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JIMMY MATCHES ME WHEN it’s his turn, shot for shot, six for six. We’re just getting started. I finally edge ahead of him in the fifth round when he misses the last target.

“Oops,” I say. “Down goes grandma.”

“She had a good life,” Jimmy says.

He’s smiling. So am I.

“You can’t even beat a cancer patient,” I say. “Sad.”

That wipes the smile off his face, but then this particular subject always does.

“You know I don’t like playing that game,” he says.

“Trust me,” I say. “Neither do I.”

Truth is, I had already been having a day, and it isn’t even eight o’clock in the morning. Sometimes I get so sick between rounds of chemo that I’m up most of the night. Sometime around four, I drop off to sleep for a couple of hours, only to be awakened by my alarm at six.

Never mind that I almost called Jimmy to cancel.

I arrived at the range, trying to act more energetic than the creature that inspired my mother’s childhood nickname for me: Hummingbird.

He worries enough about me already, telling me every chance he gets that I’m going to get better, and that even if I die, it will be over his own dead body.

He stops reracking the targets and gives me a long look, as if he’s getting ready to interview a perp. “Tell me something straight, even if you are a lawyer,” he says, as if reading my mind, something he does with annoying frequency. “You sure you got another trial in you?”

“No doubt.”

“No bull is what I was hoping for,” he says.

“You should know better than anyone that the code never changes with me,” I say. “Live to work, work to live.”

I don’t add, or die trying . Frankly, I don’t like playing that game, either.

He wins a round, the sixth, when I finally miss. But I come back and beat him one last time, because we both know I’m not leaving on a loss.

“Rematch?” Jimmy asks.

“As much as I would like to beat your butt all the livelong day, I’ve got to get to the courthouse to meet with my new jury consultant, remember?”

Across an undefeated career in court, I’ve hardly ever used jury consultants. Certainly not for Rob Jacobson’s first trial, where he was acquitted.

Now he’s about to stand trial in Nassau County, next one over from Suffolk. Different county, but same charge: the shooting deaths of an entire family—father, teenage daughter, and her mother, whom Jacobson had known back in high school.

This time around, the evidence against him is even worse.

Katherine Welsh, the new Nassau County district attorney, is leading the prosecution.

Just two days ago, on the eve of jury selection, we were informed of a piece of evidence that had magically, like a baby being left on the estimable Ms. Welsh’s doorstep, shown up at her office: a time-stamped photograph of our client leaving the victims’ house the night of the murders.

I pleaded with Judge Michael Horton for a continuance, to allow me and Jimmy time to investigate; bless his heart, he gave us two weeks.

That same day, I broke down and hired a jury consultant.

Just being realistic, this might turn out to be the last big case of my career and to win it, I was going to need all the help I could get.

“So you’re still going to meet with Queen Elizabeth?” Jimmy says.

It’s what he’s taken to calling the consultant, a woman named Norma Banks. Norma admits to being eighty-three, but I think she’s dropped a few years the way people drop excess pounds.

“Come on, I know she’s old,” I tell Jimmy. “But she’s not dead.”

“Yet,” he says. “I was you, I’d drive fast to Mineola, just to be on the safe side.”