Stone Barrington 06-11

being observant help my golf game?”
    “Nothing can help your golf game,” Dino replied, “but if somebody had told me that my former wife and lover was hunting me down to kill me, I’d take a look around me once in a while.”
    Stone tensed. “Where?”
    “Over your left shoulder, parked at the curb, about two hundred yards down. Don’t look yet!”
    Stone tried to keep his eyes ahead. They stopped to tee off, and he took his driver out of the bag and tried a couple of practice swings, which allowed him to look at the car. “I can’t see who’s inside,” he said.
    “That’s kind of the point, isn’t it?” Dino asked. “If she’d wanted you to see her, she could have parked twenty yards from us.”
    “We’ve already made the local papers this week, as a result of the scene in the restaurant,” Stone said. “I don’t think I want to read a story that says I was shot dead on the golf course at the Breakers.”
    “Don’t worry,” Dino said. “You won’t. I may, but not you.”
    “How do you know she doesn’t want to kill you, too?”
    “Because I never married her, then dumped her when an old girlfriend called,” Dino said. “I’ve always been nice to Dolce.”
    Stone teed up and swung at the ball, hitting it straight, for a change. “I remember your telling me once that Eduardo was the devil, and that Dolce was his handmaiden. Is that what you call being nice?”
    “I didn’t say it to her, ” Dino pointed out. “You think I have a death wish?”
    “But she must know what you think of her.”
    “I don’t know how she could. I’ve certainly never told her.”
    “What about Mary Ann?”
    “Mary Ann and I have not yet come to the point in our marriage where she wants me dead. Someday, maybe, but not yet.” Dino drove the ball, and they got back into the cart.
    “What is it with Sicilians, anyway?” Stone asked.
    “Well, speaking as a scion of the more elegant north of Italy, it has always been my opinion that all Sicilians are totally batshit crazy. I mean, the vendetta thing would be counterproductive anywhere else but Sicily, but they’ve made an art of it. Do you have any idea how many more Sicilians there would be in the world, not to mention in this country, if there were no vendetta? If you took all of them who’ve been knifed, shotgunned, garroted, blown up, and poisoned, married them off and had them produce, say, four point five children each? Millions.”
    “And you’re saying that’s not counterproductive?”
    “Nah. It just concentrates more ill-gotten wealth in fewer hands, and it prevents a Sicilian population explosion. And that can’t be a bad thing.”
    “But you married a Sicilian.”
    “How do you think I know all this? It’s been an education, I can tell you.” Dino curled a thirty-foot, breaking, downhill putt into the cup.
    “How’d you do that?” Stone asked, astonished.
    “I just thought about how a Sicilian would do it, if the ball would kill somebody.”
    Stone laughed. “How can I make it up with Dolce, without getting killed?” he asked, serious again.
    “Make it up? You mean marry her again?”
    “No, no, no,” Stone sputtered. “I mean just make peace with her.”
    “You don’t make peace with Sicilians, unless there is a threat of death on both sides. You know, like the nuclear thing: mutually assured destruction. Where do you think the Pentagon and the Kremlin got the idea?”
    “There has to be another way.”
    “Eduardo could call her off.”
    “Yeah? He could do that?”
    “If she wasn’t crazy. Nobody can call off a crazy person, not even with a threat of death.”
    “You’re such a pleasure to be around, sometimes, Dino.”
    “I’m just telling you the way things are. No use kidding yourself.”
    “I guess not,” Stone said glumly. They were on a tee that faced the road, now, some four hundred and fifty yards away. Stone hit his first true drive, now, two hundred and sixty yards straight down the fairway.
    “Everybody gets lucky sometime,” Dino said.
    “That’s the thing about this game,” Stone said, getting into the cart. “Even the worst duffer can go out and, maybe two or three times in a round, he can hit a shot that’s the equal of anything a pro could do under the circumstances. And it gives you the entirely irrational hope that, if you worked at it, you might get pretty good at this game.”
    “That’s what keeps us coming back,” Dino said. He hit a good drive, too, but short of