd been dressed in dark clothing and had looked to be a little shorter than I. He was probably white. He was male. And he could jump a higher fence than I could. I walked back to Susan's place with the sweat trickling down my backbone and my pulse slowing. Probably the gun had slowed me down. It was a Colt Python and it probably weighed two or three pounds with a full load. Otherwise I'd have soared over the fence.
    Susan's front door was still ajar when I got there. I stepped into the front hall and closed it behind me. The house was silent. I turned on the hall light. On the hall table was a long, narrow white box. I opened it. Inside, cradled in green tissue paper, was a single long-stemmed red rose.
    "Jesus Christ," I said aloud in the empty hallway.

CHAPTER 11

     
    When Susan woke up in the morning I was lying in bed beside her with my gun unholstered on the night table. She rolled over and looked at me silently.
    "I thought I heard you in the night," she said. Her eyes rested for a moment on the gun.
    "On my way out last night I almost caught someone who had broken into your front hallway and left a single red rose for you. I chased him but he got away." I saw no reason to discuss how I fell on my