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WHEN HE GETS ENOUGH air into him to be able to speak, he actually forces a grin.

“I guess I had that coming,” he says.

“Only because neither my partner nor I really think you’re worth shooting,” I say.

“She didn’t mean it about buying you a drink, by the way,” Jimmy says. “Now get out of here before I throw you out.”

“You sure you want to do that?” Harrington asks.

“Give me a good reason why I shouldn’t,” Jimmy says.

“Because in our world, yours and mine and hers, information still means power,” Harrington says. “And I’ve got information that the two of you want.”

He looks around the room and points to an empty table in the corner, near the big, framed picture of Jimmy, still in uniform and looking very young, posing with Joe DiMaggio at the old Yankee Stadium.

“Why don’t we all sit down and I’ll buy my own drink and then explain why you need to lay off Eric Jacobson and Edmund McKenzie so that you can both die of natural causes someday,” he says. “Her first, of course.”

“You want me to hit you again?” I say.

“Do you want to hear what I have to say or not?” Paul Harrington asks.

He does buy his own glass of Jack Daniel’s, a double, and brings it over to the table, and we all sit down.

Neither Jimmy nor I knew of a connection between Harrington and Rob Jacobson’s son, or with McKenzie, with whom Rob went to high school and who is another aging punk.

Both Eric Jacobson and Edmund McKenzie have threatened me recently.

I’ve managed not to shoot them both, though the temptation has been quite strong.

Harrington takes a sip of his drink and sighs contentedly.

“So how do you know those two mutts?” Jimmy asks him.

“I go way back with their fathers. You could say we were all members of the same club.”

“In your case,” I say, “I’m thinking it’s not the University Club.”

I take a closer look at Harrington. Jimmy has known him a long time, all the way back to when the whole city thought Paul Harrington really was a hero cop.

Now he looks old and overweight and almost as tired as I am, with a red drinker’s nose, and spidery capillaries on his cheeks, and eyes that have to see what he’s become better than anybody else.

“It’s a club as old as the city,” Harrington says. “The one where guys like the Jacobsons and the McKenzies get away with shit and guys like me help them do it.”

“Your club was supposed to be the NYPD,” Jimmy says.

Harrington grins and asks, “How do you think I got membership in theirs?”

I think: Just three ex-cops sitting around a table at Jimmy Cunniff’s cop bar. It’s just that one of them tried to have the other two killed, by another ex-cop as dirty as the East River.

“Do you really think we’re going to let you get away with sending Anthony Licata after us?” I ask.

“We need to move on from that,” Harrington says, and takes another sip of bourbon.

“When I’m dead,” Jimmy says.

Harrington grins again. He actually seems to be enjoying himself.

“Entirely up to you,” he tells Jimmy.

I smile sweetly at Harrington. “How about you stop fucking around and tell us your connection to McKenzie and the Jacobson kid?”

“The connection doesn’t matter,” he says. “What does matter is that you have now been told they are not to be touched.”

“And say we agree to that,” Jimmy says. “What do we get in return?”

“I tell you who killed Rob Jacobson’s old man,” Paul Harrington says.

He looks at Jimmy, and then me, waiting for a reaction.

“Take the deal,” Harrington says. “Because it comes off the table once I walk out of here tonight.”

“Information being power,” I say.

“Damn right,” Harrington says.

Jimmy looks at me, and I nod at him.

“Deal,” I say to Harrington.

“It involves your client,” he says to me.

“You’re telling me he’s the one who did it?”

“They,” Harrington says. “ They did it.”

He pauses.

“Your client killed his old man that day. It was his buddy Eddie McKenzie who shot the girl.”