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He bumps me some fist.
“Girl’s gotta eat.”
I’m nearly to Astro’s when I realize I’ve left my damn purse in the car. I turn around, start walking back to where I parked, when I see a couple crossing the street, having just left the Talkhouse.
Guy in a baseball cap, arm around an unsteady young girl in white jeans already looking overserved at a fairly early hour, the two of them making their way to the lot behind Jack’s that serves Amagansett Square.
When they stop in the middle of the crosswalk, making sure a car heading east is going to stop for them, I can clearly see, because of the headlights, that the guy in the Yankees cap is Rob Jacobson.
And I think of an old Yogi Berra line that Yankees fan Jimmy Cunniff uses all the time, because he always seems to be quoting Yogi.
Déjà vu, all over again.
I unlock the car and get back behind the wheel. And wait, until I see Jacobson’s Mercedes pull out of Jack’s lot, making a left, heading west.
I pull out onto Main Street myself.
Following them.
Working to live.
One Hundred Thirteen
WHAT THE HELL AMI doing?
Seriously.
What inhellam I doing?
I was supposed to be eating my pizza by now. Only I’m not. I’m following the guy I just got acquitted, not even remembering the last time I tried to follow anybody in a car but feeling jazzed about it at the same time. Edgy. And a little bit fearful, not entirely sure whether I’m afraid for myself or for the girl in that car and what might be about to happen to her.
Not sure where either one of us is going right now.
I stay with Jacobson as he’s the one taking back roads now, having taken a left off 27 when he got to Wainscott. I make sure not to stay too close to him, not wanting him to know that he’s being followed, even though I’m not sure what would change if he did.
What the hell am I doing?
If the kid with him is in trouble, what am I going to do about it?
Pull an air gun on him?
I’d taken the Glock out of the glove compartment before heading for the beach, planning to take it apart and clean it later. But I’d left it at the house, in the drawer of the small table in the front hall. There was another Glock in the nightstand next to my bed. Also of absolutely no use to me right now.
No music inside the car now. Just the sound of my own breathing, coming fast.
And the feeling of being even more alive than I was on the trail.
Being me.
I stay with Jacobson, maintaining my distance, realizing he’s on his way home as he makes one last left off Daniel’s to Gibson Lane, on his way to his big house, even if he’s passed much bigger ones along the way. Claire Jacobson is in Paris, or so I’d read last week in theEast Hampton Star.
Maybe with her away, he’s already turned the place on Gibson back into his party house.
The aging frat boy back at it.
Brazen enough—shocker—to be back cruising the Talkhouse again for girls.
Feeling young himself.
