by Stuart Woods
“That’s a fair description,” Stone said. “Did you also hear I was right about the homicide?”
“I heard you were a little right,” Mack replied, “but that your partner had to save your ass before it was over.”
“That’s fair, too, I guess,” Stone admitted.
Mack turned to Rawls. “I guess he’ll do,” he said.
Stone felt lucky: the approval of the yacht club, the golf club and the Old Farts, all in one day.
THAT NIGHT, he slept with Rawls’s shotgun on the floor next to his bed.
Chapter 18
STONE WAS WORKING on Dick’s estate when the phone rang. “Hello?”
“This is the Dark Harbor Shop. We have a package for you. Can you come pick it up?”
So much for overnight delivery, Stone thought. “Sure. Be right over.” What the hell, he had to pick up a newspaper anyway. He drove into the village and to the shop.
“Heavy,” the girl commented, handing the package to him. “You got guns in there?”
Stone smiled. “Just shoes with shoe trees in them.”
“Feels like guns,” she said, returning to her work at the soda fountain.
Stone bought a paper and went back to the house. He unwrapped the package, put his golf shoes with his clubs in the garage and the new loafers in his dressing room upstairs. He took a few hundred in cash from the money Joan had sent and put the rest in the safe. She had also sent a light, Italian cotton windbreaker, which would be useful for covering the gun as well as for the cool Maine days. Trust Joan to think of that.
He loaded the three magazines she had sent, put two in the little magazine pouch, then slapped one into the beautiful little custom-made Terry Tussey .45, with its Damascus steel slide, black anodized lightweight frame and mother-of-pearl handle. Small guns were a specialty of Terry’s, and this one weighed only twenty-one ounces, tiny for a .45.
He took off his belt and threaded the two by two-inch gun belt through his trouser loops, adding the magazine pouch and the gun holster at the appropriate points. With the belt tightened and the gun in its Mitch Rosen holster, everything felt secure, with the gun lying flat against his side and at an angle. When he slipped on the light windbreaker or a sweater, or left his shirttail out, everything would be concealed. He drew the .45, worked the slide, put on the safety and added another round to the magazine. With the pistol loaded, cocked and locked, ready for use, he felt better.
Stone called Ed Rawls. “My equipment has arrived. May I return your shotgun without getting blown away?”
“Come ahead. Blow the horn three times as you reach the gate, and I probably won’t kill you.”
Stone followed Rawls’s instructions to the letter and pulled into the clearing before the little house without incident. Rawls came out to meet him, and Stone handed him the shotgun. “There’s still one in the chamber, and the safety’s on,” he said.
“Come on in,” Rawls said. “Coffee?”
“Sure.”
Rawls poured him a cup from a Thermos and handed it to him. “So what are you packing?”
Stone removed the .45 from its holster, popped out the magazine, ejected the cartridge in the chamber, locked back the slide and handed it to Rawls.
Rawls thumbed the slide catch, aimed it out the window and squeezed off an imaginary round. “Sweet trigger,” he said. “Who’s Tussey?”
“A guy out in Carson City, Nevada. I saw something of his in a magazine, and we talked on the phone a couple of times. I’ve got a couple more of his guns, too.”
“I never had any need for a gunsmith,” Rawls said. “Tech Services supplied what we needed. It didn’t have pearl grips, but it always worked good.” He handed back Stone’s gun.
Stone picked up the ejected round, reloaded the pistol, cocked and locked it and returned it to its holster.
“I had a call from Lance a minute ago,” Rawls said. “He tried you first, but I guess you’d already left the house.”
“What news?”
“Bad news: The two Russians Dick’s source overheard at the poker game are very bad actors named Gorky and Rastropov, former KGB. Like a lot of their colleagues they discovered that there was money to be made when the Soviet Union crumbled, and their training and experience, combined with their sociopathic tendencies, make them very dangerous. The Berlin station is looking for them now, but they’ve gone to ground, and it won’t be easy to find them. The word’s out, though, and you never know. If they buy a pack of cigarettes in the wrong shop, they’re toast.”
“So what do we do?”
“Use the burglar alarm and sleep lightly,” Rawls replied.
“Will do.”
“You’ve got a very secure house, you know. Did you ever take a close look at the front door?”
“No. I’ve noticed it’s heavy.”
“Take a look at mine,” Rawls said, beckoning him to the front door. He opened the door and showed Stone the edge. “It’s two one-inch-thick sheets of mahogany with a half-inch of steel plate sandwiched between. The door frame is steel, too, and it’s bolted to eight-by-eight posts set in concrete. It’s hanging on eight hinges.”
He turned the thumb bolt on the inside, and three extra-large bolts slid out of the door, one each at the top and bottom of the door and the third in the traditional spot.
“That’s very impressive,” Stone said. “What about the rest of the house? The windows, for instance?”
“They’re all steel-framed, and the glass is armored and an inch thick. Dick’s house has the same.”
“None of it seemed to work for Dick.”
“He made a mistake; everybody does it sooner or later. If he’d had the Kirov call promptly, nobody would ever have gotten into the house alive. I’m surprised you didn’t find any weapons in the house.”
“I looked in all the cupboards,” Stone said. “I couldn’t find anything. I figure Dick kept the Keltec at his bedside. He heard something in the night, put on his pants and went downstairs. Somebody disarmed him, sat him down at the desk and shot him with his own gun, then went upstairs and shot his wife and daughter. He was wearing only trousers when they found him.”
“Sounds right,” Rawls said. “I don’t think anybody rang the doorbell; that would have woken the girls. I think what happened was, Dick didn’t lock up right and didn’t set the alarm system. By the way, the system isn’t monitored locally. If somebody set off a motion detector or something, an alarm at Langley would go off.”
“Are there motion detectors?” Stone asked. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“It’s why Dick didn’t have a dog. If you have a dog, it has to be highly trained, so you can forego the motion detectors. Otherwise, they have to be set high enough so that a dog won’t set them off, and intruders can duck under them.”
“Dick sounds too careful to have made a mistake.”
“Everybody does, eventually.”
“Either that or he knew the person who killed haft and let him into the house.”
“That’s a disturbing thought, given where we are,” Rawls said. “It’s a tightly contained population.”
“All it takes is one,” Stone said. He finished his coffee and went home.
As he walked into the house, the phone was ringing. “Hello?”
“”It’s Dino. Can you meet me at the airport?“
“What airport?”
“The one on the fucking island, dummy. Half an hour.” Dino hung up.
Chapter 19
STONE STOOD BESIDE the Islesboro airport landing strip and watched an airplane materialize in the sky to the south. It got larger fast, and a moment later a Pilatus PC12 set down just past the numbers, reversed its prop and taxied to the ramp. The lettering on the side said new york state police. The airstair door swung down, and Dino stepped onto the tarmac carrying two bags. Somebody tossed him a briefcase, then the door closed, and the airplane taxied to the other end of the runway and took off again.
“Jesus, why don’t you get a
n airplane like that?” Dino said.
“Because it costs three million dollars,” Stone replied. “I’m thinking about having my Malibu Mirage converted to a turboprop, though, and upgrading the avionics. I can do that for half a million.”
Dino put his bags into the rear of the station wagon and got into the passenger seat.
Stone started the wagon. “So, why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“This state cop was at the precinct and said he was flying up to Bar Harbor, so I asked if he could drop me here, and he did. What with the panic packing, I didn’t have time to call you. What’s happening?”
As they drove into Dark Harbor, Stone brought Dino up to date on the threat against Dick as well as Ed Rawls and the Old Farts.
“So now it’s an investigation by committee? Swell.”
“They have sources of information I don’t,” Stone said. “By the way, did you come armed?”
“Nope. I didn’t realize I’d be in danger.”
“I guess I’ll have to borrow Rawls’s shotgun again.”
“Whatever.”
They stopped at the Dark Harbor Shop. “I have to get a Times,” he said. “It gets here later than in the city.”
Dino got out and came in with him, had a look around the shop. A slender man with blond hair and beard was having a cup of coffee, and Dino glanced at him.
When they were back in the car, Dino said, “You saw the guy at the soda fountain, right?”
“Sort of. You know him?”
“Yeah, and so do you. We busted him for more than a hundred burglaries about seven, eight years ago, back when you were earning an honest living.”
“Harold Rhinehart? That was him?”
“Yeah. He has a beard now, and his hair is shorter, but that’s the guy.”
“How much time did he get?”
“He plead out for five to seven, which means he could have been out two and a half years ago, if he kept his nose clean in the joint and really impressed the parole board. You had any burglaries up here?”
“Not that I’ve heard about, but I’ll ask Rawls; he seems to know everything that’s going on. Maybe Rhinehart took his ill-gotten gains and retired up here.”
“I doubt it,” Dino said. “The guy was a pro, but he was obsessive about stealing. I don’t think there are any New York State parole officers on this island, either. If he got out in half his sentence, he should be reporting to a P.O. every week.”
“Dino, you’re a wonder; you’ve been here fifteen minutes, and already you’ve spotted a perp.”
“They’re everywhere,” Dino said. “Maybe I’ll just clean up this burg while I’m here.”
“How long can you stay?”
“I got a lot of vacation time built up; we’ll see.”
“How’s it going with Mary Ann?”
“Everything’s squared. We’re just waiting for a judge to sign off on the agreement and give us a decree, then I’ll be a free man.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Relieved.”
“No regrets?”
“Can’t think of any. It wasn’t like it was a marriage made in heaven, y’know. If the kid hadn’t been in the picture, we’d have screwed each other for a few months and called it a day the first time she complained about something. She knew it, I knew it.”
“Any luck on the apartment hunt?”
“Yeah, I found a nice six on Park in the sixties.”
“Sounds expensive.”
“By the time it’s done up I’ll have a couple mil in it”
“Sounds nice.”
“Had to be; the court has to approve it for Benito’s visits.”
“When do you close?”
“Yesterday,” Dino said. “Things move fast when it’s an all-cash deal. I’ve already got a designer working on the renovations and buying me some furniture.”
“You’re going to let a designer furnish the place?”
“Jesus, Stone, you think I give a shit about furniture? I told her, make it nice for the kid so the court will sign off on it. She’s going to get it painted, put in some new stuff in the kitchen and get the floors refinished. I’ll be in it in a month.”
“Dino, it’s New York; nothing happens in a month.”
“This designer lady is a real hard-ass; she’ll get it done. She’s already got her people lined up, and she gets paid more if it’s ready on time.”
“And you’re letting her pick out everything?”
“I picked out the TVs and the stereo and my chair for the den. The rest is up to her.”
“Good luck.”
“Listen, I’m a better judge of people than I am of furniture. Anyway, it’ll piss off Mary Ann if I’m in a really nice place, and I’ll enjoy that.”
They drove in silence until they got to the house and started unloading Dino’s bags.
“I just thought of something,” Dino said.
“What?”
“Hal Rhinehart.”
“What about him?”
“I heard a pretty good rumor one time from a guy on the organized crime task force that Rhinehart was doing some contract hit work, but they could never nail him.”
That stopped Stone in his tracks. “Why don’t you get on the phone and find out whether Rhinehart has jumped parole?”
Chapter 20
DINO PUT THE PHONE DOWN. “Rhinehart must have a very smart lawyer; he did a deal that allows him to live up here and report in by phone every week.”
“Ankle bracelet?”
“I didn’t ask,” Dino said, “but he could be out of range up here.”
“Put your stuff in the guest house, then let’s go see Rhinehart.”
“You know where he lives?”
“No, but I know how to find out.”
THEY WENT BACK to the Dark Harbor Shop, and Stone led Dino to the rear office, where he rapped on the door. The man at the desk looked up.
“Hi,” Stone said, “I’m Stone Barrington, and this is Dino Bacchetti.”
The man stood up. “Jimmy Hotchkiss.”
“You’re Seth’s cousin, right?”
“Right, and you’re Dick’s cousin.”
“Right.”
“Take a seat.” Jimmy waved them to a pair of rickety chairs next to the desk.
“We were in here earlier and saw somebody we used to know,” Stone said.
“And who would that be?”
“His name is Harold Rhinehart.”
“Sure, I know Hal.”
“You know where he lives?”
“Yep. It’s about three miles north on the main road. You’ll see a sign: RHINEHART CABINETS.”
“He’s a cabinet maker?”
“And his father before him. Hal took over the business when his old man died a few years back.”
“He grew up on the island?”
“Yeah, then he went away to some tech college in New York State, and we didn’t see much of him after that, until he came back and took over the business. His dad was sick then, lived a few more months. Hal grew up in that shop, though, so he didn’t have any problem taking over.”
“Is there a police officer on the island?”
“Constable,” Jimmy said. “You’re looking at him.”
“Jimmy, have you had any reports of burglaries on the island?”
“Over what period of time?”
“After Hal Rhinehart came back.”
Jimmy looked at them both carefully before replying. “What’s your interest in this?”
“Dino is a police lieutenant in New York. He and I used to be partners in the NYPD, and we arrested Rhinehart for burglary a few years back.”
“I heard about that,” Jimmy said. “I also heard from his parole officer—indirectly, through the state police—when he came back.”
“That’s what we were wondering about,” Dino said. “How Rhinehart could be here, when he’s supposed to be on parole.” As if he didn’t know.
�
�Apparently, he arranged things with his parole officer when his dad got sick,” Jimmy said. “He reports by phone, I’m told.”