“What kind of job did Bill Eggers stick you with?” Elaine asked.

“Actually, it’s not so bad. Dino and I are flying to Key West tomorrow morning.”

“This is work?”

“This is work.”

“You’re a lucky son of a bitch, aren’t you?” she said.

“Sometimes.”

“Later,” Elaine said, getting up to greet some regulars who had just wandered in.

“So what is it we have to do down there?” Dino asked. “I take it we’re not going to spend all our time on the beach.”

“I hate the beach,” Stone said. “It’s hot and sandy and uncomfortable. Have you ever made love on a beach? Sand gets into everything, and I mean everything. Even your ears.”

“Your ears?”

“Trust me.”

“I guess I’ll have to. You know anybody in Key West?”

“I met a lawyer from there once, at a meeting in Atlanta, but I can’t remember his name. Jack something, I think; nice guy.”

“You remember Tommy Sculley, from the old days?”

“Yeah, he was a few years ahead of us on the squad.”

“He put in his thirty and retired down there a few years ago, but he couldn’t stand it, so he got a job on the local force.”

“Good. Let’s look him up.”

“You didn’t answer my question: What do we have to do down there?”

Stone handed him the photograph. “Find this kid.”

“What, he didn’t come back from spring break last year?”

“That’s an old picture, from his college days. He’s a big boy now, twenty-six.”

“So we have to throw a bag over his head and bring him home to Mommy?”

“Nope. All we have to do is get his signature on a couple of documents, notarized, and we’re done. We can FedEx them back, then take a few days off and play some golf or some tennis or something.”

Stone explained the sale of the family business.

“What’s the problem between the kid and his daddy?”

“One of them is a kid; the other one’s a daddy.” Stone told Dino about the message on the postcard.

“That seems pretty definitive,” Dino observed.

“We don’t have to get him to kiss and make up—just sign the documents and collect a big check, his share of the sale of the business. That shouldn’t be too diffi cult.”

“Not the check part, anyway.”

“The kid has already got what the daddy describes as ‘a nice little trust fund,’ from his mother’s side of the family, so I doubt if he’s hurting too much.”

“Still, the other check sounds like a big one, if they’ve got nineteen factories around the world.”

“I didn’t ask, but I guess so.”

“You didn’t read the documents?”

“Not yet.”

“Read them; I’d like to know what we’re dealing with.”

Stone opened the envelope and flipped through the pages.