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while trying to get a cab.”
    “They can use my car,” Stone said.
    “Good idea, with the armor and all.”
    “You have an armored car?” Carrie asked.
    “Lightly armored,” Stone said. “It came that way, and it’ll stop a bullet.”
    “You,” Carrie said, putting her hand on his and squeezing, “are the second-best thing to happen to me in a long time.”

7
    CARRIE SLEPT IN STONE’S ARMS for most of the night, and neither of them was much interested in sex. Stone took a handgun out of his safe and kept it in the bedside drawer.
    Carrie didn’t wake up when he gently disengaged from her. He put on a robe, went down to the kitchen, and made them bacon and scrambled eggs, English muffins, coffee, and orange juice, then sent it upstairs in the dumbwaiter. He got the Times and went back upstairs to find Carrie sitting up in bed with a breakfast tray in her lap, bare-breasted, which was all right with him.
    “Your dumbwaiter woke me,” she said. “A little bell went off.”
    Stone took his own tray from the dumbwaiter and got in bed with it, adjusting the back with the remote control. “I’m glad you’re feeling better this morning,” he said. She was digging into the breakfast with enthusiasm.
    “I am, and I’m starved,” she said.
    Breakfast finished, he put their trays back into the dumbwaiter and sent it downstairs. He poured them both some more coffee and got back into bed. “I need to know a lot more about your ex-husband,” he said, “if I’m going to be able to help.”
    “What do you want to know?” she asked, sipping her coffee.
    “How long were you married?”
    “Nine years.”
    “What was the character of the marriage?”
    “At first, okay, then increasingly distant, then finally violent.”
    “You beat him up?”
    She laughed. “I got in a couple of good licks,” she said, “but I got the worst of it. I moved in with a girlfriend and got a lawyer.”
    “Tell me about the settlement.”
    “He wouldn’t settle, so it was really an award by the judge. I got the house on Habersham, which I sold immediately, half his brokerage account, which I put into a municipal bond fund, and one million dollars in cash, most of which I invested conservatively.”
    “Did the house have a mortgage?”
    “No; times were good when he bought it. He paid a million two, and I sold it for four and a half million.”
    “So, you’ve got several million dollars squirreled away.”
    “Winter always comes,” she said.
    “What is he so mad about?” Stone asked.
    “The fact that I left him and the size of the award. It amounted to half of what he had.”
    “He was surprised that you divorced him after he beat you up?”
    “Not surprised, I think, just angry. It made the papers, and that made him look bad. He’s angry about the award, because he wouldn’t have given me a dime, unless he had been forced to. He’s mad, too, because he knows that he could have settled for less than the judge gave me. That really got him angry. That and the fact that, in the real estate crunch, he’s lost most of what he had left.”
    “Does he have anything to gain by killing you? Insurance, maybe?”
    “No.”
    “So, it’s just irrational anger?”
    “That’s what he’s good at.”
    “You said you don’t know his address in Atlanta?”
    “That’s right.”
    The doorbell rang on his phone, and Stone pressed the speaker button. “Yes?”
    “It’s Bob. I’ve got Carrie’s luggage, and the Leahys are here.”
    “Take the Leahys to the kitchen. There’s coffee already made and Danish in the fridge. We’ll be down in a few minutes.” He pressed the button again and turned to Carrie. “We’d better get dressed; Bob is going to want to brief you about your security.”
     
     
     
    THEY FOUND the three men sitting at the kitchen counter, drinking coffee and eating pastries.
    “Morning, Carrie,” Cantor said. “This is Willie and Jimmy Leahy.”
    The two husky men waved.
    “Tell her what she