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I SIT BACK DOWN, suddenly exhausted, feeling a little sick and a little dizzy at the same time, as if my condition had once again chased me down from behind, and tried to knock me down, as jazzed as I’d felt questioning Jimmy, and finishing up the way I had.

I drink some water and feel Norma Banks’s eyes on me.

She touches my shoulder and mouths, You okay?

I nod.

Hey, I’m not the one under oath.

From my right I hear Katherine Welsh say, “Redirect please, Your Honor.”

Jimmy must have expected this because I see that he hasn’t moved.

“I’ve done my research on you, Mr. Cunniff,” she says. “And what that research tells me is that you weren’t just a good cop, you were considered, at least at your best, a great cop.”

Well, I think, until he wasn’t.

“I like to think that I was,” he says. He grins. “Though some of my superior officers thought otherwise from time to time.”

Welsh lets that settle. But she has my attention now, just because I have no idea where she is going with a line of questioning that hasn’t really started with a question.

“It was your job as a great cop to arrest the guilty,” she says, “and then hope that they were brought to justice.”

Still not a question.

“That was the goal, yes.”

“And what that really means is that you had a sense of right and wrong,” she says. “Which is why you brought that gun to Ms. Smith when you could have thrown it into the Hudson River. Because it was the right thing to do, isn’t that right?”

“I thought it was.”

Even Jimmy seems curious now.

“So does the cop in you believe that this defendant, whether he’s your client or not, hid that gun because he continues to think he’s above the law?”

I yell “Objection” as Jimmy is saying, “I never said …”

And before Judge Michael Horton can respond, Katherine Welsh is plowing right ahead, saying to Jimmy, “Doesn’t the cop in you really believe this defendant is guilty as charged, Mr. Cunniff?”

Horton’s voice is the one rising now as he says, “Sustained!”

Then Katherine Welsh is the one saying, “Withdrawn.”

The courtroom goes silent before Horton calls for a brief adjournment.

We all rise as the judge heads for his chambers. When he’s gone, Rob Jacobson says to me, “What just happened here?”

I keep my voice low, too tired to raise it.

“What just happened,” I say to him, “is that she just did to me what she said she was going to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Kicked my ass,” I say.

Then I add, “And yours, too, for what it’s worth.”

Fifteen minutes later, Norma Banks finds me on the floor of the ladies’ room.