Swimming to Catalina (37 page)
Then Ippolito gave up throwing punches and used his right to help his left hand deal with the gun. He
grabbed hold of it with both hands and yanked, and it went off with a roar.
Stone saw the back of the pilot’s head explode.
The helicopter began to rotate, at first slowly, then faster and faster.
Stone couldn’t tell whether it was going up or down, until it hit the water with a crash. With the rear door open, the machine had no chance to float. Stone forgot about Ippolito and started trying to get out. The gun left his hand; he didn’t know if Ippolito had it or if it was going to the bottom.
Stone broke the surface. He seemed always to be doing that, he thought. How many good suits had he ruined? The black helicopter was gone now, but somehow it was still making noise; the air was filled with the sound of the rotor.
Then, as Stone watched, Ippolito broke the surface some six feet in front of him. He looked very angry, and he was holding Zip’s automatic, which, Stone reckoned, still had another twelve or fourteen rounds in the clip. Stone ducked under the water.
His eyes were open, and he saw something good: the water just next to Ippolito exploded, and the pistol that had been in the banker’s hand was sinking fast.
Stone surfaced. Above and in front of him was an LAPD helicopter; Rick Grant was sitting in its open door, his feet on the strut below him and a shotgun in his hands. The shotgun was pointed at Ippolito, who was angrily treading water.
Then Stone saw Dino, holding a bunch of life jackets, jump out of the police helicopter. He came up sputtering. “You owe me one Armani suit!” he yelled, handing Stone a life jacket and tossing one to Ippolito.
Stone grabbed him and kissed him on the forehead.
“Get off me!” Dino screamed. “The suit will be enough!”
Other helicopters arrived, and other people were in the water, dealing with Ippolito. Rick’s helicopter had its struts in the water now.
Stone and Dino started swimming for the chopper.
S
tone sat at the window of his study in Turtle Bay and watched the season’s first snow fall on the gardens behind his house. The phone rang, and he picked it up.
“Hello?”
“It’s Arrington.”
His voice warmed. “How are you?” He had not talked with her in months, because she didn’t want him to.
“I’m okay. How did the business in L.A. turn out?”
“Ippolito goes on trial shortly after the first of the year; I’ll be going back out there to testify.”
“There was certainly enough in the papers about it. I think the
Wall Street Journal
was more upset than anybody.”
There was something in her voice that bothered him; she seemed to be straining for small talk.
“I still find it hard to believe that David Sturmack was involved; he and his wife were always so sweet to me.”
“They haven’t found her yet,” Stone said. “She apparently got to Panama after cleaning out the safe at their house, and she hasn’t been seen since.”
“Imagine, a woman like her on the run.”
“She’s very rich, so don’t worry about her; I’m sure she’s making some gigolo very happy.”
“Vance told me he sent you a tape of
Out of Court;
he had it cut especially, so you could see yourself in the movie.”
“Yes, he did. It was very embarrassing to look at.” He couldn’t take the chat anymore. “What’s happening, Arrington?”
Her voice changed. “Stone, there’s news.”
Stone flinched. He had an awful feeling he knew what was coming.
“Vance’s child was born last night.”
Stone let out the breath he had been holding. “Congratulations to both of you,” he managed to say.
“The blood tests left no doubt,” she said. “I want you to understand that; there was no need to go to DNA tests.”
“I understand,” he replied. A memory flooded over him: he was walking through F.A.O. Schwarz, the big toy store, looking for a first gift for a new baby. He snapped himself out of it. “I understand what you have to do.”
“I’m glad you do,” she said, then she started to cry.
“It’s all right, Arrington,” he said. “You’re doing the right thing.”
“I have to,” she said.
“I know.”
“Vance did pay your bill, didn’t he?” she said, incongruously.
“He reimbursed all my expenses,” Stone said. “I
didn’t send him a bill; I didn’t do it for him.”
“Stone, I will never be able to thank you enough for what you did.”
“Don’t worry about that…”
“Really, Vance and the baby and I owe you so much.”
Stone was extremely uncomfortable with this. “Was it a boy or a girl?”
“A girl. Seven pounds, one ounce.”
“She’ll be beautiful, like you.”
“Let’s hope she looks like her father.”
“I have to go,” Stone said. “I have an appointment.” If he talked to her any more he’d make an idiot of himself.
“I do love you, Stone,” she said, then hung up.
Stone hung up the phone and, to his astonishment, he began to cry. A moment later, he had control of himself. He dialed Dino’s direct extension.
“Lieutenant Bacchetti,” Dino said.
“Dinner tonight?”
“Sure.” Dino listened to the silence for a moment. “You’ve had some news?”
“Yeah. Elaine’s, at eight-thirty?”
“Sure.”
“You’re going to have to drive me home.”
“What are cops for?” Dino asked, then hung up.
Stone sat and looked out the window at the snow. He sat there most of the day.
Washington, Connecticut
July 23, 1997
I am grateful to my editor, HarperCollins vice president and associate publisher Gladys Justin Carr; her associate editor, Elissa Altman; and all the people at HarperCollins who worked so hard for the success of this book.
I am also grateful to my agent, Morton L. Janklow; his principal associate, Anne Sibbald; and their colleagues at Janklow & Nesbit for their continuing enthusiasm in the management of my career. I am in good hands.
E-Book Extra “We Are Very Different People”:
Stuart Woods on Stone Barrington
“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 in?piration 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.
CEW: In
Swimming to Catalina
, Stone Barrington returns and Hollywood and its pretensions are skewered—hilariously. Did you spend a lot of time in Hollywood to research the story or did it grow out of your experience in having
Chiefs
turned into a TV mini-series?
SW: My experience of Hollywood comes from being in Los Angeles on book tour every year or two and having some friends in the movie business.
Chiefs
was filmed in Chester, South Carolina, and that never took me to California. I didn’t do any specific research for the book.
CEW: What or who was the inspiration for Stone Barrington?
SW: There was no particular inspiration for Stone Barrington. I just put him together as the story went along, and I liked him, so I brought him back.