Page 125 of Hard to Kill

I got lazy and drove us here. So I drive him to his office. He calls his nurse on the way.

“We never close,” he says.

I remind him that’s my line.

I’m on my way home from Ben’s office, just turning onto my street, when Brigid calls. “Can you come over?” she asks.

She’s not calling from the Meier Clinic this time with chemo news. She’s only a few miles away, at the western end ofAmagansett. But it’s another time when I don’t like the sound of her voice, not even a little bit.

“Are you okay?”

There’s a pause.

“Just hurry,” she says. “Please.”

NINETY-NINE

BRIGID’S HOUSE, THE ONE she shared with her husband until she didn’t, is an old-fashioned Hamptons saltbox, with a white picket fence around her front lawn. Her new Audi is in the driveway.

The lights are on inside.

I knock on the front door, just to signal that I’m here, before trying the handle.

“It’s open.”

She’s sitting on the couch. No ballcap covering her bald head tonight. Maybe she doesn’t bother when she’s alone. She told me when I invited her to dinner with Ben and me that she didn’t want to put her hair on.

Somehow, as frail as she is, she’s still beautiful, at least to me.

Just not alone.

Sitting across from her, cradling what looks like a .22 pistol in his lap, is Nick Morelli.

“Long time, no see,” he says.

Then he waves at me with the gun, telling me to shut the door and take a seat next to my sister, there are things we need to discuss.

ONE HUNDRED

“IT’S GOING TO BE okay,” I say to Brigid when I’m next to her on the couch.

Morelli is no longer pointing the gun at me. Or us. But it’s still in his hand.

“That’s entirely up to you,” he says to me. “The part about it being okay.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any point in telling you that I’m sorry about your uncle Bobby,” I say.

“There’s no point, because you’re not. And I’m not.”

Brigid’s living room feels smaller than ever, the air thick with an almost kinetic combination of her fear and my fear for her. And my own anger about Morelli bringing her into this.

Nothing to be done about that now, because nothing ever changes. It’s like Jimmy always says: the one with the gun is the tough one.

My own voice is what sounds thick as I ask him, “What do you want?”

“Eric was supposed to deliver a message to you. But you clearly didn’t get that message. Or just refused to get it, being the stubborn bitch that you are.”

There’s no reason for me to reply to that. Mostly because he’s pretty much nailed it.