Son of Stone (Stone Barrington 21)

“In December?”

“It wasn’t exactly my choice.”

Stone went into the little bathroom off his office, got a towel, returned and handed it to Herbie. “Have a seat and tell me about it.”

Herbie took off his sodden overcoat, draped it over a chair, and sat down, running the towel over his hair. “Well, I went on a singles lunchtime cruise,” he said.

“They do cruises in December?”

“Singles don’t care if it’s cold; it’s warm inside the yacht.”

“Yacht?”

“These are expensive cruises. They use a seventy-foot yacht, and they serve a good lunch and wine. It’s two hundred fifty a head.”

“Sounds profitable. Any likely women?”

“Yes, a number.”

“So why did you decide to get off before the yacht reached the dock?”

“There was an altercation,” Herbie said.

“What started it?”

“There were these two guys, dressed well, but kind of beefy. They had knives.”

“For this they charge two-fifty a head?” Stone asked.

“I don’t know what they were doing there. Well, no, that’s wrong; I have a very good idea what they were doing there.”

“Which was?”

“Stephanie.”

Stephanie was Herbie’s sort of ex-wife. She and her brother had, according to news reports, stolen nearly a billion dollars from their father’s asset management firm and skipped to a Pacific island nation with no extradition treaty.

“She sent me some divorce papers a couple of times, but I just threw them away,” Herbie said.

“Never a good idea to throw away legal documents,” Stone pointed out. “Then what?”

“I was standing near the rear of the yacht’s saloon, talking to a girl, and these two guys appeared and said they needed to talk to me. They shoved me out on the afterdeck, and one of them said, ‘You should have signed the papers.’ Then both of them produced switchblades.”

“And how did you handle that?” Stone asked, fascinated now.

“I thought about it for about a nanosecond,” Herbie said, “and then I decided that there was no way to handle it that didn’t involve a lot of spilled blood, and it was my blood in question, so I ran for the rail. I jumped on a rear cockpit seat running, then just took a long leap.”

“And where was the yacht at this time?”

“Out near the Statue of Liberty,” Herbie replied.

“I suppose the two guys didn’t follow you into the water?”

“No, it was really, really cold. I made for Lady Liberty.”

“Wearing an overcoat?”

“I thought it would get even colder if I took it off. I swam like hell, and I was beginning to get pretty tired when my feet touched bottom. I waded the rest of the way. There was a dock with a ladder, so I climbed up that. I found a men’s room and turned on the heated hand-dryer thing, you know?”