Page 106 of Hard to Kill

I check his location again.

Jimmy still has his phone turned off. Or maybe the battery drained and he didn’t have a charger with him. I call the bar and tell Kenny Stanton, Jimmy’s top bartender, to call me as soon as Jimmy shows up. Or if he hears from him.

For dinner I make myself a fully loaded baked potato, butter and sour cream and crispy bacon chopped up into it, thinking how proud Sam Wylie would be. I even think about texting her a picture of it.

Still no Jimmy when I’ve finished and cleaned up.

I’m in the living room, watching the Mets game, when I hear my phone.

Not Jimmy.

Danny Esposito, our new friend from the State Police.

He skips the preliminaries.

“Have you heard from Cunniff?”

I tell him that I was supposed to have heard from him by now, that I’d last seen him this morning.

“He called me a few hours ago. Said he had to make it fast, there was something maybe going on with his phone. And to come to his bar. I’m here now.”

“He say why he was calling?”

“He said he might need my help on something, but he didn’t say what.”

I have walked back into the kitchen by now, am staring out the window at my feeder.

No birds.

“But he still hasn’t shown up,” Danny Esposito says.

EIGHTY-FOUR

Jimmy

EDMUND MCKENZIE’S HOUSE IS on Gin Lane in Southampton, the ultimate old-money address.

McKenzie hasn’t been on the premises for weeks. Jimmy knows because he’s been checking. But it’s still Jimmy’s dream that McKenzie and Eric Jacobson are both at the house, so that he can brace them both at the same time.

For now, though, he’d settle for a face-to-face with McKenzie. That way Jimmy can ask him, straight up, about his friendship with Rob Jacobson’s son.

Working a case, you can run into something, or something runs into you. Like the night before at the Bell & Anchor, when Jane saw McKenzie and Eric Jacobson together, right before she went down and out and ended up in the hospital.

Jimmy is on his way through Southampton town, passing Fellingham’s, an old neighborhood-type bar he likes almost as much as his own, when his phone pings.

It’s not a text alert, he sees when he pulls over, but another device attempting to access his phone.

Or, as far as Jimmy knows, already has accessed it.

No location on the other device.

What the fuck?

If it’s not some kind of mistake, somebody has gotten sloppy trying to track his phone. Or hack into his phone remotely. It’s not Jane. Jimmy knows she can check his location whenever she wants to. He told her he’d be the one to call her if he found out anything interesting at McKenzie’s place, but he’s not even there yet.

Jimmy’s not enough of a techie to know exactly how they’re doing it with his phone, or from where. If he were smarter about phones, maybe he could try to findoutwhere. But when he’s watching TV and somebody starts speaking cell phone on one of those commercials, he either mutes the set or changes the channel, because he just doesn’t give a shit, you could stump him with any question about what 5G even means.

Right now all he knows is that the best thing for him, in real time, is to turn the phone off.