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I look past him, across the vast expanse of the back lawn. In the distance I see a figure, who has to be the girl with whom he left the Talkhouse, sprinting toward the dunes, stumbling, falling to the grass, scrambling frantically back to her feet, no longer wearing the white jeans she’d been wearing an hour or so before.
She looks back over her shoulder one last time and then disappears in the direction of the Atlantic.
I wonder briefly what she thought was going to happen when she got into the car. Or why she got into the car. Was it because of how famous he is now? Or how rich?
Both?
Only now she acts as if she’s running for her life.
Jacobson turns and sees me just as I am about to take off running again, this time after the girl.
Far more interested in her right now than I am in him.
“Well,” he says when he sees that it’s me. “Thisis awkward, isn’t it?”
I ignore him and take a couple of steps toward the dunes before I am brought down from behind, half tackled and half shoved forward, nothing I can do to break my fall, the air completely knocked out of me as I land on my chest, my face pressed into the wet night grass.
My midsection, because of the way I’ve landed and what I’ve landed on, hurts like hell.
I turn my head enough to finally catch my breath, force myself to roll over. Jacobson and another man, the one who must have put me on the ground, are standing over me.
I hear Jacobson say, “Looks like we both lost a step, huh, Jane Smith?” He says my full name with amused contempt.
Rob Jacobson is smiling down at me.
But I’m not focused on him.
My eyes are fixed on the other man, backlit by the full moon.
A man who’s supposed to be dead.
One Rob Jacobson swore to me was dead.
“I don’t believe you and Mr. Champi have been formally introduced,” Jacobson says.
One Hundred Fifteen
THEY TELL ME TOsit on a long white leather couch, and I willingly oblige them, as Champi is the one with the gun.
Jacobson goes over to the bar at the far end of the living room and fixes himself a scotch over ice in a highball glass. I see what looks like a small splash of blood on the front of the white shirt and hope it’s his blood.
Champi is seated across the coffee table from me, a gun I know is a .22 in his hand.
I point at the gun and say, “The gift that keeps on giving. Am I right, Joe?”
Champi, his blue Rangers cap pushed back on his head, says, “I should put one in your leg for starters, like you put one in mine that night on the train tracks. Still hurts like a bastard.”
“I rushed the shot. If I’d had more time, I would have put one right between your eyes.”
I look at Jacobson, then nod over at Champi.
“One more lie from you about him being dead. On what appears to be a very long list of lies.”
“So it does,” Jacobson says.
I direct my attention back to Champi.
“So tell me, Joe. Was it you who killed them all? Or were you still just cleaning up after your excitable boy here the way you always have?”
