Page 88 of Hard to Kill

Ashamed that I am.

But here.

Stay or go?

If I make my way across the street and walk into Elian, what will I say to Martin when he sees me? What he said to me after his dinner at Allen Reese’s, that I just happen to be in the neighborhood?

Or maybe this: “Buy a girl a drink, for old time’s sake?”

Then what?

Play it all the way out, Jane.

Then what?

What do you want to happen with him, as much as you tell yourself you love Ben Kalinsky? And as much as Martin Elian hurt you.

I came to the city to be alone.

Only I ended up here.

Only I could manage to screw up a perfect day with an ending like this.

“Good job, Jane, no shit,” I say out loud, feeling once more like a ridiculous teenager.

“What did you say, ma’am?”

A young woman whose dress is too tight and too small, probably about to take the big town by storm, has stopped on the sidewalk.

Long enough to ma’am me.

“Just talking to myself,” I say.

“Cute dress,” she says, and then swings her impossibly tight butt up Third Avenue.

I’m about to come to my senses and put myself in a cab when a black SUV pulls up in front of Elian.

Less than a minute later, my ex-husband comes walking out of his restaurant, accompanied by a dead man.

SEVENTY-ONE

ON MONDAY MORNING JIMMY is driving me to the courthouse in Mineola for my meeting with Judge Kane. I’ve told him he doesn’t have to do it, that I’m perfectly capable of making the trip on my own. He won’t hear of it, says he looked it up in the wingman’s manual, and it’s one of his responsibilities, no getting around it.

We’re talking, not for the first time since I got back from the city, about what I saw in front of my ex-husband’s restaurant on Friday night.

“I can understand why you thought you were seeing dead people when you saw a guy who has to be Licata,” Jimmy says. “Mickey Dunne used to say there were look-a-likes and reminds-me-ofs. From the pictures I’ve seen of Licata and Champi, they fall into the second category. Same height, same build, same coloring. Same slouch. Even their Rangers caps. If I didn’t know better, I swear I might think the two tough guys were a couple. Like one of those old couples where they start looking like each other the longer they stay together.”

“It wasn’t long ago that somebody wanted us to think Champi was texting from the other side,” I tell Jimmy. “For a second Ithought he’d made his way all the way back to the Upper East Side.”

I lean back in my seat and close my eyes. “I’d ask my ex about it, but he won’t return my calls or my texts.”

“Isn’t that the one about the more things change the more they stay the same?”

“Oui.”

“Dick Kelley mentioned that the tag team of Licata and Champi did some work for restaurant owners along the way,” Jimmy says. “So what kinds of problems could old Marty have had that might have brought Licata and Champi into his life?”

“I’ll ask him if he ever gets back to me.”

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