“Aren’t you the guy,” I ask him, “who keeps saying that everything in this case, even before itwasour case, seems to run through him?”
“I still think it does,” Jimmy says. “But maybe not the murders.”
He raises his voice again, but maybe not just to be heard over the wind and the waves.
“I need to know who did it!”he says.
“And we, you and me, need to win this case,” I say. “Please keep in mind that’s still job one.”
“I want it all,” Jimmy says, “and so do you.”
“Did it occur to you that he might be playing you?”
Jimmy winks at me. Or at least tries. It always looks more to me like an eye tic. “What if I’m the one playing him?” he asks.
Rip has run toward the dunes and come back with a stick in his mouth. Jimmy throws it back in that direction, the wind getting him a good carry.
“I’ve got a better what-if,” I tell him. “What if you end up crossing your new friend and it gets us killed?”
“You’re not dying,” Jimmy says.
“Really.”
“I won’t allow it,” he says.
I tell him that remains to be seen, and then tell him about the stop I need to make in Southampton, and why I need to make it.
“I’m going with you,” he says. “And don’t tell me not to.”
I smile at my partner.
“One more thing you won’t allow,” I say.
SEVENTY-SIX
Jimmy
JIMMY AND JANE DRIVE in separate cars to Southampton.
“You really don’t have to go with me,” Jane says to Jimmy.
“Yeah, I kind of do,” he says.
Jane calls Sam fromhercar and then calls Jimmy as they are passing through Water Mill, telling him that the results expected first thing still haven’t come in. Jane says she wants to be in the room when Sam gives her the news. She plans to wait as long as she has to, short of making herself late for court.
He waits in his car, parked next to Jane’s, in the small parking lot outside Dr. Sam Wylie’s office. Jimmy has done this before, in this same lot. And can’t remember a time, not a single one, when Jane has come out of that office with good news.
It’s always the same feeling out here, like he’s about to get hit.
All he knows today is what she told him before they left the beach, that she had undergone her latest CT scan on the tumor in her neck late yesterday afternoon, when Sam Wylie and Jane’s oncologist, Dr. Gellis, put in a fix at Southampton Hospital, and allowed her to be hooked up to the machine much later in the day than was usually allowed for computed tomography which, Jane explained to Jimmy, is where the “CT” comes from.
She then tried to tell Jimmy about what the machine actually does. He stopped her when she got to IV contrast agents and dyes. Actually begged her to stop.
“As long as you understand it, kid,” he said.
Her next CT scan was scheduled for two weeks down the road. But she decided just like that, being Jane, that she wasn’t going to wait, that she wanted the new pictures right freaking now.
Sam has fast-tracked the results, too, ahead of the usual twenty-four hours. No surprise that these two have been friends since high school. They both want what they want when they want it.
