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Stone was packing the
following morning when his cell phone rang. “Hello?”
“Stone, it’s Ed
Eagle.”
“Hello, Ed. I tried
to reach you yesterday, but everything turned out all right. She
has a slight head wound, but the SFPD showed up at the perfect
moment and took her away. And now Terry Prince has a second
attempted murder charge against him.”
“Everything didn’t
turn out entirely all right, Stone,” Eagle said. “The cops took her
to an emergency room, where she got some stitches, and the doctor
insisted on keeping her overnight for observation. They put her in
a room with another patient, with a cop on guard outside her door.
She stole her roommate’s clothes, and while the cop was in the
john, she ran out of the hospital and found a cab dropping somebody
off at the ER.”
“Amazing,” Stone
said. “Then what?”
“The cops went to her
address and found the garage door open. They think she had a second
car there, but they had no idea what kind, so all they could do was
issue an APB for her, with no description of the vehicle. Unless
the cops get very lucky, she’s gone.”
“I hope they
fingerprinted her at the ER,” Stone said.
“Nope, apparently
they don’t have that facility. And she still has the cash in the
foreign bank account that nobody can find.”
“I wonder how much
she stole from Terry Prince,” Stone said.
An hour later, Stone
took off from Santa Monica Airport and got vectors toward Palmdale,
to the east. The weather forecast was for ninety-knot westerly
winds.
“We’ll make Wichita
on the first leg,” Stone said. “Then from there, if we’re lucky
with the winds, all the way to Teterboro.”
“Take your time,”
Dino said, opening a book of New York
Times crossword puzzles, “I’ve got all day.”
Stone leveled off at
forty-one thousand feet and turned into the sun.