Page 20

BY THE EARLY EVENING Jimmy and I have made up enough to be seated at the end of the tavern he owns on Main Street in Sag Harbor.

“I don’t want to relitigate the conversation we had in the car,” I say to him now.

“Litigate to your heart’s content,” he says. “You were lying. And I was right about you quitting this case and our asshole client once and for all.”

“That’s very open-minded of you.”

“You’re welcome,” he says.

I sip some club soda. I’m off real cocktails, because of my drug cocktail, until further notice, even though that makes me feel more out of place here than a vegan.

“I don’t want you to start yelling all over again and scare the customers,” I say. “But you’re not allowed to be more angry about me having cancer than I am. It doesn’t work that way.”

“Jesus H. Christmas trees,” he says. “I know you think you get to make the rules, about just about everything. But what you don’t get to do is tell me what I’m allowed to feel about your being sick.”

“Before I came over, you promised to be nice,” I say. “This is nice?”

“Like my mother used to say,” Jimmy tells me, “you get what you get and you don’t get upset.”

“Your mother was full of shit,” I say.

I finally get a laugh out of him.

“At least she meant well,” Jimmy says.

Both the Mets, my team, and Jimmy’s Yankees are off tonight. But there’s still baseball on the sets at both ends of the bar. Jimmy Cunniff’s theory, one on which I’m totally lined up, is that any baseball is better than none.

“If I promise not to lie to you ever again, will you stop being angry with me?”

“Here’s my promise to you,” Jimmy says. “I’ll stop being angry when you’re better.”

Then he’s looking past me, to the front door.

“You have got to be shitting me,” Jimmy Cunniff says.

I swivel my stool around and see what he is seeing.

Who he’s seeing.

Paul Harrington.

“Of all the gin mills,” I say to my partner.

“Mine’s the one that suddenly needs to be fumigated,” Jimmy says.

We both watch as Harrington walks straight toward us.

“Mind if I pull up a stool?” he says to Jimmy.

“Mind if I shoot you?” Jimmy says.

Harrington casually pulls back the front of his blue blazer to show us the Glock 19 holstered to his belt, probably his old service revolver. I briefly think about challenging the sonofabitch to a shooting contest.

“Only if you get off the first shot,” Harrington says to Jimmy.

Then he turns to me.

“Still with us, huh?” Paul Harrington says. “Maybe cancer isn’t as tough as it’s cracked up to be.”

I am tired. Exhausted really, and not just from cancer and jet lag.

I am tired of my client, tired of worrying about this new trial, tired from constantly looking over my shoulder because somebody like Harrington might have sent another shooter after me.

Or because my own client might have done the same thing.

On top of all that, I am feeling the full effects of the first few days of the ADC drugs. Most of the time I just feel weak.

Just not at this particular moment, with this bum of a disgraced cop standing in front of me, an insult to everything that made me want to be a cop in the first place.

I slide off my stool.

Then with all the strength I have in me, Harrington between me and the rest of the customers in Jimmy’s place, I step into the hard, short left hook to the body that Jimmy taught me in Gleason’s Gym about a hundred years ago, trying to drive my fist through Harrington’s fleshy midsection and all the way out the other side.

I hear the air come out of him as he doubles over.

“Buy you a drink, Lieutenant?” I ask.