Read Online Valediction by Robert B. Parker - Free Book Online

into my inside jacket pocket and came out with a pair of half glasses and put them on. I looked around again. No one seemed to have noticed. I looked down at the printout. Ah-ha. There it is. I wear these only to see.
    The physical assets of the Bullies were worth less than 300,000 dollars. Their income, from interest on mortgage loans, was 315,000 dollars. If they had three and a half million out, that meant it was loaned at less than ten percent. That was five or six points below market. Of course maybe it wasn't when the loan was made. I got out my small yellow notebook. Time was I could remember everything. Now I had half glasses and a notebook. Next thing I'd have a midlife crisis. A pigeon landed on the ground near my feet and waddled around looking for a kernel of peanut among the littered shells in front of the bench. Why this is midlife crisis nor am I out of it. I looked at my notes. The loans were recent. Mortgage rates had not been under ten percent when the loans were made. The pigeon gave up on the peanut shells and flew away on undulating wing. I watched him go. What the printout didn't tell me, and what the notebook didn't tell me, and what Reverend Winston wouldn't tell me was where the Reorganized Church got three and a half million bucks to lend out in the first place.
    I took off my half glasses and put them back into hiding. Maybe I should have my sunglasses made prescription and I could wear them all the time and people would never know. They'd think I was cool.
    I stood and put on my nonprescription sunglasses and walked back toward my office. In the Public Garden I stopped an the little bridge and leaned on the railing and watched the swan boats move about on the pond and the ducks in solicitous formation cruising after the boats, waiting for peanuts. They could not be fooled by shells. I wondered how ducks knew so quickly the kernel from the husk. One of nature's miracles.
    When I got to my office there were two thugs waiting in the corridor. I've spent half my life with thugs. I know them when I see them. They were leaning against the wall in the corridor on the second floor near the elevator just down past my office door. I unlocked the office door and went in. I left the door open. The thugs came in behind me. I walked over and opened the window and turned around and looked at them. One of them had closed the door.
    The head thug was bald with squinty eyes and a longish fringe of hair in the back that lapped over the collar of his flowered shirt. There was a scar at the corner of his mouth as if someone had slashed it during a fight and the repair job had not been done by Michael DeBakey. The assistant thug was taller and in better shape. He had black hair in a crew cut and deepset eyes and long wiry forearms with blue dancing girls and twined snakes and daggers tattooed on them. There were four upper teeth missing in the front of his mouth and someone had somewhere in his life obviously deviated his septum.
    We looked at each other.
    "You guys in the Mormon ministry?" I said.
    "You Spenser?" the bald one said.
    "Mmm," I said.
    We looked at each other some more. A small objective part of me noticed, from the far upper right corner of my consciousness, that I felt almost nothing. A faint lassitude, maybe. No more. Blankness is all.
    "Look, you guys, I'm trying to get clammy with fear, and I can't. I know that disappoints you, and I'm sorry. I'm trying, but nothing seems to happen."
    The bald one said, "You got nothing to be afraid of if you do like we tell you."
    "Or if I don't," I said.
    "You do any more messing around with the Reorganized Church then you gonna end up bad dead," Bald said.
    I felt something. What I felt was d don't care. Just a little flash of I don't care, then it was gone and blackness came back.
    "You two going to do it?" I said.
    "You don't do what you're told, we'll do it."
    "You might want to take a number," I said. "There's a waiting list."
    "You think we're fucking around,