Stuart Woods - Dark Harbor

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.

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 an 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”