Bel-Air Dead (28 page)
From Stone’s point of view, what happened next was reduced to slow motion: Prince pointed the gun at Carolyn Blaine; she threw up her hands and turned her head away, closing her eyes tightly. Dino threw away his newspaper and clawed at his belt for his own weapon. Prince fired a single shot.
Stone saw a pink cloud explode from the back of Carolyn’s head. The force of the bullet spun her around, and she fell into the pool. The water around her head became pink.
Stone dove for Prince’s wrist, got hold of it and twisted up and out. Prince lost his grip on the gun and fell backward. Stone jumped on him. “Cuffs!” he yelled to Dino. The handcuffs landed on the flagstones next to him. He rolled Prince over, twisted his arm up and got one cuff on, then he looked over his shoulder and saw Carolyn floating facedown in the pool, in a patch of red water. “The girl!” he yelled at Dino.
Dino knelt on the edge of the pool and tried to reach Carolyn’s left foot, but he couldn’t quite reach it.
“Go in!” Stone shouted, trying to get the struggling Prince’s other wrist cuffed.
Dino shucked off his jacket and jumped into the pool.
Stone left the handcuffed Prince and ran to help him. They got her out of the pool and lifted her onto a chaise longue.
Suddenly, Carolyn spat water at both of them. “What the hell happened?” she yelled, coughing up more water.
“Be quiet,” Stone said. “You’ve been shot.” He picked up a towel and pressed it behind her head, then checked it: red, but no gray matter. “Looks like it just creased you.”
“But there’s so much blood!” she yelled.
“Calm down,” Stone said, “scalp wounds always bleed a lot. Dino, call your pals at the LAPD. Tell them we need the medics, too.”
Dino got on his cell phone.
“Stone, sign my deal,” Carolyn said. “Sign the papers, take the check.”
“I’m sorry, Carolyn,” Stone replied. “We have another buyer.”
“Another buyer! Who?”
Stone was about to answer her when Manolo walked out onto the patio and looked, appalled, at Prince, handcuffed on the flagstones, and Carolyn, bleeding into one of Mrs. Calder’s good towels. “Excuse me, Mr. Stone, but there are some people here from the Santa Fe, New Mexico, Police Department. They want to speak to Ms. Blaine.”
Stone grinned. “Send them right out, Manolo.” He turned to Prince. “You’ll have to wait for the LAPD,” he said.
61
Stone was packing the following morning when his cell phone rang. “Hello?”
“Stone, it’s Ed Eagle.”
“Hello, Ed. I tried to reach you yesterday, but everything turned out all right. She has a slight head wound, but the SFPD showed up at the perfect moment and took her away. And now Terry Prince has a second attempted murder charge against him.”
“Everything didn’t turn out entirely all right, Stone,” Eagle said. “The cops took her to an emergency room, where she got some stitches, and the doctor insisted on keeping her overnight for observation. They put her in a room with another patient, with a cop on guard outside her door. She stole her roommate’s clothes, and while the cop was in the john, she ran out of the hospital and found a cab dropping somebody off at the ER.”
“Amazing,” Stone said. “Then what?”
“The cops went to her address and found the garage door open. They think she had a second car there, but they had no idea what kind, so all they could do was issue an APB for her, with no description of the vehicle. Unless the cops get very lucky, she’s gone.”
“I hope they fingerprinted her at the ER,” Stone said.
“Nope, apparently they don’t have that facility. And she still has the cash in the foreign bank account that nobody can find.”
“I wonder how much she stole from Terry Prince,” Stone said.
An hour later, Stone took off from Santa Monica Airport and got vectors toward Palmdale, to the east. The weather forecast was for ninety-knot westerly winds.
“We’ll make Wichita on the first leg,” Stone said. “Then from there, if we’re lucky with the winds, all the way to Teterboro.”
“Take your time,” Dino said, opening a book of
New York Times
crossword puzzles, “I’ve got all day.”
Stone leveled off at forty-one thousand feet and turned into the sun.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I am happy to hear from readers, but you should know that if you write to me in care of my publisher, three to six months will pass before I receive your letter, and when it finally arrives it will be one among many, and I will not be able to reply.
However, if you have access to the Internet, you may visit my website at
www.stuartwoods.com
, where there is a button for sending me e-mail. So far, I have been able to reply to all my e-mail, and I will continue to try to do so.
If you send me an e-mail and do not receive a reply, it is probably because you are among an alarming number of people who have entered their e-mail address incorrectly in their mail software. I have many of my replies returned as undeliverable.
Remember: e-mail, reply; snail mail, no reply.
When you e-mail, please do not send attachments, as I never open these. They can take twenty minutes to download, and they often contain viruses.
Please do not place me on your mailing lists for funny stories, prayers, political causes, charitable fund-raising, petitions, or sentimental claptrap. I get enough of that from people I already know. Generally speaking, when I get e-mail addressed to a large number of people, I immediately delete it without reading it.
Please do not send me your ideas for a book, as I have a policy of writing only what I myself invent. If you send me story ideas, I will immediately delete them without reading them. If you have a good idea for a book, write it yourself, but I will not be able to advise you on how to get it published. Buy a copy of
Writer’s Market
at any bookstore; that will tell you how.
Anyone with a request concerning events or appearances may e-mail it to me or send it to: Publicity Department, Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.
Those ambitious folk who wish to buy film, dramatic, or television rights to my books should contact Matthew Snyder, Creative Artists Agency, 9830 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA 98212-1825.
Those who wish to make offers for rights of a literary nature should contact Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit, 445 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022. (Note: This is not an invitation for you to send her your manuscript or to solicit her to be your agent.)
If you want to know if I will be signing books in your city, please visit my website,
www.stuartwoods.com
, where the tour schedule will be published a month or so in advance. If you wish me to do a book signing in your locality, ask your favorite bookseller to contact his Penguin representative or the Penguin publicity department with the request.
If you find typographical or editorial errors in my book and feel an irresistible urge to tell someone, please write to Rachel Kahan at Penguin’s address above. Do not e-mail your discoveries to me, as I will already have learned about them from others.
A list of my published works appears in the front of this book and on my website. All the novels are still in print in paperback and can be found at or ordered from any bookstore. If you wish to obtain hardcover copies of earlier novels or of the two nonfiction books, a good secondhand bookstore or one of the online bookstores can help you find them. Otherwise, you will have to go to a great many garage sales.
A Holly Barker Novel
A Stone Barrington Novel
A Will Lee Novel
An Ed Eagle Novel
BOOKS BY STUART WOODS
FICTION
Strategic Moves
2
Santa Fe Edge
4
Lucid Intervals
2
Kisser
2
Hothouse Orchid
1
Loitering with Intent
2
Mounting Fears
3
Hot Mahogany
2
Santa Fe Dead
4
Beverly Hills Dead
Shoot Him If He Runs
2
Fresh Disasters
2
Short Straw
4
Dark Harbor
2
Iron Orchid
1
Two Dollar Bill
2
The Prince of Beverly Hills
Reckless Abandon
2
Capital Crimes
3
Dirty Work
2
Blood Orchid
1
The Short Forever
2
Orchid Blues
1
Cold Paradise
2
L.A. Dead
2
The Run
3
Worst Fears Realized
2
Orchid Beach
1
Swimming to Catalina
2
Dead in the Water
2
Dirt
2
Choke
Imperfect Strangers
Heat
Dead Eyes
L.A. Times
Santa Fe Rules
4
New York Dead
2
Palindrome
Grass Roots
3
White Cargo
Deep Lie
3
Under the Lake
Run Before the Wind
3
Chiefs
3
TRAVEL
A Romantic’s Guide to the Country
Inns of Britain and Ireland (1979)
MEMOIR
Blue Water, Green Skipper (1977)
Table of Contents