Stuart Woods - Dark Harbor

“What?”

“A guy Dino and I once busted for more than a hundred burglaries in New York. He’s out of prison now and living here. He’s a cabinetmaker.”

“Well, I guess that’s one kind of expert. If you’re all right, I’m going back to bed.”

“Sure, and thanks for calling.” They both hung up.

Suddenly, the front doorbell rang, and there was a hammering on the front door. Stone ran to the door, switched on the front porch light and looked through the peephole. Dino was standing there in his pajamas and robe. Stone opened the door.

“What’s going on?” Dino asked.

“I heard a noise in the house,” Stone said. “What woke you up?”

“The phone. I had just gotten up to piss, and I heard it ring. I wasn’t sleepy, anyway, so I came over.”

Stone closed the door. “Come in the study. You want a drink?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Dino said. “Keep out the cold night air.”

“Oh, let me show you something.” He led Dino into Dick’s little office and showed him the array of weapons. Dino picked up the officer’s.45. “I like this,” he said. “I’ll sleep with it under my pillow.” He checked and found a full magazine in the gun.

Stone pointed to a shelf that held a lot of gun leather. “Find yourself a belt and holster.” He went to the bar and got down a couple of glasses. As he was about to open the door to the ice machine, he heard the noise again.

Dino approached. “Is that the noise you heard?”

“Yes,” Stone said sheepishly.

“The ice machine, making ice?”

Stone sighed. “Yes. I wonder why I’ve never heard it before.”

“I think you’re a little too tightly wound,” Dino said. “Sit down and drink that bourbon.”

Stone followed orders.

STONE WENT BACK to bed and tried to retrieve the dream with Arrington, but it wouldn’t come back. He overslept, not waking until after ten, and he felt fuzzy around the edges. He wasn’t accustomed to drinking in the middle of the night.

He sat up in bed and called Arrington’s home in Virginia. A maid answered.

“She’s not here, Mr. Barrington. She’s in New York, she and Peter. You can reach her at the Carlyle.”

“Thank you,” Stone said. He called the Carlyle and asked for Mrs. Calder.

“Hello?” she said, sounding chipper and cheerful.

“It’s Stone.”

“Oh, hi. I was about to call you. I’m in New York.”

“I know; I just called you.”

“Oh, that’s right. Sorry. You want to have dinner tonight?”

“I’d love to, but it’s a plane ride.”

“What?”

“I’m in Maine.”

“Why? What are you doing in Maine?”

“I have a new house on an island called Islesboro. Why don’t you summon up the Centurion jet, and you and Peter come up here for a few days?” As the widow of Centurion Studios’ largest stockholder, she had access to their jet.

She was silent for a moment. “All right, but it will have to be tomorrow, maybe the next day. I have some shopping to do here.”

“Tell the flight department at Centurion that you’ll be landing at Rockland. I’ll meet you there in my airplane. It’s only another ten minutes of flying, but the strip on the island is too short for a jet.”

“All right. What will I need in the way of clothes?”

“Nothing you couldn’t find at L.L. Bean.”

“I’ve got to run; I have a hair appointment, but I’ll call you later and give you an ETA.”

He gave her the number and hung up, feeling wonderful. He bounded out of bed, shaved, showered and began getting dressed when the phone rang. “Hello?”

“It’s Ed Rawls. I need to see you at Don Brown’s house right now.”

“Okay. Where’s the house?”

Rawls gave him directions.

“What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.”

Stone finished dressing and went downstairs. Dino was having breakfast in the kitchen, and Stone grabbed a piece of his toast. “Come on. We have to be somewhere.”

“Where?”

“Not far.”

It was a beautiful day, and they took the little MG, top down.

“Arrington and Peter are coming up tomorrow or the next day,” Stone said.

“You’re horny, huh?”

“Oh, shut up.”

They drove through some woods and stopped at the end of a short, paved driveway. There were other cars parked there.

The house was a shingled Cape Cod with a porch. The front door was opened by an obviously upset woman wearing an apron. Rawls emerged from another room and waved them in. Harley Davis and Mack Morris were seated in the living room, while Jimmy Hotchkiss talked on the phone. Stone introduced Dino to everybody, then followed Rawls into a bedroom.

“Uh, oh,” Dino said.

Don Brown, The Old Fart who used the electric scooter, was sitting up in bed, a bullet hole in his right temple and a much larger hole in his left. A Colt.45 lay on the bed, and brains and blood were scattered around the bedspread.

“We’ve got another one,” Rawls said.

“How long have you been here?” Stone asked.

“Less than half an hour. I’ve mostly been on the phone calling people.”

“Has somebody called the state police?”

“Jimmy’s on the phone with them now.”

“Let’s get out of this room,” Stone said. “Have you touched anything?”

Rawls shook his head. “I know better than that.”

They went back into the living room and took seats, while the woman served them coffee.

“This is Hilda,” Rawls said. “She found him when she came to clean the house.”

“What time do you normally get here, Hilda?” Stone said.

“Usually, at nine,” the woman replied. “But it was ten, today; I had to do Mr. Brown’s grocery shopping. I always do that for him.” She went back to the kitchen.

“Dino,” Stone said, “you ask the questions.”

Dino nodded. “Gentlemen, did any of you know Mr. Brown to be depressed?”

“This wasn’t suicide,” Harley Davis replied.

“Please, just answer the question.”

“Don wasn’t depressed,” Mack Morris said. “He was pissed off.”

“About what?” Dino asked.

“About being in that fucking wheelchair thing. He didn’t like it at all; he was permanently pissed off about it.”

“Did he ever talk about suicide?”

All three men shook their heads. “He wasn’t the type,” Rawls said.

“Is the gun his?” Dino asked.

“Probably; he had a.45,” Rawls said. “If the cops don’t find another one, then it’s his.”

Jimmy hung up the phone. “The state boys will be on the next ferry,” he said, looking at his watch. “They should be here in an hour or so.”

“Gentlemen,” Dino said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d all go sit on the porch until the cops get here. Stone and I will take a look around the house.”

The four men went outside, and Dino went into the kitchen, followed by Stone.

“Hilda,” Dino said, “when you got here this morning, did you find anything unusual about the state of the house?”

“Well, Mr. Brown was dead in his bed,” she said.

Dino nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Anything else?”

“Well, the vacuum cleaner is normally in the broom closet, but it was sitting in the kitchen, by the back door, there.” She pointed. “And there wasn’t no bag inside it.”

STONE AND DINO WENT and stood in the bedroom door, so as not to disturb anything further by entering the room.

“He’s sitting up in bed,” Stone said, “so whoever shot him woke him up first.”

“Unless he wasn’t asleep when the guy arrived,” Dino said.

“The TV isn’t on, and there’s no book present, so he wasn’t sitting up in bed reading. Nobody just sits in bed, doing nothin'.“