Double Jeopardy (Stone Barrington #57)(65)

Rawls let the body go, took out his hunting knife and walked to the wooden support and dug into it with the blade. A moment later, he had a slug in his hand. “What are you firing?”

“Nine millimeter,” Stone replied.

“See if the one with the slug in his chest has an exit wound.”

Stone rolled him over. “No,” he said.

“Well, at the shooting range, that shot would have won you a big, fuzzy, pink rabbit.”

Then Primmy was standing next to Stone, still naked, dabbing at his scalp with a cloth soaked in vodka. “Here,” she said, taking his empty hand and pressing it to his head, “hold that in place while I get another cloth.”

Rawls shouted up at the porch. “Carly!” he yelled. “Throw me down a couple of blankets.”

“Will beach towels do?”

“Yes!”

She dropped the towels over the railing, and Rawls began the job of wrapping up the bodies and securing them with duct tape from his bag.

“I saw some leaf bags in the barn,” Rawls said to her. “Get me four of them, will you?”

Carly disappeared.

Primmy came back, wearing clothes now, with another towel and some big Band-Aids and cleaned up Stone, while Ed and Carly got the bodies into the double leaf bags.

“There’s not much cleaning up to do,” Rawls said. “They both died instantly, so they didn’t bleed much.” He kicked dirt over what was on the ground.

“Stone, let’s get these into your car and down to my boat,” Rawls said. “The sun will be setting in half an hour. You ladies clean up the inside of the house and the porch. Tomorrow, I’ll come by and patch that bullet hole in the porch support, and we’ll be clear.”

Stone and Rawls got the bagged corpses into the back of the MG and moved them over to Rawls’s dock, where they loaded them into the boat.

“You’re going to need some help dumping them,” Stone said.

“No, I’ve got enough iron and chain around here to handle it. You make sure our crime scene is in order, and then get the girls home. I’ll take care of everything here. Oh, and give me your gun.”

Stone handed it to him. “Nice piece, but it has to go into the bay with the bodies.”

“Thank you, Ed,” Stone said.

“For what? You did all the shooting.”



* * *



—

Back at Stone’s house, everybody had a drink.

“Did everything go as planned?” Dino asked.

“No,” Stone said, “but there was a happy ending. You knew about this, didn’t you?”

“They made me promise not to tell you,” Dino said. “They said if you knew, you wouldn’t let them do it.”

“It wasn’t an entirely unhappy experience,” Primmy said, and Carly laughed a lot.





58

The following morning, while the others were packing the Ford, Stone drove over to Ed Rawls’s house. To his surprise, both gates stood open. Stone paused long enough to be identified on a monitor, then drove in and parked.

Ed and Sally were lazing on the front porch, sharing the Times. “Hey,” Ed said.

“What’s with the open gates?” Stone asked. “I’ve never seen that before.”

“Today there is no threat,” Rawls replied, then took a pencil from behind his ear and wrote something on the crossword.

“Have the packages been disposed of?” Stone asked.

Rawls lifted an eyebrow. “What packages?”

Stone nodded. “We’re off to New York this morning,” he said. “We’re going to drop Carly at the New Haven airport to pick up her car and get packed, then she’s driving to the city. She starts tomorrow morning at Woodman & Weld.”

“They’ll be lucky to have her, if they can stand her,” Rawls said.

“Well, there is that.”

“Can you get five people and their luggage off the ground in that Cessna?”

“Getting off the ground isn’t the problem. It’s getting off the ground before you run out of runway. That’s solved by having only half fuel aboard.”

“Right.”

“The G-500 will meet us at Rockport.” Stone sighed. “I wish I could say it’s been fun, Ed, but it’s been unusual. I’ll give you that.”

Rawls grinned. “It has been, hasn’t it?”

Sally got up, gave Stone a hug and a kiss, then sat down again.

“When will we see you in New York?” Stone asked.

“We’ll stop in for a few days on the way to Virginia, at the end of the season.” Rawls got up and gave him a bearish hug. “Fly safe.”



* * *



—

The Cessna did get off the ground, with runway to spare, and they dropped Carly off, then made for Rockport. As they lined up to land, they could see the Gulfstream waiting for them.

“I don’t see a small plane,” Primmy said.

“We’re taking the large one, right there,” Stone said, pointing.

“That beats the 1938 Ford,” she said.

“You betcha.”





END