Page 48

Jimmy

THE THROUGH LINE BETWEEN Sonny Blum and so many elements of Rob Jacobson’s case has grown so long that Jimmy now has Jane as fixed on Blum as he is. He’s promised not only to locate Blum but also to find a way to serve him so that she can call him as a witness.

When she asks how he plans to do that, he says, “They found bin Laden, didn’t they?”

“It took them years, which we don’t have.”

“Maybe if they’d asked me, they would have found him sooner.”

“Please promise me you won’t get shot while you’re looking for Blum.”

“Okay,” Jimmy says. “But only because you said please.”

He really does feel as if he keeps hearing Blum’s name get called every time he turns around.

Hank Carson was in deep to Bobby Salvatore.

Sonny’s guy. Now both of them are dead. Paul Harrington was in Sonny’s pocket a long time, which meant Harrington’s two top foot soldiers, Joe Champi and Anthony Licata, cops every bit as dirty as Harrington, were in there with them.

Now both Champi and Licata are dead, thanks to Janie.

And it was Champi, about a hundred years ago, who turned up at Robinson Jacobson’s town house right after Jacobson and his girlfriend, Carey Watson, ended up good and dead. As far as Jimmy is concerned, that’s practically the same as putting Sonny in the room with them.

Jimmy is at the end of his bar on Saturday night, remembering the night when another one of Blum’s guys, Len Greene, came in and told him that as long as Jane and Jimmy backed off they’d be left alone.

Except now Jane is not only refusing to back off, she is dead set on calling Blum as a witness and putting him on trial for murder, starting first thing Monday morning, putting him on trial every bit as much as Katherine Welsh was about to do the same with Rob Jacobson.

What a freaking mess.

Jimmy drinks some beer and thinks:

I’m right back to where we started. Hoping somebody doesn’t kill my girl before cancer does.

He turns to look at the room. Still a decent crowd tonight, even late. Good for business. But Jimmy has known from the start that this bar is more than just business with him. It’s every good cop bar in which he ever drank when he was still on the job, and even after he wasn’t.

That’s really the best part for him, he knows in his heart.

The way this place takes him back.

He is considering having one more for the road when he hears the ping that means a text coming in to his phone. He grabs the phone off the bar and checks who the sender is, but the ID is blank.

And when he opens the first text, he feels as if he’s back in the boxing ring, breathless after taking a body shot to the rib cage.

It’s a picture of the woman he knows right away is Beth Lassiter, the Bridgehampton florist who was shot to death a couple of days ago, the one whose face has been plastered all over the front page of The East Hampton Star.

Beth Lassiter is on her back, eyes wide open in death, one bullet hole in the center of her forehead, one in her chest, flowers strewn all around her on the floor, as if the shooter had arranged them.

No cop that Jimmy knows would be sending along a photograph like this; it can have only come from the shooter.

The fuck .

Jimmy clicks on the second text.

Your boss needs to keep my boss’s name out of her mouth.

Unless she wants to be laid out like this.

Jimmy makes a call as he’s running out to where he’s parked his car in its usual spot in the back lot.

Then he decides to take a drive.

The fuck, he thinks again.

One in particular this time.