Stuart Woods Holly Barker Collection Read online

  Stuart Woods HOLLY BARKER Collection

  Orchid Blues

  Blood Orchid

  Iron Orchid

  Hothouse Orchid

  Stuart Woods

  BOOKS BY STUART WOODS

  FICTION

  Strategic Moves†

  Santa Fe Edge§

  Lucid Intervals†

  Kisser†

  Hothouse Orchid*

  Loitering with Intent†

  Mounting Fears‡

  Hot Mahogany†

  Santa Fe Dead§

  Beverly Hills Dead

  Shoot Him If He Runs†

  Fresh Disasters†

  Short Straw§

  Dark Harbor†

  Iron Orchid*

  Two Dollar Bill†

  The Prince of Beverly Hills

  Reckless Abandon†

  Capital Crimes‡

  Dirty Work†

  Blood Orchid*

  The Short Forever†

  Orchid Blues*

  Cold Paradise†

  L.A. Dead†

  The Run‡

  Worst Fears Realized†

  Orchid Beach*

  Swimming to Catalina†

  Dead in the Water†

  Dirt†

  Choke

  Imperfect Strangers

  Heat

  Dead Eyes

  L.A. Times

  Santa Fe Rules§

  New York Dead†

  Palindrome

  Grass Roots‡

  White Cargo

  Deep Lie‡

  Under the Lake

  Run Before the Wind‡

  Chiefs‡

  TRAVEL

  A Romantic’s Guide to the Country

  Inns of Britain and Ireland (1979)

  MEMOIR

  Blue Water, Green Skipper (1977)

  *A Holly Barker Novel

  †A Stone Barrington Novel

  ‡A Will Lee Novel

  §An Ed Eagle Novel

  Table of Contents

  Orchid Blues

  Blood Orchid

  Iron Orchid

  Hothouse Orchid

  Praise for the Novels of Stuart Woods

  Orchid Blues

  “Mr. Woods delivers smart characters and dialogue with a nice swing to it. . . . Holly and Ham are engaging . . . with lots of gumption and tough-talking banter between them. . . . Mr. Woods, like his characters, has an appealing way of making things nice and clear.”

  —The New York Times

  “His action scenes are clean and sharp.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Fast paced and exciting . . . sure to please his fans.”

  —Booklist

  “[Will] keep you turning pages.”—Kirkus Reviews

  Cold Paradise

  “A delightful tale of sex and violence . . . Sopranos-style . . . slick, sophisticated fun.”—The Washington Post

  “Woods delivers his most riveting and glamorous Barrington novel yet.”—Vero Beach Press Journal (FL)

  “Plenty of action plus a surprise ending.”

  —The Stuart News/Port St. Lucie News (Stuart, FL)

  “Roller-coaster plotting.”—The Denver Post

  L.A. Dead

  “Scrumptious!”—The New York Times

  “Alive with action . . . so delightfully, typically Woods, it will send his fans into paroxysms of joy. . . . Entertainment novels can’t get any better than this.”

  —The Associated Press

  “The best novel in the series. With an exclamation point, Stuart Woods makes it evident that he is a force in the mystery genre.”—Midwest Book Review

  “One of the smoothest writers in the pop-literature biz and always a pleasure to read. . . . A stylish whodunit.”

  —The Detroit News

  “Barrington’s fans will likely welcome the detective’s newest California-chic adventure.”—Publishers Weekly

  “An exciting story, and Stuart Woods tells it well.”

  —Winston-Salem Journal

  “[A] nerve-racking thriller.”

  —The Stuart News/Port St. Lucie News (Stuart, FL)

  ... And His Other Novels

  “An action-packed puzzler.”—People

  “Keeps you turning page after page.”

  —The Washington Post

  “A whale of a story.”—The New York Times

  “Blackmail, murder, suspense, love—what else could you want in a book?”—Cosmopolitan

  “Terrific.”—Pat Conroy

  “A fast-paced thriller.”—Rocky Mountain News

  “Another gem. . . . A book to read and get chills from on even the hottest day.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Woods delivers a marvelously sophisticated, thoroughly modern, old-fashioned read.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,

  Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,

  Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632,

  New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

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  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a G. P. Putnam’s Sons edition.

  First Signet Printing, October 2002

  Copyright © Stuart Woods, 2001

  Excerpt from Blood Orchid copyright © Stuart Woods, 2002

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-09838-7

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is for

  Phil and Susan Dus
enberry.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  Fifty-four

  Fifty-five

  Fifty-six

  Fifty-seven

  Fifty-eight

  Fifty-nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-one

  Sixty-two

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  One

  HE WAITED UNTIL THE LAST OF THE LINE HAD entered the cinema for the eight o’clock movie.

  “All right, let’s take a tour,” he said to the boy at the wheel.

  The boy drove slowly around the parking lot.

  “Here,” he said.

  The boy stopped the car.

  The man looked at the parked vehicle. It was an older Ford commercial van, well cared for and clean. “Wait a minute,” he said. He got out of the car and grabbed his tool bag. “Drive over to the edge of the parking lot and wait. When you see the van’s headlights go on, follow me home. I’ll be making a lot of turns.”

  “Yessir,” the boy said.

  He slipped a pair of rubber gloves on, then walked over to the van and tried the door. Unlocked. It took him less than a minute to punch the steering lock and start the van. He switched on the lights and checked the odometer: 48,000 miles; not bad. He backed out of the parking space and drove out of the lot, onto the highway. In the rearview mirror he watched the boy fall in behind him, well back. He drove for a couple of minutes, constantly making turns, checking the mirror; then he turned down a dirt road, drove a hundred yards and stopped. The boy stopped behind him. He sat in the van and watched the traffic pass on the highway for five minutes; then he made a U-turn and went back to the highway and headed west. He had two hours before the van’s owner would come out of the movies and discover his loss, but he needed only half an hour.

  Twenty-five minutes later, he drove into the little town, and five minutes after that, he pulled the van into the large steel shed behind his business. Half a dozen men, who had been sitting around a poker table, stood up and walked over.

  “Looks good,” one of them said.

  “It’ll do. Only 48K on the clock, and it runs like a sewing machine. Let’s do it.”

  Everybody went to work. First, they donned rubber gloves, then they washed the van thoroughly and cleaned the interior, and fastened two rough wooden benches to the floor. Two men unrolled a large decal and affixed it to the side of the van. Environmental Services, Inc., it read, and in smaller letters, Cleaning up after the world. There was a phone number, too. If anyone rang it, they’d get a pizzeria on U.S. 1. They fixed an identical decal to the opposite side of the van, then changed the license plates, tossing the old ones into the van.

  Somebody looked under the hood, fiddled with a couple of things, then closed it. “Good shape,” he said. “The man knows how to take care of a vehicle.” He checked a sticker on the windshield. “Had it serviced last week; nice of him.”

  “I hope his insurance is paid up,” someone else said.

  “All right,” their leader said, “let’s go over it again.” The poker chips and cards were removed from the big round table, and a large floor plan was spread out. “Number two,” the leader said, “take us through it.”

  “We all know it by heart,” somebody said.

  “You will when I’m finished,” the leader said. “Then you can all get a good night’s sleep.”

  When the van was ready they went home and left him alone in the shed. He went to an elongated safe in a corner, tapped the combination into the keypad, and opened it. He removed six Remington riot guns—12-gauge pump shotguns with 18¼-inch barrels, normally used for police work—and took them to the van, laying them on the floor. He went to a locker and removed six blue jumpsuits—all the same size—took them to the van and put one where each man would sit. Back to the locker to find six yellow construction hard hats, six dust masks and six pairs of tinted safety goggles, which he laid neatly on top of the jumpsuits. He then laid a shotgun on each seat, and placed a box of double-aught shells and a pair of latex surgical gloves beside each shotgun. Finally, he went back to the gun safe, removed six 9mm semiautomatic handguns and boxes of ammunition and distributed them inside the van. The weapons had been bought, one at a time, at gun shows or from unlicensed dealers, then stripped, inspected and, if necessary, repaired. Before reassembly, each part of each weapon had been washed clean with denatured alcohol and oiled. There would be no fingerprints or DNA samples on them.

  When he was done, he sat down at the table, stripped off his gloves and poured himself a drink from a bottle of bourbon. He looked at the newspaper clipping again. Eleven o’clock at the courthouse. “Happy occasion,” he said aloud to himself. “And oh so convenient.”

  Two

  HOLLY BARKER OPENED HER EYES AND FELT FOR Jackson. His side of the bed was empty, and she could hear the shower running. She moved her hand to the warm place on her stomach and found Daisy’s head. She scratched behind an ear and was answered with a small sigh. Daisy was a Doberman pinscher, and she liked to sleep with her head on Holly’s belly.

  Holly heard the shower turn off and, a moment later, Jackson’s bare feet padding across the bedroom carpet. She raised her head, tucked a pillow under it and eyed him—naked, wet hair, in a hurry. She liked him naked.

  “So,” she said, “where am I going on my honeymoon?”

  “Same place as I am,” Jackson replied, stepping into his boxer shorts and selecting a white shirt from a drawer.

  “I’m relieved to hear it,” she said. “And where is that?”

  “Someplace you’ll probably like,” he said.

  “Probably like? You’re not even sure I’m going to like it?”

  “I think you will,” he said, “but, in the immortal words of Fats Waller, ‘One never knows, do one?’ ”

  “This is how you treat your wife?”

  “I don’t have a wife.”

  “You will by high noon, or my daddy will shoot you.”

  “Ham wouldn’t shoot me; he’s too nice a guy.”

  “He would, if he knew you wouldn’t tell me where I’m going on my honeymoon.”

  “He knows, and that’s enough for Ham.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “My father knows where I’m going on my honeymoon, and your wife doesn’t?”

  “I told you, I don’t have a wife.”

  She sat up on one elbow, and the sheet fell away from her breasts. “How will I know what to pack?”

  “You packed yesterday,” he said, “and I told you what to pack, remember?”

  “Men never know w
hat to pack. What if you screw up?”

  “I’ll just have to take that chance.” He pulled on his trousers, found a necktie and started to tie it.

  “You’re driving me crazy,” she said, falling back onto the pillow.

  “If you don’t pull that sheet over your breasts, you’re going to drive me crazy,” he replied, looking at her in the mirror.

  She kicked the sheet completely off, disturbing Daisy’s sleep. “Take that,” she said.

  “I intend to,” he said, “when we arrive in . . . whatchacallit.”

  “Why are you rushing off ?” she asked seductively.

  “Don’t point that thing at me,” Jackson said. “I’ve got a closing in half an hour, then I have to do some dictating before I leave the office and then, on the way to the courthouse, I have to pick up the tickets at the travel agent’s and stop at the bank for some travelers’ checks.”

  “Why didn’t you have the tickets sent here?” she asked.

  “Because you would have ripped them open to find out where you’re going on your honeymoon.”

  He had her there. She fumed.

  He slipped into his suit jacket, adjusted his tie, came to the bed and bent over her.

  “Why didn’t you dry your hair?”

  “I’ll put the top down.” He kissed her on one nipple, then the other.