Page 82

“Glad I caught you when I did,” he says. “You’re gonna want to make a stop in Southampton, which is where I happen to be at.”

“This doesn’t sound remotely good.”

“It’s not,” he says. “Your good friend Allen Reese? Somebody put one in his forehead and one in the chest, and not too long ago, according to the ME.”

In the moment, my brain flashes right back to the woman at the flower shop in Bridgehampton having been murdered the same way, execution style.

“Not only did somebody shoot him,” Esposito says, “it looks like they did some job on his left hand before they did. Like they took a hammer to it.”

“Sounds as if Mr. Reese owed somebody money.”

“You think?”

I’ve already made the left off 111 and am now on the divided highway headed east, driving fast, though fast is a relative concept on this stretch of 27. I tell Danny Esposito I’m probably twenty minutes out and ask if Jimmy knows.

Esposito says he called him first, adding that it was a cop thing.

“I was a cop.”

“Ish,” he says.

“Watch it,” I say, and then ask who found the body.

“That’s the weird part. The cops found him. The killer used Reese’s landline to call them.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I wish,” Esposito says. “You throw in the guy’s hand, and the whole thing brings, like, a whole new dimension to breaking news.”

“What did he say to the cops? The killer, I mean.”

“He said, and I quote, ‘You ought to head over to Allen Reese’s house,’” Esposito tells me. “Then he said, ‘Mr. Reese had an accident.’”