Page 5

FIVE

Jimmy

JIMMY IS SURPRISED WHEN he looks up to see Jane walking toward his car so soon. But it doesn’t matter.

He knows that even if she’s inside with Sam Wylie until tomorrow morning, he’ll still be out here waiting for her. Jimmy has promised her he won’t let her go through this alone. He keeps his promises.

Especially to her.

“So how did it go?”

“Great,” she says.

“You don’t look great.”

“Thanks for sharing.”

“You know,” Jimmy says, “people say that sarcasm is the weapon of the weak.”

“I am weak,” she says in a quiet voice.

“No,” he says, “you’re not. You’re tougher than me, and nobody is tougher than me.”

“Does that even make sense?”

“To me it does.”

They’re stopped at the light where Main Street merges into 27. He feels her eyes on him, turns so he can see her.

“What?”

“I love you,” she says.

Then his girl smiles at him and it’s as if all the seriously bad shit she’s got going in her life suddenly has washed away.

Jimmy actually feels a catch in his throat as he remembers, all over again, how much he loves her right back.

Not that way, of course.

It was never that way for either one of them, even when they first started working together and he was coming off a divorce and Jane was coming off her second. He loves her like a sister. Or the best friend that she is.

Both, probably.

He’d always known he’d take a bullet for her if he had to, something that finally happened, twice, while he was working the Carson case. Knows in his heart that he’d take cancer of the neck and head for her if he could, without hesitation.

“How did it go for real?” he says when the car is in motion and going through Water Mill.

“Basically, no change, according to the good doctor.”

“So, for today it’s a push,” Jimmy says. “A push isn’t a loss, right?”

“Sure,” Jane says, without much enthusiasm.

Then she tells him to take the back roads, she likes the back roads better.

By the time they get to Scuttle Hole Road, Southampton becoming Bridgehampton, she’s asleep. Jimmy punches the button for the Miles Davis channel on satellite radio. He really only bought satellite radio because it makes it easier, this far from the city, for him to actually hear Yankee games in the summer.

Miles is playing “So What.”

In a soft voice, covered by Miles’s horn, Jimmy says, “You either beat this or else.”

From the seat next to him he hears, “Or else what?”

He grins. “I’ve never been entirely sure. But it always sounds good.”

In that moment he hears the little ping that means a text message. It’s Jane’s phone, not his.

She reaches into the pocket of her jeans and comes out with it.

“What the hell?” she says.

“What?”

“Text. Unknown number.”

Then she reads it to him:

Wouldn’t you just rather die in peace?

Jimmy turns down the radio, so it’s quiet then in the front seat of his car.

Jane is still staring at her phone.

“Is that all of it?” Jimmy says.

“It’s signed.”

“By who?”

“Joe Champi.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. It’s signed ‘Joe Champi.’”

“Morelli is only presumed dead,” Jimmy says. “Champi really is.”

“I know,” Jane says. “I killed him, remember?”