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“Didn’t seethatcoming,” I say, slipping back behind the wheel of my own car.
So I decide to stick around. Nine o’clock by now. I stay until two in the morning.
The Fiat is still there. All the lights in the house are off.
This time I don’t sleep in my car. I drive home, thinking about things that might be going bump in the night.
Literally.
Twenty-Five
Jimmy
JIMMY IS CERTAIN ITwas a cop, and a local, who took those potshots at Jane. Certain that the codes of the blue brotherhood have come into play here, as though Jane took a shot at one of them, instead of just roughing up one of them on the witness stand.
Jimmy doesn’t know all the cops on the East Hampton force. But a lot of them drink in his bar. Because Jimmy Cunniff, ex-NYPD, owns the place, they consider it a cop bar. And they’d rather drink in his town than their own, especially when they’ll get at least one on the house when they come in, and sometimes more than that.
Tonight three of them are sitting around a table when he gets back from a fast meeting with McCall. The best McCall can do on the call that came in on Artie Shore’s landline is that it was placed by a burner. All he has. All anybody has. Somebody said something to the poor bastard and he took himself out.
I should have tried to get up there sooner.Jimmy thinks:It isn’t just ballplayers who lose a step.
Now he’s back at his usual seat at the end of the bar, watching the three cops at the table across the room. Two of them Jimmy recognizes from the local Sag Harbor PD. But the other one, Jimmy knows, is from East Hampton. Big guy in his thirties, maybe early forties. An ex-Marine, Jimmy knows, because the guy told him one time. Mike Rousselle is his name. A hardo all the way. One of the bartenders told Jimmy that Rousselle was in the night before, mouthing off enough for everybody in the place to hear him, like he wanted them to hear, wanted them to wonder how Jimmy Cunniff’s friend Jane could live with herself defending a dirtbag like Rob Jacobson.
Even managed to get a laugh out of the old joke, according to the bartender. “You know what one dead lawyer is?” Rousselle said. “A start.”
Another cop at the table says something now. They all laugh. Maybe Rousselle laughs the hardest. Funny guy. Does that mean heisthe one who shot at Jane? Jimmy is too good a cop to go anywhere near that. But does Jimmy Cunniff think it was a cop?
No, he doesn’t just think.
He’s sure of it.
Jane originally thought it was a long gun. Jimmy found out differently. He went out to the trail and hunted around and is convinced now that it was a Glock 17, 9mm—more than enough gun to do the job for a skilled shooter. Most police departments follow the FBI’s recent determination that the 9mm makes the best service weapon because it has less recoil. And Jimmy, after Jane described where her last target was, pulled a Speer Gold Dot 9mm round out of the tree with not much work. The most common duty bullet that police departments buy. And what Jimmy himself still uses. Too expensive, and not common, for most people.
But not cops.
Could somebody like this loudmouth Rousselle have been arrogant enough or dumb enough to use his service weapon? Doubtful. But could he have an identical backup?
Hundred percent.
Jimmy alternates between watching the Yankees play the Angels in Anaheim on one of the two TV sets above the bar. But he makes a point of staring at Rousselle every chance he gets. It’s him. Jimmyknows. Sometimes you do. He did gang work when he started with the cops. The Westies. He would walk up to a bunch of them in Hell’s Kitchen, sometimes with backup, sometimes not, and know instantly who the one wasnotto take his eyes off.
“To blue lives,” Rousselle says at one point, and they all raise their mugs.
Jimmy is looking directly at him again. Now Rousselle pushes his chair back, gets up, walks over to him.
“There a problem, Cunniff?”
Tight polo shirt. Ripped. Him, not the shirt. A bodybuilder. Tats up and down both arms.
“Only because I’m watching the Yankees bullpen blow another one.”
“Looks like you’re spending more time watching me than the game,” Rousselle says.
“Sounds to me like you’re the one with the problem,” Jimmy says.
“You know what Ireallygot a problem with? Somebody trying to lawyer a scumbag like Rob Jacobson out of a triple homicide everybody knows he’s good for. Because in my book, that makes the lawyer a scumbag, too.”
“A lawyer worth shooting at?”
