“I can’t imagine why,” Hank replied.

Okay, Stone said to himself, I think I’m getting this. He rewound his memory to earlier in the evening and watched the replay on the inside of his eyelids. They had drinks; he gave Hank a key; he showed her how the security system worked; she spent ten minutes in the Four Seasons’ ladies’ room while he got a cab; she must have made a phone call. Who else could the guy be but Marty Parese? They stopped talking and worked, and that gave him more time to think. He had come down to fax Eggers the year-to-date statement. If Bill didn’t receive it, would he send somebody over here? Stone’s question was almost immediately answered.

The phone rang three times, and the voice mail system picked up. “Stone? It’s Bill. Never mind faxing the document, we found our copy. Sorry to trouble you.” Eggers hung up.

Shit. No cavalry arriving from that direction. He did some more thinking. God knows where Joan is; long weekend. No conceivable cavalry from any other direction, either. Assuming they didn’t kill him—and that, he thought, might be an unwarranted assumption—nobody would find him until Tuesday morning. Where would Hank and her friend be by then? Acapulco? Rio? Answer: anywhere they damn well pleased. They would have a lot of luggage, of course, given the bulk of his five million dollars, even neatly stacked in suitcases. Unlikely that they would take a commercial flight; they wouldn’t want to be separated from their bags. So, they’d drive. Somewhere they could exchange the money for hundreds. Where the hell could they do that? They couldn’t just wheel it into a bank and make reverse change. Any banker in his right mind would call the FBI.

Wait a minute; why would Marty Parese have a cash counter-sorter handy on short notice? You couldn’t rent one at a tool rental place. Chop shop had to be a cash business; if you sold somebody a few thousand bucks’ worth of Mercedes bits and pieces, you wouldn’t take a check, and you wouldn’t put the cash in the bank. You’d launder it, somehow. Run it through a legit business account, maybe? One that dealt in a lot of cash? Casino? Check cashing service? Dirty bank? There must be dirty banks.

“Marty, tell me you got the groceries,” Hank said.

“A week’s worth.”

“I gave you a list.”

“Yeah, I got most of that. I couldn’t find truffle oil.”

She gave him a shopping list. When? On the phone from the ladies’ room, or maybe before that. She had a plan; she called him for dinner, not the other way around. Where would they need groceries, especially Hank’s kind of groceries? Someplace with a kitchen.

A wave of nausea struck Stone. Could a blow to the back of the head do that? He answered his own question by vomiting over the edge of the sofa.

“Jesus,” Marty said.

“Oh, Stone, poor baby,” Hank said. She went into his office bathroom and came out with a couple of towels and a trash can. She wiped his face with a damp facecloth, cleaned up the mess, and put the towels in the trash can. “Let’s sit you up,” she said. She rolled him onto his side, put his feet on the floor, and sat him up. “Is that better?”

Stone nodded and looked as dazed as he could, which, given the circumstances, wasn’t hard. He moved his hands: cuffs. He looked down at his feet: duct tape. He was secured.

“You want some water, Stone?”

He nodded. She went to the bathroom and came back with a glass. He took a sip, swished it around in his mouth, and spat into the trash can. “More.” He drank half the glass.

“Put some of that duct tape on his mouth,” Parese said.

“I can’t do that,” Hank replied. “If he vomits again, he could choke on it.”

“So what? I don’t care if he chokes, I’d just as soon put a bullet in his head.”

“Marty, I’ve told you before: if we kill him they’ll never stop looking for us, wherever we go. It’s not like killing Bats—nobody cares about him. Stone has friends in the police, and they’d really come after us. Stone can take the five-million-dollar hit without blinking. He might even be too embarrassed to tell anybody.”

“Whatever you say, babe. Now keep feeding the machine money.”

“How much are we up to?”

“Two hundred and twenty thou.”

“God. We’ll be here until Tuesday.”

“Not that long—we’re getting the hang of it now.”

They went back to work.

Stone felt better for throwing up; his head was clear now; he could think. Trouble was, he couldn’t think of any way out of this. There were things in the office he could use, but he couldn’t move. They could do with him as they willed.

That thought made him nauseous again, but he fought it down. He took some deep breaths.

“You okay, Stone?” Hank asked.

“Just confused,” he said.

“Yes, I guess this is pretty confusing for you.”

“So, was it you and Bats or you and Marty?”

“It was always Marty,” she said. “Bats was just a schmuck.”

“Ah,” he said, “all is revealed.” He was a schmuck, too. Now all he could do was sit here and wait to find out who won the argument over whether or not to kill him.

52

Jack and Hillary finished their round and went back to the clubhouse for lunch.

“You beat me on handicap,” Hillary said, after they had ordered.

“Come on, I don’t even have a handicap yet.”

“You’re playing consistently, though, which nobody with your experience ever does. I think your instructor is wrong about your playing at the eighteen-handicap level. I think you’re closer to a fifteen.”

“From your lips to God’s ear,” Jack said.

“You seem very much at peace today, Jack. I had noticed a little tension the past few days. Did something good happen?”

“Yes, something good happened. I just cleared up a little of the underbrush of my past life.”

“Underbrush? That’s a funny word.”

“Now everything is just smooth, freshly mown fairway. I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite so free.”

She squeezed his hand. “I’m happy for you, Jack. I’m happy for both of us.” She looked out at the golf course for a moment, as if she had something on her mind. “There’s something I have to say to you.”

Oh, God, he thought. And it had been going so well. His greatest fear had been something like this. He had been thinking of marriage, but now he was about to be cut down to size. “What is it?” he asked, as steadily as he could.

“Will you marry me, Jack?”

He nearly spilled his iced tea. “I was going to . . .”

“I know, you were going to back out. I was afraid that you were afraid of me.”

“Oh, no,” he said.

“You haven’t answered me. Do you want to know about my circumstances? I love you, Jack, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

“There’s nothing I need to know about you, Hillary. I love you, and I’ll marry you just as fast as we can do whatever it takes to get it done.”

“Oh, that’s such a relief,” she said. “I was afraid you were afraid of my wealth.”

“Not your wealth, hon, just our different stations in life.”

“There’s no difference, Jack. We live in the same community, in the same building, even. We play at the same golf course, we have the same best friends.”

“You’re a very generous person, Hillary.”

“You’re right, I am, but I’m not exercising generosity. I feel that we are absolute equals. I’m sorry about the difference in our fortunes, but it wasn’t my fault—I inherited it.”

“I promise I won’t hold it against you.”

“There are some things you need to know about my life and the way I live it.”

“I don’t need to know anything.”

“If we’re to be married, you need to know everything. I was married twice before I met you: divorced once, then widowed. Bob was a very wealthy man, and neither of us had children. After the estate was wound up and the taxes paid, I had a stock account with about seventy million in it, and four houses. I sold the one in Scottsdale. Now I live here in the winter and in Northeast Harbor, Maine, in the summer, and the spring and autumn on Fifth Avenue in New York, across from Central Park. Do you think you could live like that? I mean, I can sell any place you don’t want to live.”