“What really did happen that day at Jacobson’s place when that girl died, along with Jacobson’s old man?”

  “You mean what do I think might have happened after I was long gone? I think Rob went crazy and killed them both and then the scene got staged by a cop who went on his payroll that day and didn’t get off till he was the one who got shot to death by that lawyer you work for.” He grins. “Whew, a mouthful like that makes me thirsty.”

  He drinks.

  He’s no longer grinning when he puts his glass back down.

  “You think you know so much about me, Cunniff. You don’t know jack shit. Or who I know. Or what happens if I make a call about you thinking you can come here and jam me up like this.”

  Before Jimmy can respond, a young woman about half Mc-Kenzie’s age, if that, appears at the table, wearing something Jimmy would call a dress if there were more of it.

  “Amber,” McKenzie says.

  “Eddie,” she whines. “I would have been here already if you sent the car like you promised.”

  McKenzie acts as if he hasn’t heard and stands. So does Jimmy.

  “Now beat it,” McKenzie says to him. “Before I make that call.”

  Jimmy thinks about grabbing him by the lapels of the skinny, too-short blazer he’s wearing and bouncing him into the wall. But there’s no point, at least not tonight. Jimmy doesn’t want to be the one on Page Six tomorrow morning for busting up Edmund McKenzie and the Bemelmans Bar.

  He’s on his way out the door when McKenzie calls out to him. “Hey, Cunniff.”

  Jimmy makes a half turn.

  “How many times are the two of you going to let him get away with murder? Asking for a friend.”

  FOURTEEN

  Jimmy

  WHEN HE’S GOTTEN OUT of the city and is finally flying up the LIE, Jimmy has finally calmed down, knowing how close he’d come to bouncing McKenzie around, even in a bar full of cell phone cameras.

  What he had done, though, before McKenzie knew it was happening, was get him up and out of his chair and into the small lobby between Bemelmans and the Café Carlyle, where Bobby Short used to play the piano in the old days.

  Out there, nobody around except the girl in no clothes, Amber, making bird noises, Jimmy put McKenzie up against the wall.

  “You got any other smart comments you want to make?” Jimmy had said to him, their faces close enough that he could smell the whiskey on McKenzie’s breath.

  “You have no idea what a mistake you’re making,” McKenzie said.

  An older couple walked through the door from Madison Avenue, took one look at them, and left.

  “It’s the other way around,” Jimmy said. “I’m the last guy in town you want up in your shit.”

  McKenzie had smiled at him.

  “Well, maybe not the last guy.”

  “You think you’re some kind of badass, Eddie?”

  The smirk was back in place. “No,” McKenzie said. “But I know some. Now get your hands off me before I start yelling for security.”

  Jimmy did. McKenzie walked out onto Madison, his girlfriend following him.

  Jimmy gets to Southampton and cuts through Shinnecock Hills Golf Club; taking North Sea and then Noyac Road, the bay on his left, passing Ferry Road because he’s not going down to the Shelter Island Ferry but into North Haven and the turn on his street.

  He loves driving around at this time of night, hardly any other cars out, sometimes going a couple of miles without seeing any headlights or taillights.

  As late as it is, he knows it’s still too early in Switzerland to call Jane and tell her about his night. And before she left he promised her, and himself, that he wasn’t going to give her daily updates while she was over there, even though she tells him it will take her mind off the reason she went there in the first place.

  As if any update he was going to give her could do that.

  He knows he needs to find out more about McKenzie, figure out how much badass he might have behind him, maybe even from Sonny Blum, who might still be in business with Edmund McKenzie’s old man. Who might still be fixing things for the family.

  One thing was certain: McKenzie had seemed pretty goddamned sure of himself, after he’d asked how many times Jane and Jimmy might let Rob Jacobson, his old high school pal, get away with murder.

  Jimmy parks his car in the driveway, finally ready to sleep, as if driving back out has really driven the adrenaline he was feeling at Bemelmans right out of him.

  They’re waiting for him inside the front door, on him in the dark before he can throw the light switch.

  A needle goes into the back of his neck then.

  The last thing Jimmy hears is a voice behind him in the darkness saying, “Remember what this feels like?”

  FIFTEEN

  Jimmy

  WHEN HE COMES TO, he feels as groggy as he did after Joe Champi—or at least Jimmy always assumed it was Champi—jabbed him at the home of Gregg McCall, the Nassau County DA who’d hired Jane and Jimmy before disappearing for good.

  Except it’s my goddamn house this time.

  He can see enough, barely, to know they have him in his bedroom at the back of the house. It’s dark enough that he can make out shapes, just not faces. There’s a big guy to his right, the one who’s just said, “Rise and shine.” The woman, smaller, is to Jimmy’s left. Jimmy knows it’s a woman because he hears her say “You must be joking” when the guy asks if she’s sure Jimmy’s wrists are secure enough.

  “You want to tell me what this is about,” Jimmy says. “I was hoping to turn in early.”

  “And you did.”

  “You have a name?” Jimmy says, turning his head just enough to face the guy.

  Nothing.

  “You and Champi have similar games. The two of you ever work together?”

  “Funny story,” the guy says. “We started working together when we were involved in the same situation. Long time ago. Representing different interests.”

  “Whose?”

  Nothing.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your date?” Jimmy says.

  Jimmy is bound to what he’s sure is one of his kitchen chairs. Before he even knows she’s on him, the woman hits him with what has to be a full wind-up slap across his face, nearly knocking the chair he’s bound to over on its side.

  “Do we have your attention now?” the guy asks.

  “What,” Jimmy says, “you got tired of sending texts and came here for a more hands-on approach?”

  “Do you want a little more?” the woman asks.

  “Not tonight, dear. I have a headache.”

  The guy chuckles. “I told you he’s a funny bastard. Didn’t I tell you this guy is a funny bastard?”

  “Is there a purpose to this visit?”

  “Now that you mention it,” the guy says.

  Jimmy thinks he even sounds a little like Champi. Older voice. Raspy. Some New York in it. Almost like he could have come out of Jimmy’s old neighborhood.

  “I want you and your friend, when she gets back from Switzerland, to stop looking into things you don’t need to be looking into. We like things we fix to stay fixed.”

  “You know about Switzerland?”

  “Want to know which seat she sat in on the flight over?”

  Jimmy feels his fingers losing circulation. Knocked out and tied up in his own home. First time for everything. If there were just one, Jimmy could try to bull-rush him, even with his hands tied behind him. But there’s two of them. And there are guys Jimmy was in the ring with who couldn’t hit as hard as this woman.

  “You want to waste your time defending that asshole again, have at it. I kept telling Joe he wasn’t worth it, but Joe just didn’t want the gravy train to end. Either way, Jacobson’s going down this time.”

  “You sound pretty sure of that.”

  “He did it. I thought Joe told you that.”

  “So what’s in this for you?”

  “My business, not yours. Let the trial play out. Then you and the cancer patient go on and live happy lives. Hers will be shorter, of course. Just stay away from Eddie McKenzie, starting now.”

  “Did McKenzie call you after I put him against the wall?”

  Now the guy laughs hard enough that he starts coughing.

  “You got no idea what you’re into. No wonder you busted out of the cops. You still don’t know what you don’t know.”

  “I know you could have killed me tonight if you wanted,” Jimmy says.

  “I need you around, to get her to come around.”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  “Then she unfortunately dies of something other than cancer,” the guy says. “While you watch.”

  He shoves Jimmy hard enough that the chair goes over and he ends up on his back. The guy laughs again and they leave him there.

  SIXTEEN

  AS SOON AS I’M awake at the Meier Clinic, every morning, first thing, I check my hair.

  My nose is nearly pressed against the bathroom mirror after I’ve made what I consider to be a full forensic examination of my pillows, making sure I haven’t backslid, hairwise, overnight.

  It doesn’t mean I’m getting better, necessarily. But still having a full head of hair makes me feel better.

  About me.

  My father was born on the West Side of Manhattan, Hell’s Kitchen, but grew up in Seaford, Long Island, and finally went to high school there, with the old basketball coach Jim Valvano. And the more Valvano won in college basketball, including a national championship, the better friends my father and the coach had been when they were kids. At least, that’s the way my father told it. Valvano later died of cancer himself, young, at forty-seven. At the time it was treated like a death in our family.

  But when Valvano did finally pass, he still had a full head of hair. I read up on his final days, an old cover piece from Sports Illustrated.

  One line stayed with me:

  “His hair, against all medical logic, had survived massive chemotherapy.”

  So has mine, at least so far.

  I’m undergoing another round of what the Meier team describes as “gentle” chemo, along with a daily multidrug cocktail they call multitargeted immunotherapy. They are even trying intense, experimental nerve therapy in the area on the back of my neck where the tumor was first discovered.

  “Perfect,” I tell Dr. Ludwig. “A pain in the neck for a pain in the neck like me.”

  He’s German, maybe as much as one person could possibly be. Dr. Stone Face. Head of hospital. I get no reaction out of him.

  “Tough room,” I say.

  Still nothing.

  “Come on, doc. You know I’m funny.”

  He responds in his thick accent. “Ya. But maybe I’m just not sinking you are funny.”

  Five days in, and I might be feeling a little less weak, but maybe that’s just me wishing to make it so. I’m a little less tired. Less like a daytime drunk by the time I’ve finished my various treatments. Afterward, I make myself go for a long afternoon walk, even when I’m not feeling up to it, picturing Dr. Ben and Rip and wishing they were with me, pretending I’m at some kind of five-star Swiss hotel instead of one of the world’s leading cancer clinics.

  I talk to Ben Kalinsky almost every day. Jimmy, on the other hand, has told me that he’ll call me at the end of my first week.

  He’s never been much of a phone person.

  “Even if something develops?” I asked him.

  “The only development I’m interested in is you telling me the Swiss cheese heads are getting my girl better,” he said.

  It’s on Day Six that Dr. Ludwig informs me that my numbers have improved, with as much emotion as if he were announcing a change in the lunch menu. Not a big improvement. He shows me the charts, and the pretty pictures. But for the first time in months, a doctor gives me some legit good news. The tumor has shrunk, if ever so slightly. It ain’t nothing, as my father used to say.

  There’s a gym here, and I force myself to work out with weights and on the machines at least every other day, whether I feel the energy or not. All this means I’m fighting the way my mother did, and the way Brigid is fighting, in a way I hope would make my ex-Marine Pops proud, even if I always knew I was the jock daughter he really wanted to be a son. He never came right out and said it, but we both knew it was true.

  As far as he ever went was to tell me, “Show some balls,” when he thought somebody had pushed me around in a hockey game.

  He was brave growing up with gangs all around him in Hell’s Kitchen, brave enough to take a bullet to the shoulder for a friend when he was a teenager, in the middle of some gang beef that didn’t involve him. He never talked much about it, never told us the kid’s name, the way he never talked about being in the Corps. Just that his friend would have done the same for him. It was, he said, what friends did for each other.

  If they had the balls.

  But my mother was brave, too. Even at the end, when she had nothing left and weighed hardly anything and barely had the strength to get out of bed, it was as if she were still the strongest of all of us. And the bravest. As brave as the Marine she’d married. Never whined. No woe-is-me. Never complained even when her last house became a hospice in the end, because there wasn’t enough money to send her across the world to some fancy clinic and buy her more time.

  Through it all, I never saw her cry.

  I don’t cry here, even when I’m alone. At least not yet. And never in front of strangers.

  Tonight is another night when I’m wide awake at a little after four. And even though I’ve been telling myself since the moment I arrived to stay present, stay even, follow coaches’ orders about not getting too high or too low, out of nowhere I feel overwhelmed suddenly, about everything that’s happened and everything that might still happen.

  Now I feel the tears coming.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, like slamming a door.

  I try something else I’d learned in sports. I try visualization, try to take myself away from here. Picture myself at Atlantic Beach, or Indian Wells, with Dr. Ben and Rip. Or at the end of Jimmy’s bar, watching a ball game with him. Any ball game.

  I picture myself in the courtroom in Mineola, walking and talking and playing to the jury and the judge and even the gallery, back in my element, totally.

  And the tears don’t come.

  And then I’m talking to God again, softly but out loud, hoping that this is the night when She’s really listening.

  “You’ve got my attention, okay? You’ve had Your fun. I’ve clearly cleaned up my act. Gotten my priorities in order. Now how about You go bother somebody else?”

  No answer.

  At least I’m finally starting to feel my eyes get heavy with something other than tears, sleep finally on the way. It’s a good thing. Some nights rest never comes and I feel even more like shit the next day, all day.

  “Eff cancer,” I say, cleaning up the language just in case God does happen to be listening tonight.

  It would be, on Her part, about effing time.

  SEVENTEEN

  SINCE MY FIRST NIGHT at Meier, I’ve been dreaming about my mother.

  I was fourteen when she died of ovarian cancer. Brigid was sixteen. But my sister, as brave as she was being in her own cancer fight, never could handle it with Mom, from the day we’d all gotten Mom’s diagnosis, which was essentially a death sentence. So Brigid would look for any possible reason to be out of the house, look for any excuse to avoid being alone with Mom. She even went out for soccer her junior year of high school.

  Dad took on part-time construction jobs in addition to bartending, because insurance was covering only a fraction of Mom’s hospital costs before she finally made the decision that she was going to die at home. She never came out and said it, but I knew it was because of the expense.

  Because she was Mom.

  So while Dad was working two jobs and with Brigid rarely around, I became Mom’s nurse and caregiver. And best friend. Mostly I was there to talk to her, and listen, and keep her company before she’d drift off again.

  “I don’t want you to be sad when I’m gone,” Mary Smith would tell me, repeatedly. “I’ve been blessed with two wonderful daughters and a husband who loves me. My regrets are small ones.”

  I knew her regrets were bigger than that, that she’d always dreamed about being a writer, across all her years as a school librarian. But with being a mother and wife and holding down a job, there was never enough time for her to write.

  To the end, she would hold my hand and smile and tell me that if there were one truth she wanted to pass on, it was how precious life is, even as her own was draining out of her.

  Then she’d be talking again about her hummingbirds. I sometimes thought she loved the ones that used to come to the feeder Dad built for her when we were still living in Patchogue almost as much as she loved him, and Brigid. And me.

  She even nicknamed me Hummingbird, my mother did, because she said I was in constant motion. I had a tiny hummingbird tattooed behind my left hip bone, but she didn’t live long enough to see it. Dr. Ben didn’t even notice it right away when we started sleeping together.

  He finally ran a finger over it one night and asked what it was.

  “It’s me,” I said, and told him the story.

  “I’m the hummingbird,” I said.

  Mom’s feeder moved with us when we moved back to the city, a couple of years before she died. An old friend of my father’s had given him a better bartending job. On our tiny balcony overlooking 11th Street, there was even a place for Mom to hang the feeder. The hummingbirds never found it, and though she ended up taking it down, she could never bring herself to throw it away, just packed it in a box with the rest of her belongings, like she was packing for a long trip.

  In my dreams, I never picture Mom as sick. She’s in her bed. The drapes are open so she could feel the sun on her face. Most of the time—not all the time, but most—I dream of her as a young woman, the great beauty she’d been when my father first fell in love with her.