Worst Fears Realized (36 page)
“Forget it,” Stone said. He was feeling a little weak.
The flight attendant brought a clean towel and pressed it against the back of Stone’s shoulder. “Just lean back against the seat,” she said. “That will hold the towel in place.”
“You okay here?” Dino asked. “I want to search the rest of the airplane.”
“I’m okay,” Stone replied.
Dino beckoned to Sam Warren. They walked aft in the airplane, checking under seats and in the toilets. Shortly, Dino returned. “How you doing?”
“I’m fine, Dino; when can we get out of here?”
“You’re going to have to go to the emergency room,” Dino said.
“Well, I’m not going in an ambulance; you can drive me.”
“All right,” Dino said. “Miss?” he said to the flight attendant. “Can you get me a wheelchair?”
“I don’t need a wheelchair,” Stone said. “I can walk.”
“I’m not going to have you walking through the airport, covered with blood, then passing out in front of everybody,” Dino said.
“Did you get Mitteldorfer?” Stone asked.
“I didn’t see him; Andy and his people are checking the lounge and the corridors now. He may have made it out during the excitement.”
Two security people arrived with a stretcher and took Peter Hausman’s body away, leaving Stone and Dino alone on the airplane.
“You just sit tight,” Dino said. “I’m going to go find a wheelchair, then we’ll get you out of here.” He left Stone alone on the airplane.
Stone was feeling better after the shock of learning that he had been stabbed had passed. Twenty minutes had passed since the excitement, and he was even feeling a little drowsy. He pushed the recline button on his seat, which was at the rear of the first-class
compartment, and tucked a pillow under his head. At least he could rest until they got him out of here.
Stone was nearly asleep when he heard the sound, which was very like snoring. He opened his eyes. How could he be snoring, when he wasn’t even asleep, yet? The sound persisted. Stone pressed a button, and his seat returned to a sitting position. He could still hear the snoring, and it seemed to be coming from behind him somewhere.
He got to his feet, somewhat unsteadily, and began to make his way down the aisle toward the rear of the airplane, listening. The snoring grew louder. Well back into the tourist section of the airplane, he stopped and looked up and to his left. The large overhead bin was closed. He reached up and opened it, then took Dino’s .38 from his belt and stepped back.
The snoring was coming from a raincoat stashed in the overhead bin. With the short gun barrel, Stone moved the coat out of the way. A middle-aged man with gray hair and a small beard lay on his back in the compartment, snoring loudly. At first, Stone didn’t recognize him.
Dino came back aboard the airplane, pushing a wheelchair. “Hey!” he called to Stone. “What are you doing back there? You shouldn’t be on your feet!”
“Come back here,” Stone called to him, “and bring your cuffs.”
Mitteldorfer jerked awake at the sound of Stone’s voice. He turned and looked at Stone, and recognition distorted his face. “You!” he screamed.
“Me!” Stone shouted back at him.
I
T WAS AFTER 1:00 A.M., AND IT HAD BEGUN
raining when Dino’s car stopped in front of Stone’s house. The emergency room had been a zoo. They had given him a local anesthetic, stitched him up, given him a tetanus shot, some antibiotics, and a little bottle of painkillers. It had taken Stone some time to convince his doctor that he would be better off at home than in the hospital.
“Thanks,” Stone said.
“It wasn’t much out of my way,” Dino replied.
“I mean for shooting Hausman. He was about to do more damage.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t shoot him sooner.”
“It’s over, isn’t it? Finally”
“Yeah, it’s over.”
“There’s nobody out there trying to do us in?”
“You can sleep well tonight,” Dino said. “Me, too, come to that. Mary Ann and Ben are already back at home.”
“I’m glad; I know you’ve missed them.”
“Yeah, I have. Being a bachelor isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Oh, I don’t know; it’s not a bad life, when people aren’t trying to kill you.”
“What are you going to say to Eduardo?”
“I’ll reason with him.”
“It might work, if you can do it without annoying him. Sicilians perceive insults even where there are none.”
“I’ll reason with him very carefully.”
“Good. You’re my friend, Stone, but I can’t say I want you for a brother-in-law.”
“I’m hurt, Dino.”
“You going to reason with Dolce, too?”
“I’m not sure she can be reasoned with.”
“Now you’re beginning to get the picture.”
“I’m too tired to think about it right now,” Stone said. “And the painkillers are starting to kick in. I hope I can get upstairs before I fall asleep.”
“You want some help?”
“No, I’ll make it.” Stone opened the car door and stepped out into the rain. “Good night, Dino.”
“Good night, Stone. I’ll call you tomorrow and give you the latest on Mitteldorfer.”
“You do that.” Stone closed the car door and walked slowly up the front steps of his house. He let himself in and took the elevator upstairs, because he didn’t feel like negotiating the stairs. He had a pretty good buzz from the painkillers.
There was a light on in the bedroom, which gave him a little start. He crept into the room and found Dolce asleep in his bed, naked, only partly covered by
a sheet. The expression on her face was one of a somnolent child, all innocence and sweetness.
He slipped out of the sling that held his arm, got undressed as quietly as he could, switched off the light, and got into bed beside her. She stirred in her sleep and reached out for him, illuminated by the light of half a moon, coming through the clouds outside.
“You okay?” she asked, without really waking up.
“I’m okay. How’d you get in?”
Her brow wrinkled. “Remote control for the garage door. I brought your car back. What happened?”
She seemed to be waking up, now, and he didn’t want that. He stroked her face, and she slept again. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” he whispered, letting sleep come to him.
He had absolutely no idea what he would say to her tomorrow.
I am grateful to my editor, vice president and associate publisher Gladys Justin Carr, and her staff, associate editor Erin Cartwright and editorial associate Deirdre O’Brien, as well as all those at HarperCollins who have worked so hard for the success of my books.
I also want to express my gratitude to my agent, Morton L. Janklow, and his principal associate, Anne Sibbald, as well as to the staff of Janklow & Nesbit for their continuing efforts in the management of my writing career and for their warm friendship.
I am also very grateful to my wife, Chris, who is always the first subjected to my manuscripts, for plugging the holes therein and for the shoulder rubs that keep me working at the computer.
“We Are Very Different People”:
Stuart Woods on Stone Barrington
An Interview by Claire E. White
S
tuart Woods was born in the small southern town of Manchester, Georgia on January 9, 1938. His mother was a church organist and his father an ex-convict who left when Stuart was two years old, when it was suggested to him that, because of his apparent participation in the burglary of a Royal Crown Cola bottling plant, he might be more comfortable in another state. He chose California, and Stuart only met him twice thereafter before his death in 1959, when Stuart was a senior in college.
After college, Stuart spent a year in Atlanta, two months of which were spent in basic training for what he calls “the draft-dodger program” of the Air National
Guard. He worked at a men’s’ clothing store and at Rich’s department store while he got his military obligation out of the way. Then, in the autumn of 1960, he moved to New York in search of a writing job. The magazines and newspapers weren’t hiring, so he got a job in a training program at an advertising agency, earning seventy dollars a week. “It is a measure of my value to the company,” he says, “that my secretary was earning eighty dollars a week.”
At the end of the sixties, after spending several weeks in London, he moved to that city and worked there for three years in various advertising agencies. At the end of that time he decided that the time had come for him to write the novel he had been thinking about since the age of ten. But after getting about a hundred pages into the book, he discovered sailing, and “…everything went to hell. All I did was sail.”
After a couple of years of this his grandfather died, leaving him, “…just enough money to get into debt for a boat,” and he decided to compete in the 1976 Observer Single-handed Transatlantic Race (OSTAR). Since his previous sailing experience consisted of, “…racing a ten-foot plywood dingy on Sunday afternoons against small children, losing regularly,” he spent eighteen months learning more about sailing and,
especially, ocean navigation while the boat was built at a yard in Cork.
He moved to a nearby gamekeeper’s cottage on a big estate to be near the building boat. In the summer of 1975 he sailed out to the Azores in a two-handed race, in company with Commander Bill King, a famous World War II submarine commander and yachtsman, who had done a round-the-world, single-handed voyage. Commander King then flew back to Ireland, and Stuart sailed back, single-handed, as his qualifying cruise for the OSTAR the following year.
The next couple of years were spent in Georgia, dividing his time between Manchester and Atlanta, while selling his grandfather’s business, a small-town department store, and writing two non-fiction books.
Blue Water, Green Skipper
, was an account of his Irish experience and the OSTAR, and
A Romantic’s Guide to the Country Inns of Britain and Ireland
, “was a travel book, done on a whim.
He also did some more sailing. In August of 1979 he competed in the now notorious Fastnet Race of 1979, which was struck by a huge storm. Fifteen competitors and four observers lost their lives, but Stuart and his host crew finished in good order, with little damage. That October and November, he spent skippering
his friend’s yacht back across the Atlantic, calling at the Azores, Madiera and the Canary Islands, finishing at Antigua, in the Caribbean.
In the meantime, the British publisher of
Blue Water, Green Skipper
had sold the American rights to W.W. Norton, a New York publishing house, and they had also contracted to publish the novel, on the basis of two hundred pages and an outline, for an advance of $7500. “I was out of excuses to not finish it, and I had taken their money, so I finally had to get to work.” He finished the novel and it was published in 1981, eight years after he had begun it. The novel was called
Chiefs
.
Though only 20,000 copies were printed in hard-back, the book achieved a hefty paperback sale and was made into a six-hour critically acclaimed television drama for CBS-TV, starring Charlton Heston, Danny Glover, John Goodman, Billy D. Williams, and Stephen Collins.
Chiefs
also established Stuart as a novelist in the eyes of the New York publishing community and was the beginning of a successful career. He has since written fifteen more novels, the most recent of which are
Dead in the Water
, which just came out in paperback, and
Swimming to Catalina
, just out in hardcover from HarperCollins. Both books feature Stone Barrington,
the handsome, sophisticated attorney/investigator, and are New York Times bestsellers.
Chiefs
won the coveted Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America, and Stuart was nominated again for
Palindrome
. Recently he has been awarded France’s Prix de Literature Policière, for
Imperfect Strangers
.
In 1984 Stuart married for the first time, but the marriage ended in 1990. “I married too young,” he says. “I was only forty-seven.” Then, after fifteen years in Atlanta, he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There he spent five years, building a house and meeting his second wife, Chris, who was working in a local bookstore while trying to write her own novel. He now divides his time between Florida and Connecticut and travels widely. At fifty-nine, he has no plans to retire. “I reckon I’m good for another fifteen or twenty novels, maybe more,” he says. “I began to be a lot more careful about my health after I learned that heart disease can be prevented by drinking red wine, so I should be around for a long time.”
CEW: When did you first know you wanted to be a novelist?
SW: My mother taught me to read a year before I went to school, and I became a voracious reader. I first tried to write a novel when I was nine, but I gave up when I found out how hard it was.
CEW: Did you take any formal writing classes or seminars?
SW: The only writing class I ever took was a correspondence course at the University of Georgia, because I needed an additional five credits to graduate. Any teaching I learned from came from my early bosses in the advertising business, who were sticklers for persuasive prose. I learned a lot there.
CEW: I’d like to talk about the latest two novels which feature the popular character, Stone Barrington:
Dead in the Water
and
Swimming to Catalina
. What was your inspiration for the storylines?
SW: The inspiration for
Dead in the Water
came from an article I read in a yachting magazine about an incident where a woman’s husband died in the middle of the Atlantic and she managed to sail herself the rest of the way across. I wrote a short story about it for another
sailing magazine, and later, it occurred to me that it might make a basis for a novel. Still later, it occurred to me that it might make a Stone Barrington novel. Near the end of the book, when Arrington marries her movie star, I thought that might make a good beginning for the next book, which is how
Swimming to Catalina
came along.
