Page 73

JIMMY DRIVES BACK TO the bar, not ready to go home yet, having nowhere to go except there.

On the way to Sag Harbor he’s thinking that a guy who’s been accused of killing six people is involved with more women—of all ages—than Jimmy is these days.

He’s looking ahead to one more night when he’s not ready to go back to the empty house. He keeps telling himself that he might finally be ready to have someone in his life again, for the first time in a long time, when all of this is over.

But only if it’s ever over.

Jimmy takes his usual seat at the end of the bar.

There’s a football game on the television set closest to him.

This time of year, there always seems to be some kind of football on.

Jimmy’s old enough to remember when college football was Saturday afternoons and the pros were Sunday afternoons and Monday nights.

Stop it.

Thinking about the old days was just another way of making you even older than you already are.

He turns his thoughts back to Edmund (Eddie) McKenzie.

Another rich man’s son with the morals of a sewer rat.

But the one who had it in for Jacobson since high school.

The one who may or may not have been at Jacobson’s town house the day Jacobson’s father was shot to death, along with a girl about the same age as the one Jimmy just encountered in Amagansett.

McKenzie is the one who may or may not have done one of the killings himself at the town house that day, if you could believe another sewer rat like former Commander of Detectives Paul Harrington.

Eddie McKenzie: another sick, spoiled boy who never grew up. But does that make him sick enough to have done everything that Jacobson has been accused of doing?

McKenzie is also the one who was accused of rape when he and Rob Jacobson really were still boys, a rape he swears up and down that Jacobson committed and then stood by and watched as McKenzie took the weight on it.

Maybe McKenzie did wait all this time to get even.

Could he have known enough about blood and hair and DNA to plant it near the bodies? Why the hell not? You can learn just about anything these days on the internet, including how to build your own bomb.

Maybe Jacobson is right about him, and somehow McKenzie is the one who killed both families, and it just turns out he did a much better job of planting the evidence at the Carson house than he did later when he killed Mitch Gates and his wife and his daughter.

Or, it suddenly occurs to Jimmy, another way of looking at things, there are two killers instead of just one.

“Goddamn it!” Jimmy says, and slaps the bar in front of him.

“You okay, boss?” Kenny asks.

“Do I look okay?”

“Trick question?” Kenny asks, grinning.

“I’m too old for this shit,” Jimmy says.

“Who isn’t?” Kenny says. “Want another beer while we ponder that and other deep questions?”

Jimmy shakes his head, stands, leaves a too-big tip next to his glass.

“You don’t have to tip me,” Kenny says. “You’re already paying my salary, remember?”

“Excellent point,” Jimmy says, and picks up the twenty and replaces it with a fifty and leaves.

When he’s approaching his house, he sees the downstairs lights are on.

Jimmy is sure he didn’t leave them that way.

He’s always been a bit of a wing nut on conserving electricity, his parents having drummed that into him when he was growing up and there was barely enough money for his father to put food on the table in their small apartment in the Bronx.

Jimmy keeps going, past the house, slowly drives to the end of the street and parks there, shutting off the car and removing his gun from the glove compartment before he gets out.

He cuts across his next-door neighbor’s lawn and makes his way along the front of his house, ducking down as he passes the living room window.

Then he’s at the door, hand on the doorknob as he gives it a slow, gentle turn.

Unlocked.

He’s also sure he left it locked. He never forgets to do that.

Jimmy turns the handle, then he’s opening the door, stepping into the house, gun out in front of him.

The man is sitting there on his couch.

He looks at the gun in Jimmy’s hand, barely changing expression.

“You use that, better make sure you kill me with the first shot,” he says.

Then the man says, “You know who I am?”

“I do,” Jimmy says, lowering his weapon.

“We need to talk,” Sonny Blum says.