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ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN

“WE’VE ALREADY GOT PEOPLE doing one of those deep dive things into his phone records,” Danny Esposito says. “His dead wife didn’t pay for that house. But I got this funny feeling Sonny Blum might have.”

“Lot of calls on Harrington’s phone to Sonny’s house,” Jimmy says. “Turns out that Sonny isn’t just old. He’s old school. Still uses a landline.”

The three of us are at a table at Jimmy’s bar on Tuesday night, the night before jury selection begins. Lieutenant Paul Harrington is in custody at the same jail in Riverhead that once housed Rob Jacobson.

“The way I see it laying out,” Jimmy says, “is that Sonny had Harrington in his pocket, all the way back. He worked for Sonny, and Licata and Champi worked for him. The rich guys called Harrington first, not them.”

Jimmy goes quiet now. I see him staring at the Yankee game on the TV set over the bar, but don’t think he’s looking at baseball.

“What?”

“There’s still too much we don’t know,” he says.

He turns to face me. Even in his bar, I imagine a shadow having fallen across his face.

“I gotta ask again: Who was the shooter in the dunes?”

“Maybe somebody who didn’t want Licata to tell us who killed those two families. Maybe McKenzie hung around. Maybe it was Eric Jacobson or Morelli.”

“I need to know,” Jimmy says to me.

“And where’s our friend Mei?”

“Out there,” Jimmy says. “We gotta find her, too.”

“We’ve got time.”

He turns to me and smiles. It’s as if the shadow leaves his face, that quickly. In that moment, I remember just how much I love him.

Jimmy reaches across the table and covers my hand with one of his old, crooked boxer’s hands.

“All the time in the world,” he says.

We all leave early. I get to bed early for a change, feeling as if tomorrow is my equivalent of the first day of school.

When I’m up and showered and I’ve done my face and hair—still hanging in there, God bless it—I get into the new sincerity suit I’ve purchased for today’s appearance in court.

And before I even make myself a cup of coffee, I stand in the middle of my kitchen, ridiculously excited. Feel the thrill of it all, all over again, even if all I will be doing today is interviewing prospective jurors. Asking them questions before Kevin Ahearn and I get to all the questions the trial will answer, the ones I need to answer for myself, and about my client, about who murdered the Carsons of Garden City if he didn’t.

And if he didn’t, who wanted it to look like he did.

Murder, I think, and can’t help myself from smiling.

Still the main event.

And I’m going to be in the middle of it, again, in the middle of the effing action. Nobody killed me in the dunes. Now here I am, feeling this alive again, because I am on my way to court. I’m always talking and thinking about the juice being pumped into me while I do chemo, the juice that’s trying to keep me alive.

But what I’m feeling now, as I stand in my kitchen, this is the juice making me feel alive.

When I finally do make myself the one cup of coffee I’m allowing myself before I get into the car, I walk over to the kitchen window and take a look outside.

I see the hummingbird then.