Page 64 of Hard to Kill
This kid in his own dark place talking about his own father.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Eric Jacobson says. “You walk away and I’ll do the same thing. And you won’t hear from me ever again. Or my boys.”
“How come Morelli’s not with you tonight?”
“I told him I could handle this. And, counselor? Trust me on something. You’d much rather deal with me than him.”
There’s so much more I want to ask him. But I sense that I’m running out of time.
“It’s that important for you to see your father go down?”
“He’s a predator,” Eric Jacobson says. “A violent sexual predator, no matter how much he wants to be the coolest guy at the cocktail party. He wanted my girlfriends. He wanted mothers and their daughters. He wanted somebody’s wife, if only because shewassomebody else’s wife.” A pause. “Why do you think I’m the way I am?”
“He may be the prick you say he is. But that doesn’t mean he did it.”
“He told me he did, you stupid cow!”
Somehow I’ve touched a nerve.
Another nerve.
“Told you what?”
He’s whispering again. “Everything. Like he wanted somebody to know. Like he was bragging.”
We hear the sirens then, and junior now knows what I’ve known all along, that he isn’t nearly as good with alarms as he thought he was, or as smart. Because Jimmy Cunniff is no amateur.
Somehow the sirens don’t seem to rattle him very much.
“I forgot what a rush all of this was,” he says.
Then he gets next to my ear. I can feel his breath as he adds, “I’ll be in touch.”
He walks over to the window closest to him and opens it. Before he climbs through and out, he says, “One thing I inherited from my father? We both think we can get away with anything.”
Then he’s gone.
I get out of bed and open the top drawer to my nightstand.
The Glock is still there.
FIFTY-TWO
Jimmy
JANE IS ON HER way to Mineola for the hearing in which she’ll ask Judge Kane to move up the trial date. She hasn’t told the East Hampton cops the identity of her intruder, only that he ran off when he heard the alarms and thanked the cops for their service.
Jimmy knocks on the door of Rob Jacobson’s rental house in Amagansett.
A tall girl wearing a St. John’s sweatshirt that barely covers anything south of the equator answers.
“Who are you?” she asks.
“The truant officer,” Jimmy says. “Where is he?”
“Still in bed. Where I should be, by the way. But he made me come answer the stupid door.”
“Tough shit. Go get him. Unless you want me to call your parents.”