Bob came down the steps and flung himself at Fred. They all got into the car and headed home.

—

Stone had spent most of the trip trying to put Gala out of his mind. He hadn’t succeeded, but he had time.

Fred pulled into the garage, and Stone got out. Joan came through the inside door.

“There’s someone here to see you,” she said. “He won’t give me his name. He said those people in Palm Beach sent him.”

“Dicky Chalmers?”

“Right. He’s waiting in my office.”

“Send him in.” Stone walked into his office and set his briefcase on the desk. He poked through the messages and found one from Dicky Chalmers.

I’m sending you a client—you’ll like him.

Stone looked up and found a rather seedy young man standing in his doorway. He appeared to be in his late twenties or early thirties and was dressed in the current youth fashion. Stone thought of it as “adolescent lumberjack”: jeans, checkered shirt, tail out, vest, hoodie, scraggly beard, and unkempt hair.

“I’m Laurence Hayward,” he said. “Richard Chalmers said I had to see you.”

“Had to?”

“I’m being pursued,” he said.

“Who’s pursuing you?”

“Everybody.”

Oh, God, one of those, he thought. “Well,” Stone said, “you’d better close the door and sit down.”

—

To be continued . . .

Author’s Note

I am happy to hear from readers, but you should know that if you write to me in care of my publisher, three to six months will pass before I receive your letter, and when it finally arrives it will be one among many, and I will not be able to reply.

However, if you have access to the Internet, you may visit my website at www.stuartwoods.com, where there is a button for sending me e-mail. So far, I have been able to reply to all my e-mail, and I will continue to try to do so.

If you send me an e-mail and do not receive a reply, it is probably because you are among an alarming number of people who have entered their e-mail address incorrectly in their mail software. I have many of my replies returned as undeliverable.

Remember: e-mail, reply; snail mail, no reply.

When you e-mail, please do not send attachments, as I never open these. They can take twenty minutes to download, and they often contain viruses.

Please do not place me on your mailing lists for funny stories, prayers, political causes, charitable fund-raising, petitions, or sentimental claptrap. I get enough of that from people I already know. Generally speaking, when I get e-mail addressed to a large number of people, I immediately delete it without reading it.