Page 1 of Hard to Kill

ONE

JIMMY CUNNIFF CALLS TO tell me to get dressed, we’re taking a ride.

“Am I allowed to ask where we’re going?”

“To check in on an old friend.”

“Am I allowed to ask which one?”

He tells me. And I tell him I’ll be ready when he gets to my house.

Now we’re standing at the top of steps leading up and into a courthouse, a new one for us, the Nassau County Courthouse in Mineola.

Rob Jacobson, my former client, one I recently got acquitted of a triple homicide in Suffolk County, is about to turn himself in one county over. On another triple homicide. Like Jimmy always says: You can’t make this shit up.

“Apparently he’s gonna tour,” Jimmy says. “Like the Ice Capades.”

“Ice Capades ended years ago.”

“I was making a larger point,” he says.

“You often are.”

Jimmy is my investigator, wing man, best friend, former hot-ticket NYPD detective. His divorce from the cops wasn’t pretty. But then neither were my divorces from husbands one and two.

“Here he comes,” I say.

“It’s a perp walk,” Jimmy says. “Not a red carpet.”

With plenty of time to spare, it got out, the way everything gets out in the modern world, that Jacobson and his new lawyer, Howie “the Horse” Friedlander, were going to do it this way, here at the courthouse. Jacobson’s renting a house not far from mine in Amagansett, between East Hampton and Montauk. Having him led out of a residence in handcuffs was not the optic Howie or Rob wanted, as if any good optics could come from a moment like this.

The crowd today isn’t the size that we routinely got during trial in Riverhead. A trial that ended, thanks to Jimmy and me, in Jacobson’s acquittal. But now, in what felt like a blink, he has been charged with murdering another father, wife, teenage daughter. It was the Gates family last time. This time the Carsons of Garden City.

“He says he was set up,” I tell Jimmy Cunniff.

“Set up again? For three more murders? What are the odds?”

“He’s either a psychopath or the unluckiest SOB on the face of the earth.”

“I’ll take psychopath for two hundred, Alex,” Jimmy says.

“Alex Trebek is dead.”

“So are all those people.”

Howie Friedlander is walking next to Rob. Howie got his nickname because he’s about the size of a jockey. A case like this is the kind of ride lawyers like Howie and me look for their whole lives but hardly ever get.

All Howie has to do is what I did:

Win.

Rob Jacobson’s trying to look as sure of himself as ever, the cameras back on him, at the center of his own three-ring circus all over again.

It’s been a few months since I’ve seen the aging frat boy. He seems a lot older and the thousand-dollar suit he’s wearing hangs on him a little bit.

But there’s a deeper difference in him today. Maybe his old friends in the media can’t see it. But I can.

In his eyes, mostly.

---