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JIMMY AND BEN AND Danny Esposito and I are celebrating the next night at Jimmy’s bar. Thomas McGoey is there, too, along with Norma Banks, who already might be the most overserved person in the place.

I have even allowed myself a second glass of wine.

McGoey is the last to get here, having just arrived from the courthouse, the charges against Rob Jacobson having been officially dropped a few hours ago, not just because of the video from the bird feeder, but because of what turned out to be the late Edmund McKenzie’s rambling deathbed confession, recorded from the floor of the house in Water Mill, on Danny Esposito’s phone, before McKenzie was DOA at Southampton Hospital.

Judge Horton was persuaded. So was Katherine Welsh.

Just like that, it was over. I didn’t make the trip to Mineola, mostly because I don’t want to be part of another photo op with Rob Jacobson for as long as I live.

Even if I somehow manage to live.

“Who’s going to represent Eric?” I ask McGoey. “Rob mention anything to you about that?”

McGoey doesn’t answer right away, somehow managing to look everywhere in Jimmy’s bar except at me.

“Don’t you tell me this, McGoey,” I say. “Do not tell me this. Or you may be out of this bar.”

“I haven’t officially told him yes,” McGoey says.

“If you didn’t say no, you know you’ve already decided to do it.”

“His dad is going to pay my fee,” McGoey says. “The full boat.”

“Now you’ve really got to be shitting me,” I say. “After he and McKenzie tried to set him up for murder twice ?”

“Rob says he feels guilty that his own son could hate him even more than Rob hated his own father,” McGoey says.

McKenzie told Jimmy and Danny Esposito a lot before he died. Jimmy says it was clear even to McKenzie that the ambulance probably wasn’t going to get to him in time, as much as both Jimmy and Esposito tried to stop the bleeding, not wanting to lose him.

Once Eric Jacobson was on his way to the Southampton police station, McKenzie confessed that he and Eric had been planning the Carson murders for a long time.

Eric had somehow found out Rob Jacobson was doing yet another mother-daughter act, this time with Rob’s old prom date; Eric knew the act very well because there had been multiple occasions when Rob Jacobson had taken girls away from his own son.

Jimmy asked McKenzie which one of them knew enough about DNA to arrange the frame-up. Jimmy forgot that McKenzie had once told him what a science whiz he was before he dropped out of Princeton.

I could have been on one of those CSI shows.

Eric had been the one who helped harvest his father’s DNA. It had taken time, and a lot of secret visits to the house in Sagaponack. But he’d managed.

Jane watched the video of McKenzie from Esposito’s phone. Twice. When Jimmy asked why they had framed Rob and then waited to do anything about it, McKenzie, even starting to fade, actually choked out a laugh before croaking, “Because we both liked it so much, we wanted to do it again.”

Then they knew that Rob Jacobson’s DNA would be in the system once they’d done a less elaborate frame on the Gates murders. After that, they were prepared to sit back with their popcorn and watch the movie play out, even if they had to sit through the same movie twice.

“It must’ve been when they started to worry that you might get him off that they tried to kill both of us,” Jimmy says.

“They both hated Rob that much,” I say, almost in wonder.

Jimmy says, “McKenzie just hated him longer.”

Then Jimmy tells me something we both heard on the tape.

“And if you got him acquitted again, they were just gonna kill him this time,” Jimmy says. “And then probably us.”

He raises his glass of Scotch.

“But they were just the latest to find out how hard we are to kill, Janie,” he says.

I raise my own glass, clink it gently against his, and then smile at my partner.

“And they might have gotten away with it,” I say, “if it hadn’t been for the hummingbirds.”

We drink to hummingbirds then.

It’s the last thing I remember before I wake up in the ambulance, sure I’m dying.