Page 96 of Hard to Kill
“Shut up and listen,” Licata says. “Both of you.”
I hold up a finger to my lips, telling Jimmy to let him go.
“Cunniff, you stop asking around about my business. Because I’m telling you straight up: it has nothing to do with your business. Leave me alone, I leave you alone. That’s the deal.”
Jane says, “Our client’s son made me the same offer.”
They hear Licata chuckle.
“He’s the one you should be worried about,” Anthony Licata says. “He’s a bigger psycho than his old man ever was.”
Then the line goes dead.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
DR. BEN DOES NOT stay the night. His choice, not mine, even though we’ve resumed sleeping together, sometimes at his place, sometimes at mine.
My choice on that, not his.
“You only live once,” Dr. Ben says.
“My line, remember,” I tell him.
He has an early flight to Los Angeles to visit his only sister and attend his nephew’s graduation from the film school at USC. Even I know the School of Cinematic Arts is a very big deal.
If you live this far out on Long Island, an early flight can mean leaving for the airport as early as four in the morning.
When I kiss him good-bye, I thank him.
“For dinner?”
“For getting out of town for a few days so I don’t have to worry about you.”
“We’ve gone over this. You need to stop worrying about me.”
“Right,” I say. “It must be me who has the hole in her head.”
When he’s gone, I try to sleep and can’t. So I grab the easel that I keep in the guest bedroom, one I set up when I’m working on a trial because sometimes I need to sketch out timelinesand facts and even strategies on a great big grease board instead of on my trusty legal pad.
Like bigger print might produce bigger ideas.
The plan, anyway.
I set it up in the living room. Rip the dog, once he realizes all this activity doesn’t mean treats for him, flops down next to the easel.
Of course he goes right to sleep.
I start writing down names, Rob Jacobson’s at the top of the pyramid, up there next to Anthony Licata and Joe Champi. Then Rob’s father and Carey Watson, the dead girl. Then I run through the entire repertory company, including the two murdered families, all the way down to Dave Wolk, the dead surfer dude. Elise Parsons and her daughter.
Once I have them all on the board, I start drawing connecting lines. Eventually I feel as if I’m looking at a homemade map of the New York City subway system.
Most of the lines run all the way up to Rob Jacobson. A lot of them run through his school friend—frenemy?—the guy he calls Eddie McKenzie.
I stare at the board a long time, until it almost starts to make me dizzy with possibilities, before grabbing a rag and wiping it clean.
I go into the kitchen and come back with a small glass of Jameson and replay Anthony Licata’s call to Jimmy and me inside my head, and wonder what’s changed, and why we are suddenly a bigger threat to him than ever. He wants me to stay out of his business the way Eric Jacobson wants me to stay out of his.
“If Licata wanted us dead,” Jimmy said before I left the bar, “we’d be dead already.”