“That’s what you came here to tell us?” Morelli says.

  I nod. “And to tell you that if you choose not to back off, and if either one of you, or anybody you work with, or for, goes near my sister or Jimmy Cunniff or my boyfriend, I will find you both again. And the next time I will shoot you dead.”

  “If you live that long,” Morelli says.

  Some drops of blood have landed on the shoulder of his white T-shirt.

  “I could have done it tonight and told the cops you both attacked me,” I say. “So if you think about it, maybe you guys are the ones who owe me a favor now.”

  “My ass,” Morelli says.

  “Well put.”

  I keep the Glock pointed at them as I slowly back my way across the patio. When I get to the corner of the house, I stop.

  “Boom,” I say.

  ONE HUNDRED SIX

  Jimmy

  SONNY BLUM’S NAME KEEPS coming up, here and there, has from the beginning. Jimmy Cunniff knows why and knows maybe he should have red-flagged it sooner. Bobby Salvatore worked for Blum before going out on his own, if not with Sonny’s approval, at least with his consent. Gambling was never a big part of Sonny’s operation.

  Loan sharking sure was, though, and bad girls, and extortion, and forcing his way into legitimate businesses, and all-around racketeering, and the ever-popular waste management companies. Maybe Sonny didn’t view Salvatore as a competitor, or threat, until maybe he did.

  Jimmy was so fixed on Champi, and then Licata, the immediate threats, that he never paid enough attention to Blum over there on the edges of this thing, maybe because he bought into the notion that the old man was supposed to be drooling on himself.

  None of the mob cops could pinpoint the time when Bobby Salvatore went off on his own. Maybe Salvatore was allowed to go off on his own because Sonny Blum was getting a cut of his profits, was a partner to him the way Salvatore was with somebody like Allen Reese. Maybe they were all in bed together, in one big landfill-type pile.

  The last time there were any pictures of Blum, or any video, was when he was seen walking down Seventh Street in Garden City in his bathrobe, mumbling to himself, a few miles from a mansion that the guys from Organized Crime Control said was as well guarded as the White House.

  But maybe Detective Craig Jackson’s intel was wrong about Sonny Blum being the one behind the curtain. Maybe Blum’s mind really has turned to oatmeal, and he isn’t capable of masterminding anything these days beyond trips to the bathroom.

  But there are still all these connections.

  “Lot of pearls,” Mickey Dunne used to say when they’d be working a case that threatened to turn their brains to mush. “Our job is to make a necklace out of them.”

  It’s Jimmy’s job now, because he isn’t going to let Mickey Dunne’s murder stay in Open Unsolved forever. So Jimmy has been working the phones hard the past few days. Gone back to the city for face-to-face time with some of his OCC contacts. Because Sonny Blum is from the Island, Danny Esposito has been working with his Organized Crime task force.

  The Jewish Don, they called Sonny Blum in a Times piece a few years ago. In the photographs they ran of the old man, he looks like a taller Mel Brooks.

  Jimmy has turned the bar into his office tonight, laptop set up under the television set at his corner. He tried to call Jane a few hours ago but got sent straight to voicemail. Probably on a date with Ben Kalinsky.

  “How ya doin’?” Jimmy hears now to his left.

  He turns. A guy in a dark navy suit, white shirt, no tie, has taken the open stool next to him. Maybe in his forties, maybe a little older. Nice tan. That kind of beard stubble that somehow has been turned into a modern art form. Hair short on the side, a little bit of a fade on top, some gray in it. Small smile for Jimmy, from dark blue eyes that seem to match the suit.

  “Do I know you?” Jimmy asks.

  “Nah.”

  “How can I help you then?” He points at the laptop. “Kind of working here.”

  “I’m actually here to help you.”

  The guy’s still smiling. Lot of teeth. He turns to Kenny Stanton and orders a Crown Royal, neat. When Kenny sets the glass down in front of him, he takes a small sip of it right away.

  “Help me with what?” Jimmy says. “Or maybe I should ask, with who?”

  “Sonny.”

  ONE HUNDRED SEVEN

  I SEE A MISSED call from Jimmy when I get home, but his phone is turned off when I try to hit him back.

  I call Brigid then, wanting to be honest with her about where I’ve been and what I’ve done at Edmund McKenzie’s house, and what it might mean for both of us going forward.

  I tell it all in a rush after she answers.

  When I finish, there’s a long silence on her end. I can hear jazz playing softly in the background. One thing she did inherit from Jack Smith is her love of jazz.

  “You never change, do you, Jane? You do what you want when you want, and to hell with what anybody else might want.”

  “Not fair.”

  “Fair? You told me you were going to leave all of this alone, because you told me it was the best way to keep me safe. But now I’m probably right back in the line of fire, aren’t I? Good work, sis. You’ve pissed them off and you’ve pissed me off.”

  “We were already in the line of fire, both of us.”

  Another silence, longer than the one before.

  “I’m going away,” she says finally. “I’m going to get away from here and I’m going to get away from you.”

  “Go where?” I ask.

  “To save my marriage.”

  Before I can respond she says, “I love you. I hope we both get better. But you really are a selfish bitch.”

  She ends the call before I can tell her it’s the second time I’ve been called a bitch tonight.

  It’s late on a Friday night. I try Jimmy again. Phone still off. But what I need to tell him about Nick Morelli and Eric Jacobson can wait until the morning. He’ll probably be as angry at me as I’ve made my sister. Maybe even angrier.

  I try to do a little more work, jury selection a few days away. There was a time when this upcoming trial, on the heels of the first one, my client really on trial for another triple homicide, seemed all-consuming to me. But as hideous as these crimes are, more and more I’ve started to think that they’re just one element to a much bigger story.

  Maybe Brigid is right. Maybe it was selfish of me to even go looking for those two punks tonight, much less roust them the way I did. But I’m tired of being threatened. I’m tired of being pushed around. I’ve never let anybody push me around, at least not for very long, all the way back to the mean girls. Martin did it for a while at the end of our marriage.

  But I didn’t let him get away with it for long.

  I’ve had no choice about cancer, which chose me the way it chooses everybody else, my sister included.

  But tonight I made a choice of my own.

  My father’s daughter.

  “My girl,” he always called me.

  I had a dream about him last night, for the first time in a long time, certainly for the first time since I got sick. He was younger, too, the way my mother is so often younger in my dreams, not the sad old man who dropped dead of a heart attack on the barroom floor, working too hard until the end, drinking too much, doing everything not to go back to the empty apartment after Brigid and I went off to college.

  Jack Smith hated being alone, and at least when he was behind the bar, he wasn’t. Alone. The tough ex-Marine who never got over losing her, never stopped beating himself up for not doing enough for her, especially once she got sick.

  Who owes him a favor, all this time later?

  How far back does this story really go?

  He always said this about tending bar, my father did:

  “You meet all kinds. But their money looks exactly the same once they slide it across to me.”

  In the dream, he’s up in the stands, alone up there, too, watching me play hockey. But when I go up to find him after the game is over, he’s gone.

  I take my Glock with me when I walk Rip up and down the street in front of my house, come back inside, set the alarm. When I get into bed, I don’t put the gun in the drawer of the bedside table, I leave it on top.

  Maybe I really do have some kind of death wish, as hard as I’m fighting to live.

  I leave a light on outside my bedroom door and open it a crack, so Rip and I aren’t entirely in the dark tonight.

  It turns out my father wasn’t the only one who met all kinds.

  So has his little girl.

  ONE HUNDRED EIGHT

  Jimmy

  NO POINT IN ASKING the guy his name again. Jimmy already has a better idea about finding out later, if he needs to.

  Just not now.

  “Here’s how I’d like this to go,” the guy says. “Let me help you help me. Think of it that way.”

  “Win, win, so to speak?”

  “Exactly!”

  Jimmy sees that the guy is barely making a dent in his whiskey. Maybe he’s pacing himself. Or he’s already had a few and is worried about driving back to wherever he came from.

  “How about we cut to the chase,” Jimmy says. “It’s getting late and I’m tired.”

  “Not tired of me, I hope.”

  “To be determined.”

  “I like a man who doesn’t screw around.”

  “You might maybe want to hold off on reaching that conclusion.”

  The guy nods in agreement.

  “So here it is,” he says. “Sonny, he has good days and bad days. Mostly bad. But out of the sky he just had a couple of good ones, and that’s when he found out you’ve been asking a lot of questions about him. And what he has sent me here to tell you is that he’d like to call a cease-fire. So to speak. Just you and him. A rare opportunity with Sonny, you want to know the truth.”

  Now Jimmy nods. He’s the one smiling back at the guy now.

  “You’re telling me the guy who’s still the head of the mob on Long Island needs a cease-fire with a broken-down ex-cop?” Jimmy says. “Get the hell out of here.”

  “Just sayin’.”

  “Does this mean it’s Sonny who’s been behind all the killing and general bullshit?”

  “Not saying that at all,” the guy says. “And not here to litigate the past. I am just authorized to tell you that shit got out of hand and now he wants it to stop before anybody else gets killed.”

  “Not until I find out who killed my old partner.”

  “Wasn’t us,” the guy says. “Like I said: shit got out of hand. But now the people who did let it get out of hand are gone.”

  “Who killed Mickey Dunne?”

  “Licata.”

  Just like that, bingo bango, as Mickey used to say.

  “Who called it?”

  “Licata called it. He was worried that you and the lawyer lady were going to trace too much shit back to him, which you fuckin’ ay did anyway, and he did something he never used to do.”

  “Which is?”

  “Panicked.”

  “I thought it was Champi who did Mickey.”

  “What Anthony wanted you to think. He wanted you to think Champi did a lot of shit he didn’t do.”

  “And you know all this how?”

  He shrugs. “I lead a very interesting life. But all you need to know is that when the boss found out, on one of those good days, he took care of it.”

  “Why did Salvatore get clipped, too?”

  “That’s between Sonny and Salvatore. Or was.”

  Jimmy checks his phone, remembers he turned it off.

  “And what do I get if I agree to this truce you’re talking about?”

  “More of the answers you want to the questions you still got.”

  “And what if I continue to be the stubborn bastard I’ve always been, and decide to find those answers on my own?”

  The guy has another small taste of the whiskey. Jimmy thinks he drinks like Janie’s birds used to.

  “Sonny got tired of sending boys to do a man’s job when it came to delivering the message he wants delivered.”

  “So here you are, the man with no name, like Eastwood in those old spaghetti westerns.”

  “Sure.”

  It comes out shoo-wah. City accent.

  “Just so we’re clear,” Jimmy says, “what is the message, exactly?”

  One last smile.

  “Jesus,” the guy says. “Do we have to draw you a picture? We get our peace accord squared away, or the pause button comes off on the killing, and you all go. Her first.”

  He stands, drinks up, walks out of the bar without saying another word, or looking back.

  Jimmy points at the empty glass sitting there on the bar.

  “Bag this,” he says to Kenny Stanton, and then calls Danny Esposito and tells him he’s got some prints he needs to have run.

  Then Jimmy calls Paul Harrington.

  “I may have a lead on Sonny,” Jimmy says.

  ONE HUNDRED NINE

  I GO FOR SOMETHING unusual on the weekend:

  I go for normal.

  I’m still not going anywhere without my gun, I’m not crazy, even taking it into the bathroom with me when I shower. I take it with me when I walk Rip, either on the street or on the beach. I take it with me to the farm stand and the grocery store and Jack’s.

  Brigid is safe with her maybe-not-soon-to-be ex, at what she calls an undisclosed location in Maine that she promises to me is far from the line of fire.

  Rob Jacobson is still calling a couple of times a day to tell me how bored and stir-crazy he is.

  “That’s where I am with my so-called life,” he says. “I might be the only guy in the world to be excited about standing trial for murder again, as long as it gets me out of the house.”

  Sam Wylie calls to remind me, as if I need reminding, that my next appointment with her and Dr. Mike Gellis, my oncologist, is scheduled for next Saturday, both of them willing to meet with me on a weekend to accommodate my court schedule. I tell her I’m more likely to forget my birthday than an exciting opportunity like that.

  “You know you can drop the tough-guy act with me, right?” she says on the phone.

  “What act?”

  At least she didn’t call me a bitch after telling me she loved me.

  Jimmy continues to investigate Sonny Blum, without much success. The only success he’s had is with the prints Danny Esposito ran for him off the glass the hard case at the bar left. It turns out they’re in the system, and belong to a man named Len Greene, who came up in Blum’s organization around the same time as Bobby Salvatore. His service was interrupted by the four years he spent at Green Haven Correctional.

  “Ask me what he was in for,” Jimmy says.

  “I’ll bite.”

  “Blowing up the car of somebody stealing from Sonny.”

  “Was this somebody in the car at the time?”

  “He was not.”

  “Does Mr. Greene have an address?”

  “Yeah. Sonny’s house.”

  “Would it help if I suggested letting sleeping Jewish gangsters lie?”

  “No,” he says, and ends the call.

  His tough-guy act isn’t an act, either. But I already knew that.

  I work all of Saturday on trial stuff, throwing myself into the grind, knowing the day will end with the dinner I’m preparing for Dr. Ben Kalinsky and myself. For the first time in weeks, I’ve decided to go fancy with ingredients from Balsam Farms: mushroom Asiago chicken pasta as the main course, preceded by an apple harvest salad.

  For dessert I’m reaching for the sky, a chocolate soufflé I’ve prepped to go into the oven as we start the main course.

  “What’s the occasion?” Ben says, pouring us more wine.

  “It’s not really very complicated,” I say, leaning across the table, nearly knocking over my wineglass as I do, and then kissing him.

  I pull back, smiling at him. “The occasion is that I love you.”

  “You’re right. Not that complicated at all.”

  “I still am, you know. Complicated as all get-out.”

  “Just another reason why I love you. And why I’m so happy that you’re getting back to work you love.”

  “You mean being a criminal lawyer instead of running around with a gun and behaving like one?”

  “Like that.”

  The soufflé is beyond a guilty pleasure. We clean up the kitchen and share a brandy in the living room and then shut the bedroom door on Rip the dog and make love, after which I experience the best night of sleep I’ve had in a long time.

  I tell myself I’m getting back to my day job, even knowing that my full-time job is cancer.

  The next night, alone with Rip, and pizza from Astro’s, I’m deep into a dreamless sleep for a change, no visits in the night from either of my parents, when I hear my phone. The clock on my bedside table reads 12:01.

  UNKNOWN CALLER.

  I instinctively reach for the Glock.

  “It’s McKenzie,” I hear. “You have to help me.”

  My old friend Edmund McKenzie. He sounds as if calling from the middle of a wind tunnel.

  “Why in the world would I do something like that?”

  “They’re gonna kill me, Cunniff!”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “I ran up into Walking Dunes in Montauk after I ditched my car.”

  A pause.

  “They were following me, but my car was faster.”

  “Why there?”

  “I’ll explain everything when you get here. Just hurry. I figured they’d come for me eventually.”

  There’s a pause, and now just the sound of the wind.

  “I’m tired of looking over my shoulder,” he says.

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “Because I know everything you want to know,” he says. “But I can’t tell you if I’m dead.”

  ONE HUNDRED TEN

  I WAIT FOR JIMMY.

  My house, no traffic, is fifteen minutes, tops, from the Walking Dunes, one of the natural wonders of eastern Long Island, maybe the best before land’s end. Four parabolic sand dunes, maybe a hundred years old, that have migrated a mile inland over time from the water at Napeague Harbor.