AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Garry says he’ll post somebody in front and back until morning, not that he thinks it will do much good. Jimmy thanks him and looks around at the street scene as the onlookers, the ones out here in the middle of the night, begin to disperse. Thinking about how many arsonists like to come back and hide in plain sight in the crowd, wanting to watch the show.
Mostly men out here. Jimmy does see two young couples, probably having walked down from the high-end condos in what used to be the Bulova Watchcase Factory up Division Street.
All come to watch somebody try to burn Jimmy to the ground tonight.
Jimmy turns back to the bar, having paid no attention to the big guy in the New York Rangers cap, over on the west side of Main, leaning against a wall next to the laundromat over there, where a bookstore used to be.
Doesn’t notice the guy walking back toward the municipal parking lot, pulling his phone out of his pocket.
Jimmy’s phone chirps now.
Unknown Caller.
Jimmy knows who it is before the guy starts talking.
“You’re still being a bad boy, Jimmy boy,” what is now a familiar voice says. “A bad, bad boy. Making calls on me after I told you to stop.”
“I’m going to do more than make calls on you,” Jimmy says. “I’m going to piss on you after I find you and setyouon fire.”
The guy lets that one go.
“Hey, Jimmy. That guy you posted outside Jane’s house? I hope nothing happened to him while you were rushing over here.”
And disconnects the call.
Forty-Four
ONE OF THE JURORSfaints and gets carried out on a stretcher the next morning right before I am about to call my next witness. At which point Judge Prentice has no choice but to send everybody home for the day.
Onmyway home, I stop to inspect what turns out to be surprisingly minor damage at Jimmy’s bar, which he insists will be open tonight even if he has to set up tables on the sidewalk, the way he did during COVID.
“I look at it this way,” Jimmy Cunniff tells me. “I grew up in smoke-filled bars. So nothing’s really changed.”
He has already told me about the call he got after the fire, about what the guy said before the call ended, about how it turned out he’d been bluffing about Kenny Stanton not being safe over at my house. And, as always, what Jimmy Cunniff planned to do with this guy when he found him.
“Look on the bright side. If you do take him out, at least you’ll have a good lawyer.”
By one in the afternoon I am having lunch with my sister, Brigid, at an outdoor table on a beautiful spring day—Bostwick’s Chowder House, on Highway 27 between Amagansett and central East Hampton.
She’s having a salad. I ordered the fried clams platter.
“Fried food is going to kill you,” she says.
“Wanna bet?” I fork a clam and put it on her plate.
Brigid laughs and recoils, like I’ve put a bug on it.
“Okay, so tell me stuff about the trial I can’t read online.”
She has always been thin, even before cancer. But she looks thinner than the last time we were together, and even paler than usual. She blames her coloring on our late Irish mother every time she has to make another trip to the dermatologist and have something taken off her face.
“How are you doing really?” I ask my sister.
She smiles. “Rhetorical question?”
“Maybe just a predictably dumb one.”
“You’re not creating an equivalency to the trial, are you, sis?”
