The Hamptons Lawyer

ONE

JIMMY CUNNIFF AND I are inside the shooting range at the Maidstone Gun Club a little after seven in the morning. For a change, we’re shooting at targets and not at people. Even better, the targets aren’t shooting back.

As ex‑NYPD cops, Jimmy and I have long competed at shooting ranges. With rare exceptions, we’ve been better shots than the bad guys we’ve encountered along the way.

Jimmy still feels the need to remind me that he thinks he’s better than I am. I now feel almost obligated to remind him that in my humble opinion, nobody’s better than I am.

“We’re still just talking about guns here, right?” he asks.

“Among other things,” I say.

I smile sweetly at my partner. And he’s not that kind of partner, not now and not ever. I’m a criminal defense attorney, he’s my investigator and indispensable right‑hand man, in addition to being the best friend I’ve ever had, or maybe anybody has ever had.

Like me, he’s also a survivor. At least for now.

It wasn’t so terribly long ago that we both survived a late‑night shootout that turned the Walking Dunes of Montauk, out near land’s end on eastern Long Island, into the OK Corral. One of the shooters somehow managed to get away. The other wasn’t quite as lucky.

Jimmy and I aren’t here at Maidstone Gun getting ready for the next time. Neither one of us wants a next time, even though way too many people have been shooting — at both of us — since I began defending a local real estate guy named Rob Jacobson accused of committing his first triple homicide.

Yeah, that’s right. His first.

Of two.

If that sounds like some kind of record, it probably is. People keep telling me I sure can pick ’em. But then no one has ever confused my line of work, or Jimmy’s, with church.

The gun club is in Wainscott, about twenty minutes west of where I live. The place has been shuttered for a couple of years because of a beef with the town fathers, mostly from neighbors who got tired of the soundtrack of their lives sounding way too much like an action movie. Now the rifle range and the clubhouse, with its covered porch and big‑game trophies inside, looks like some kind of deserted movie set.

Of course Jimmy, who seems to know practically everybody in this part of Long Island, still has a key and the code that got us through the electronic gate on Northwest Harbor Road and past the sign that actually reads: ABSOLUTELY NO ARMOR‑PIERCING AMMUNITION. Words to live by, as far as we’re concerned.

But I do dearly hate to lose, almost as much as I hate Jimmy’s Yankees, being a Mets girl and all. I hate to lose at anything, one of the reasons why they call me Jane Effing Smith.

One of many.

As we get ready to begin today’s competition, I am singing the old Aerosmith song “Janie’s Got a Gun.”

“Janie’s got a gun, her whole world’s come undone…”

“Well, maybe not her whole world,” Jimmy adds. “Just this little corner of it.”

“You continue to forget something, Cunniff,” I say. “I never lose.”

“Well, not on the big things.”

“You mean like cancer?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean.”

“To be determined,” I tell him.

“Shut up and shoot,” he says.

“Is that your way of telling me to stop singing?”

“Not unless you want me to shoot myself,” Jimmy Cunniff says.

We’re each using a state‑of‑the‑art gun, a Sig Sauer P320 XCompact. And because this is part of an ongoing competition between two ex‑NYPD cops, we’re using a clock. Cops use clocks. Ours beeps when we start the timer, telling Jimmy or me it’s time to draw our weapon, in what would theoretically be a shootout on the street. Or in an alley. Or even on the Walking Dunes of Montauk.

The clock doesn’t stop until after the last shot has been fired.

Jimmy has already set up a rack with a half‑dozen steel target plates — six inches in diameter, three‑eighths of an inch thick — that he’s spray‑painted black to more easily determine the location of the hit. The steel is sturdy enough to occasionally withstand a bullet strike without tipping over.

When I leave a target standing, Jimmy usually tells me I shoot like a girl.

“Yeah,” I say. “Calamity Jane.”

It was what my father the ex‑Marine used to call me when he started taking me to the range. I’d say it was right after I stopped playing with dolls. But the only way I would have ever played with dolls is if there had been an Officer Barbie. And probably not even then.

As the leadoff shooter, I step back ten yards from the plates — it doesn’t seem like much, but it’s the proper distance to test accuracy with even a fancy handgun — and wait for Jimmy to start the clock.

In civilian shooting competitions, missed shots are awarded zero points. Cops who miss lose points, then get smack‑talked all the way to the parking lot. Or back to the squad room in the old days.

“When cops miss what they’re aiming at,” Jimmy says as he sets the timer, “they might hit grandma by mistake.”

“Or maybe, say, a client?” I ask him, grinning.

“Don’t give me any ideas about that bottom‑feeder we’re defending,” he says, then asks if I’m ready.

I take a big deep breath, let the air out slowly, trying to get my adrenaline under control.

“Armed and ready.”

“At least you didn’t give me that cheesy line about being born ready.”

“No effing way,” I say.

I hear the beep and raise the P320 and start firing away. Six for six.

They all go down.

But even after the last one is down, I want to keep going, reload until I’m out of ammunition and my hand can no longer squeeze the trigger.

I want everything in my life to be this easy. Aim and fire.

I want to stop feeling the way I’ve felt for the past eight months, that I’m the one with the target on my back.