Page 7 of Hard to Kill

“How did it go for real?” he says when the car is in motion and going through Water Mill.

“Basically, no change, according to the good doctor.”

“So, for today it’s a push,” Jimmy says. “A push isn’t a loss, right?”

“Sure,” Jane says, without much enthusiasm.

Then she tells him to take the back roads, she likes the back roads better.

By the time they get to Scuttle Hole Road, Southampton becoming Bridgehampton, she’s asleep. Jimmy punches the button for the Miles Davis channel on satellite radio. He really only bought satellite radio because it makes it easier, this far from the city, for him to actually hear Yankee games in the summer.

Miles is playing “So What.”

In a soft voice, covered by Miles’s horn, Jimmy says, “You either beat this or else.”

From the seat next to him he hears, “Or else what?”

He grins. “I’ve never been entirely sure. But it always sounds good.”

In that moment he hears the little ping that means a text message. It’s Jane’s phone, not his.

She reaches into the pocket of her jeans and comes out with it.

“What the hell?”she says.

“What?”

“Text. Unknown number.”

Then she reads it to him:

Wouldn’t you just rather die in peace?

Jimmy turns down the radio, so it’s quiet then in the front seat of his car.

Jane is still staring at her phone.

“Is that all of it?” Jimmy says.

“It’s signed.”

“By who?”

“Joe Champi.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. It’s signed ‘Joe Champi.’”

“Morelli is onlypresumeddead,” Jimmy says. “Champi really is.”

“I know,” Jane says. “I killed him, remember?”

SIX

JIMMY TAKES THE THREAT seriously, even if it came from a dead guy.

Joe Champi: former NYPD the way Jimmy is, the guy Rob Jacobson called Uncle Joe. The guy who’d been a fixer for Jacobson from the time he was first cop on the scene when Jacobson’s father killed a teenage mistress named Carey Watson and then himself.

---