“Hey, that sounds great, but I’m buying. You get the gas.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
She put a hand under Daisy’s chin and gazed into her eyes. “You stay here and be a good girl,” she said, then she turned to Stone. “Do you want her to kill anybody who comes into the house?”
“No, thanks,” Stone replied. “I wouldn’t want to come home and find my secretary dead.”
Stone slipped into a tweed jacket. “Okay, let’s go.” He led her downstairs to the garage, opened the door, and backed out, closing the garage door with a remote control.
“Your car makes a nice noise,” she said, as he accelerated toward Second Avenue. It’s an E55, isn’t it?”
“Very good. Most people can’t distinguish it from the ordinary E-class Mercedes.”
“I drove one, once; pretended that I was a prospective customer. I liked it.”
“Did you train Daisy yourself?”
“No, she was trained by an old army buddy of my father’s who got murdered. I bought her from his daughter. Daisy is what’s called in dog-breeding circles an ‘Excellent Working Bitch.’ ”
Stone laughed. “I like that.”
“Applies to me, too,” Holly said, grinning.
Soon they were creeping through traffic throug
h the little streets of Little Italy. “That’s Umberto’s Clam House,” Stone said, pointing at a little restaurant. “Joey Gallo got shot there. Down the street is a coffeehouse, where some other don got it while playing bocce in the back garden. You may have seen that photograph of the corpse, with a cigar still clamped in his teeth.”
“I think I saw that on the History Channel,” Holly said.
“I guess you have a lot of time for things like the History Channel in Orchid Beach.”
“Oh, we get out of the house once in a while.” She pointed at a little restaurant. “Let’s have lunch there.”
“Okay. Let me find a parking space.”
“I’ll go ahead and get a table.” She opened the door and got out. It took Stone another ten minutes before somebody freed up a parking space, and when he got back to the restaurant, she was sitting at a table in the window, looking at the menu. He stopped and just looked for a moment. He was finding her more and more attractive. He went in and took a seat.
“What looks good?”
“Pasta,” she said. “I was thinking about the white clam sauce.”
A waiter came over.
“I’ll have the same,” Stone said, after she’d ordered. “And let’s have a bottle of the Frascati.”
“I hope that’s a dry white wine,” she said.
“It is.”
The waiter brought the bottle and poured them each a glass.
Stone raised his glass. “To . . .” But, to his astonishment, Holly had kicked over her chair and run out of the restaurant. He ran to the front door and looked down the street in time to see her sprinting through the crowds on the sidewalk, her handbag in one hand and his Walther in the other.
4
STONE RAN A few steps in the direction Holly had taken, but she had disappeared into the crowd. He ran back to the restaurant, left some money on the table, and ran to his car. He executed a lucky U-turn and started down the street, checking both sides for Holly. A couple of blocks down, he found a parking place and got out of the car, searching the street for signs of her. Then he saw her half a block away, walking toward him. He leaned on the car and waited.
“I can’t believe I let the son of a bitch outrun me,” Holly said, though she wasn’t even breathing hard.