Gone

CHAPTER 89

Old Beto, Perrine’s head vaquero, was standing beside his long-faced butler, Arthur, on the other side of the forty-five-million-dollar aircraft’s drop-down stairs.

“Beto, what is it? You look excited,” Perrine cried in Spanish as he handed his English butler his silk sport coat and began rolling up his sleeves. “Don’t tell me she foaled?”

Bowlegged Beto nodded rapidly and smiled, the laugh lines around his bright eyes like cracks in brown glass.

“Show me immediately.”

They walked along the front of his massive, marble-stepped mansion and around the pool to the air-conditioned barn. Though he had several Thoroughbred racehorses, Perrine’s real passion was for the show horses. They walked past stalls filled with several million dollars’ worth of them. He stopped to pat and pet his favorites, She-Wolf, and Blue, and Troubled Queen. The prize horses took their names from the Jackson Pollock paintings that hung in the mansion’s front hallway.

Perrine peered into Troubled Queen’s stall at the new-born foal. It was a filly, like he’d predicted. A pale-strawberry roan as pretty as her mother. The little horse peered back at him shyly before tucking itself back in, next to its mother.

“Look! She is afraid of me, Beto!” Perrine complained. “Can you believe this? Afraid of me?”

There was a troubled look on Beto’s face.

“What is it?” Perrine asked.

“What are we to call her?”

Perrine stared at the baby horse, a finger pressed to his pursed lips. He finally raised his finger in the air like a maestro.

“We shall call her La Rose,” Perrine announced.

“La Rose,” Beto repeated reverently as Perrine patted the old man on his shoulder and turned.

What he didn’t tell Beto was that “La Rose” came from the name of the captivating Paul Delvaux painting that he’d just picked up at Sotheby’s. Eighteen million was probably a tad pricey for the Belgian surrealist, Perrine thought, rolling his sleeves back down, but, hey, you can’t take it with you.

Arthur was waiting for him outside the front door of the barn, holding his cream-colored jacket. Perrine slipped back into it and shot the cuffs.

“Arthur,” he said.

“Yes, Mr. Perrine?”

“A plane will be coming in about twenty minutes with quite a few, uh, lake-house guests aboard.”

Arthur nodded without batting an eyelash. The lake house was where the men liked to blow off steam after the bonus-party festivities. Morning cleanup usually involved hoses and shovels, but boys will be boys.

“Are those new cameras that I ordered installed?”

“They went online yesterday with a closed-circuit feed into your bedroom, as you insisted,” Arthur said. “Shall I have Hector and Junior waiting with the van at the airfield?”

“Yes, you shall, Arthur. Please remind them and the rest of the staff that these are special guests. Guests who will be treated with the utmost respect.”

Perrine smiled proudly as he walked with his manservant toward his glittering pool, the tiers of manicured gardens, his magnificent mansion.

“That is, until I kill them, of course,” he said.