Shoot First(Stone Barrington #45)(71)

“Right away, sir.” Atkins left at a trot for the cottage where his crew were staying.

Stone’s phone rang. “Hello?”

“It’s Dino. Are you still alive?”

“Perfectly so,” Stone replied.

“I mean, I heard that Owaki is in your neighborhood.”

“Meg and I met with him only a few minutes ago, and, with the able assistance of Dame Felicity, we have rattled his cage sufficiently for him to be out of the country tomorrow.”

“Which means he’ll be coming back into my jurisdiction,” Dino said. “Thanks a lot.”

“I expect so. Can you think of any way to make his arrival memorable?”

“I expect so. I’ll alert U.S. Customs at Teterboro, which is where he lands his Gulfstream. Might they be carrying any weapons?”

“Perhaps, but I have managed to put some of them beyond his reach. Perhaps a strip search by customs might turn up anything he has left.”

“I’ll suggest a full cavity search, too,” Dino said. “Those customs guys love that. When are you coming back?”

“I don’t know—a day or two, I guess. Meg has to close on her new apartment.”

“I spoke to the head of the committee,” Dino said. “She’s a shoo-in.”

“I’ll tell her, she’ll like that.” They said goodbye and hung up.





54




As Meg left the house, a stableman walked around the corner, leading two beautifully groomed horses.

“Yours is the mare, mine the gelding,” Stone said.

“I hope I can tell which is which,” she said, lifting a leg so that the groom could hoist her into the saddle.

Stone managed on his own. “We’ll walk them for a couple of hundred yards, to let them loosen up,” he said, and they did so. At the end of that Stone’s gelding was champing at the bit, and a tap of the heel into his flank achieved a comfortable gallop. Meg pulled up alongside him. “Wall coming up,” Stone said. “Are you up for that?”

“Sure I am,” she said.

They took the stone wall that divided Windward Hall from the hotel’s estate and galloped across the acreage of its front lawn.

“Magnificent house,” Meg said. “You should have bought that one.”

“I wasn’t looking for a stately home,” Stone said. “And there are at least sixty staff there, not counting the hotel keepers.” He noted that two bellmen were piling up luggage at the bottom of the front steps. “Mr. Owaki appears to be checking out,” he said, as the black Maybach pulled up to the front of the house.

He edged the gelding up into a full run, and Meg kept right up. They took another wall, then pulled up into some trees to rest the horses. Stone got down and took a small bag from its place behind the saddle. “Would you like a beer?”

“What a good idea!” They sat down with their backs against a tree and drank the cold lager.

“I would jump you,” Meg said, “if riding clothes weren’t so difficult to deal with.”

“They’ll come off easily enough when we get back,” Stone said, kissing her lightly.

“I’ll look forward to watching.”

Stone gave her a leg up onto the mare, then got onto the gelding,

Then Meg pointed back to where they had come from. “Look!” she shouted.

Stone pulled his mount around to face Windward Hall. From the rear of the house a column of black smoke was rising. He dug his heels into the gelding. “Come on, we’ll run them the whole way!”

The horses sprang forward and hardly noticed the stone wall when they topped it. Stone could hear a siren in the distance, and as they drew up in front of the house, a fire truck drove around to the rear.

Stone and Meg jumped down and handed their horses to the waiting groom, then she followed him up the front steps, into the house and down a hall toward the kitchen. The fire was not inside but at the rear of the building. They ran out the kitchen door and found flames from some unidentifiable pile of material licking at the rear wall. The firemen were spooling out their hoses.

Stone and Meg watched anxiously from the rear as the firemen applied water to the burning pile, then, when that failed to stanch the flames, they produced extinguishers and sprayed it with foam. Gradually, the flames lessened and finally stopped, buried under a white mass of fire suppressant.

“Thank God,” Stone muttered.

“Do you think this has something to do with Owaki?” Meg asked.

“Who else hates me enough to want to burn down my house?” Stone asked.

“Well, there must be a woman or two,” Meg said, “even in England.”



* * *



—

THE FIREMEN had removed their protective gear and were being fed sandwiches and tea by the kitchen staff.

“Do you know what the burning material was?” Stone asked their chief.

“Never seen anything like it,” the man replied, between munches. “They had stuff like that during the war, you know, in the blitz. The devil to put out. Black stuff. Come to think of it, we were up at the motorcar factory earlier today, and I saw some black stuff piled up next to the trash-removal place. I’ll have my investigator look into that.”