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“Yeah,” Jimmy calls over to him, “we’re number one.”
Jimmy waves Kenny down and says he’s going out for some air but might be back.
“Shouldn’t that arm be in a sling?” Kenny says.
“Yes,” Jimmy says.
He takes a right out of the bar, heads east on Bay Street, past the gym on his left at the end of Division. Dopo La Spiaggia, a pretty good Italian joint, is up ahead on his right. The water to his left is lit up like Yankee Stadium because of all the big boats docked here, with more on the way.
Quiet night in Sag Harbor, Jimmy thinks. Calm before the looming summer storm, when Jimmy knows he’ll once again be asking himself if the extra business he gets from the Summer People is worth it.
Good for business, he thinks. Just bad for the soul.
Jimmy sticks his right hand into the pocket of his windbreaker, because letting the arm flop around hurts too much. Yeah, he thinks. Getting shot still hurts like a son of a bitch.
It’s so quiet—no foot traffic on the sidewalk in either direction—it reminds him of winter, the time of year he likes the best out here, even if there are nights when the bar is almost empty and the antique cash register is so light on cash Jimmy worries it might float away.
Jimmy Cunniff is so lost in thought that he never hears the guy coming, never sees the punch that catches him flush on the right side of his face, spins him around and puts him down on the bad shoulder.
The pain of landing on it makes him feel as if he’s gotten himself shot all over again.
Then the guy is on top of him, so much weight on Jimmy’s chest that the air comes right out of him. Jimmy’s thinking the guy must know about the shoulder somehow, because he grinds it into the sidewalk with one hand while he keeps punching Jimmy in the head with the other, nothing for Jimmy to do but take it until he feels himself about to go out.
Another feeling you don’t forget.
Somebody trying to punch your lights out.
Fifty-Nine
ROB JACOBSON HAS BEENgiven a spectacular private room. It turns out he’s an annual donor to just about every hospital from Manorville to Montauk. Who says crime, even alleged crime, doesn’t pay?
Jacobson isn’t cuffed to the bed, as I thought he might be. Just attached to a heart monitor instead. He told the EMTs that he knew from experience what a heart attack feels like and was sure he was having another one. It turned out, after a battery of tests, that he was not. They have him spending the night in the hospital as a precaution anyway. The judge has already called off further testimony until Monday.
“This’ll be the best night’s sleep I’ve had in months,” he says. “Prison bed is the worst I’ve had since Duke. And, Jesus, the stuff you hear in jail all night long. It sounds like a zoo.”
“That’s fascinating, Rob, no kidding. Why am I here?”
I was halfway home when I got the call from his hospital bed that he needed to see me tonight, that it couldn’t wait. I turned the car around and sat a couple of hours in the waiting room until the doctors were completely finished with him. Now here I am. Jimmy is constantly reminding me how much the man is paying us, and that means we have to eat some shit along the way.
“Just to be clear,” he says. “Everything I say to you is protected by lawyer-client privilege, right? Even in the hospital?”
“It is.”
“You can’t repeat any of it, not even to your sister, correct?”
“Not if you don’t want me to. You don’t have a lot of rights at the present time. But that happens to be one of them.”
“Okay, then,” he says. “Everything I tell you in this room stays between the two of us.”
“You know what they say. What happens in the Peconic Bay Medical Center…”
He smiles at me, then asks me to get up and make sure the door is closed. I get up and make sure. Then he motions me to bring my chair closer to him, which I do.
“I’m the one who’s been lying. Like a champion.”
“Even about the heart attack?”
“About all of it,” Rob Jacobson says, “except that I didn’t do it.”
