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TWO

IT DOESN’T TAKE LONG for my friends in the media to move right in on me after Jacobson is inside the courthouse.

“Let’s get out of here,” Jimmy says as he sees them coming.

I grin at him. “And why would we want to do something like that?”

It’s worth pointing out here that for me to get more face time on cable news than I did during Jacobson’s first trial I’d have to be involved in a juicy sex scandal.

I wish.

From behind one of the cameras I hear, “Do you think he’s going to get away with it again, Jane?”

“Are you implying that he got away with something when I was the one representing him?”

“Just asking you what you think.”

“The jury spoke,” I say. “Almost as eloquently as I so often did during that trial.”

It gets a laugh.

I put up my hands in mock surrender now.

“Ladies and gentlemen, pay close attention, because you may never again hear these words from me, at least not consecutively: No comment.”

But it’s as if at least one of them has read my mind about being here.

“Come on. Don’t you wish it was you perp-walking right alongside him?”

“No.”

Yes.

“Tell the truth, Jane.”

“You can’t handle the truth,” I growl.

It gets another decent laugh, if only from fans of A Few Good Men . I tell them not to forget to tip their waiters, and Jimmy and I start walking down the steps.

We’re only halfway down to the street when I see a guy in a hoodie staring up at me from the sidewalk, about fifty yards away. Giving me—in words that Jimmy taught me from his cop days—the hard eye.

Jimmy is still walking, not realizing right away that I’ve stopped, as the guy in the hoodie extends his arm, cocks his thumb and index finger of his hand, makes a shooting motion.

Then he’s around the corner and gone.

Now Jimmy stops.

“You look like you saw a ghost,” he says.

“I did.”

“Ghost got a name?”

“Yeah. Nick Morelli.”

A star witness in Rob Jacobson’s first trial until the Coast Guard found his fishing boat out on the water near Montauk without him in it.

“He’s dead,” Jimmy says.

I’m still staring at where he’d been on the sidewalk.

“Or not.”