Stuart Woods - Dark Harbor

Stone shook hands all around. “Gentlemen, glad to meet you.”

“We’re a kind of club of old boys,” Rawls said. “We call ourselves the Old Farts.”

“Your reputation precedes you,” Stone said.

The three men looked wary and exchanged glances. “How’s that?” Mack Morris asked.

“I told you, he knows Lance Cabot,” Rawls said. “In fact, Stone is one of Lance’s contract people. And he’s Dick Stone’s first cousin.”

Everybody nodded, seemingly satisfied with Stone’s credentials. They all ordered sandwiches and iced tea and chatted desultorily about golf and boats for a while, then Rawls called the meeting to order, after a fashion.

“My sources are telling me somebody ordered a hit on Dick,” he said, without preamble. Everybody became very still.

“We know why?” Davis asked.

“Haven’t gotten that far yet,” Rawls replied.

Stone spoke up. “My information is a revenge killing, in return for the Agency’s busting up a drug ring in East Germany.”

“ Your information?” Don Brown asked, with laconic incredulity.

Stone shrugged.

“Details?” Brown asked.

“I answered Dick’s office phone, and somebody used a code word, Kirov, which turned out to be a warning.”

“Okay,” Brown said.

“Problem is, the caller may have thought I was Dick.”

“So,” Harley Davis said, “if they think Dick is still alive, somebody may make another house call.”

Stone nodded. “So I’m told.”

“Are you armed, Stone?” Rawls asked.

“I will be tomorrow.”

“That may not be soon enough. I’ve got a shotgun in the car you can borrow until you’re equipped.”

“Thanks.”

Their sandwiches arrived, and everybody ate in silence for a while.

“For what it’s worth, Ed,” Stone said, “Lance didn’t think any of this had spilled over on you.”

“It’s nice that Lance thinks that,” Rawls said, “but he don’t know everything.”

“Who knows everything?” Mack Morris observed.

There were affirmative grunts around the table. Then Rawls’s three cohorts began to grill Stone.

“How come you’re Dick’s first cousin and we never heard of you?” Harley Davis asked.

“There was a rift in the family,” Stone said. “I spent a summer up here when I was eighteen, and that was about the only contact we had with the Boston branch. I had a great aunt who lived in New York. She was the only one who was friendly.”

“What was the cause of the rift?” Don Brown asked.

“My father left Yale to become a carpenter in New York. He was also a member of the Communist Party for a little while.” He watched the four men exchange glances.

“How little a while?” Harley asked.

“A couple of years. His family disowned him, and my mother’s family disowned her for marrying him.”

“She was a Stone?”

“Yes, Matilda.”

Don looked up from his sandwich. “She a painter?”

“Yes.”

“My wife was a painter; she thought your mother was the greatest artist since Rembrandt.”

“My father thought so, too.”

“Where’d you go to school?”

“New York public schools, then NYU, both undergraduate and law.”

“You ever run into Sam Bernard there?”

“He taught me constitutional law.”

Harley looked at Rawls. “I’m surprised Sam didn’t recruit him.”

“He tried, but Stone preferred the NYPD,” Rawls replied.

“That was dumb,” Harley said.

Stone couldn’t help laughing. “It was pretty good, actually, until I took a bullet in the knee.” That wasn’t all of it, but it was as much as he told people.

“I heard that wasn’t all of it,” Mack said.

Stone suppressed another laugh.

“We’re careful people,” Rawls said, “by nature and by training. We do our homework.”

“What did you hear?” Stone asked.

“I heard you were a pain in the ass to your superiors, particularly on that last homicide you worked, and they took advantage of your injury to bounce you.”

“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.

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.