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Sixty
THE PAIN IN HISshoulder is getting worse, pretty much by the second.
He wants to scream but doesn’t. If this is Joe Champi on top of him, if the guy has been cocky enough to jump him in the street this way, Jimmy isn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
Jimmy hasn’t lost consciousness, as close as he was coming a couple of minutes ago. But now he wants the guy to think that he has. Lord knows he’s had enough boxing trainers tell him to stay down in his life.
He stays down now.
It’s dark enough at this end of Bay Street that Jimmy opens an eye, just barely. The guy hasn’t moved; he’s still on top of Jimmy but breathing hard now, like maybe he’s punched himself. Jimmy sees that he’s wearing some kind of dark-colored ski mask, slits for eyes, covering his face.
For the moment, he has stopped hitting Jimmy in the head.
Jimmy is still having trouble getting enough air into his lungs, just because of the weight of the guy on top of him. He tells himself to breathe through his nose and continue to play dead.
Enough,he thinks now.
Enough.
And even on his back like this, having just had the holy hell beat out of him, Jimmy Cunniff can still do something he has been able to do since the first day he walked into the Times Square Boxing Club when he was fourteen years old and Mr. Glenn, who owned the place, saw enough raw talent to tell him that he might be able to make a boxer out of him someday:
Jimmy Cunniff can still throw a left hook.
And throws one now.
Flat on his back the way he is, he braces himself on his bad right shoulder and puts everything he has into the kind of left hook that Mr. Glenn—Jimmy still thinks of him that way—told him one time you had to be born being able to throw.
You either have a left hand or you don’t,Mr. Glenn said.
Jimmy Cunniff has one now.
Sixty-One
ROB JACOBSON ACTS ASif we’re sitting on his back deck, having drinks with umbrellas in them, looking out at the ocean, Jacobson acting as if it’s still good—no,great—being him.
As if he’s not actually in this hospital room, cop posted at the door, on his way back to what he calls the Riverhead Correctional Ramada, and then back to a murder trial after that.
“I faked the heart attack,” he says. “And faked it pretty damn well if you ask me.”
“And why did you feel it necessary to do something like that?”
“Because I needed Brigid to stop talking.”
“Right after the part where you had just called her a liar,” I say.
“Pretty convincing with that, too, if I do say so myself.”
He jerks his chin at the cart carrying what looks like cranberry juice in a plastic cup, along with a pitcher of ice water. He can’t reach it because he’s attached to a heart monitor he’s just informed me he doesn’t need.
“Would you mind pushing the cart a little closer? I’m thirsty.”
“I’m not your nurse. Or your waitress.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Do I look like I’m joking, Rob? You’re the one who continues to act as if being on trial for your goddamn life, the one you used to have, anyway, is some kind of joke.”
“That’s because you’re going to make those charges go away.”
