Certain Prey (28 page)

“Not here yet,” he said quietly.

“Then we wait until Wooden Head calls,” said the first man.

“In the dark?”

“Yeah, in case she comes.”

“I’m dead on my ass,” the farther man said. “I get the couch, if that’s a couch.”
T
HE
SECOND MAN
lay down on the couch; the first sat in an easy chair, lit a cigarette. Rinker never allowed cigarettes in
her house. The second man said from the couch, “What if she smells that smoke?”

The smoker said, “Shit,” and dropped the cigarette butt on the hardwood floor and ground it out with his foot. She’d sanded the floors herself, and sealed them. The man’s action almost moved Rinker, but not quite.

“You seen this chick?” one man asked.

“Once, I think. Gotta nice rack.”

“The Guy seemed kind of scared of her. You know, like he was all that,
Get her quick, don’t give her a shot
.”

“Never seen a chick who could take me,” said the second man. “In fact, if this is the same chick I’m thinking about, I wouldn’t mind fuckin’ her first.”

“Don’t think that way. If the Guy’s nervous, we don’t want to be fuckin’ around.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Now shut up; I’m gonna get some sleep.”

“Listen for the shots,” the second man said. “Then you’ll know she got here.”
F
IVE
MINUTES LATER,
Rinker heard the first tentative snore from the man on the couch; the man on the chair sat unmoving, as far as she could tell. They were like that for another five minutes, the man on the couch breathing deeper, snoring more regularly; then the man on the couch stood up, lit a cigarette and started toward her. She withdrew just an inch into the deeper darkness of the closet. When he brushed by, a shoulder width away, she stepped sideways, then out of the closet in a dance step, her left pistol arm coming up. He never heard her, saw her or suspected her. She fired a double-tap into the back of his head and took three quick steps to the couch. The man on the couch snorted when the first man hit the floor, and may have been about to wake up. Rinker fired two more shots into his forehead.

Lights.

She got the lights on. The man on the floor was bleeding, but the blood was running out on vinyl. She could get that. The other one wasn’t bleeding much, just two small bubbles of blood over his brow ridges: slugs never exited.

She’d have to hurry, she thought. The sky outside seemed brighter: the summer dawn was not far away. She ran to the kitchen, got a roll of duct tape, and taped the wounds on the men’s heads. Stop the bleeding: leave no more traces than she had to. The back window, overlooking the communal Dumpster, would open wide enough, she thought, and the screen would swing free. She dragged the man on the couch to the window, opened it, laboriously shoved him into the window hole, took a last look around and pushed him out. He hit the tarmac below with a dull sloppy
whock.

The second guy, the one on the vinyl, was smaller, and she moved him more easily, over the sill, out the window; the impact, broken by the man already on the ground, was softer.

With the two men outside, she hurried, quietly as she could, down to the van, backed it up to the Dumpster and dragged the two bodies into the back.

She was tired. The bigger of the two guys probably went two-ten, maybe two-twenty. He was a lot of work. She sat for a moment in the van, catching her breath, and then started out. Ten minutes later, she was in the countryside. Fifteen minutes after the Dumpster, she was crawling down a one-lane track, next to a creek. She remembered the place from a country ramble earlier in the year; she remembered the unfenced cornfield that bordered on the track.

The dawn was coming as she dragged the men through a patch of weeds, ten rows back into the corn. With any luck, they wouldn’t be found until October, when the corn was picked. Before she left, she took their wallets, pocketed the money—a little over a thousand, total—and their driver’s licenses. On the way back to town, she fed the miscellaneous paper in the wallets out the window, little anonymous
scraps every couple hundred yards or so. In town, she stopped at a trash can and dumped the two empty wallets themselves.

Done.

Back to the apartment, up the stairs. A little after six o’clock in the morning: a little less than three hours before the banks opened. She’d spend it, she decided, wiping the place. Every coat hanger, every Coke can, every can and bottle in the cupboards and refrigerator. At the end, she wrote two notes—the first, a note to the landlord:

Sorry to do this to you, Larry, to skip out on the lease, but you’ve got the last month’s rent, and I’m sure you can move the place in a hurry. I’ve got bad personal problems with my ex—if the asshole does find me he’s gonna kill me—and I gotta get out of here. You can have the furniture and everything else in the place, instead of the rent. Sorry again, and have a good life. —Clara.

The landlord was greedy enough that he’d be moving the furniture out ten minutes after he got the note. If he could move somebody else in, in a hurry, she’d have that much less to worry about, involving fingerprints.

The second note she put in an envelope, which she sealed. She scrawled the St. Louis guy’s name on it, and under that wrote, “Private.”

The bank took five minutes, in a private booth. She spent most of the time wiping the box; much of the rest of the time putting one hundred and eighty thousand dollars in a brown paper bag. She also collected a brown cardboard folder that held her best, bottom-line, last-chance ID: credit cards, a Missouri driver’s license, a passport and up-to-date plates and registration for her car.

And a deed: the deed sold the Rink to James Larimore—
Wooden Head—for $175,000, a fair price six years ago when she’d bought the place, and then two months later sold it to Wooden Head. The sale had been a technical one, though witnessed by all the proper authorities. Until Wooden Head had the deed in his hands, Rinker was the owner. Now he would get it; and he was getting a deal.
W
OODEN
H
EAD
was waiting at the bar, in the back. He had a head the size of a regulation NBA basketball, but squared a bit, and small, delicate features and tight, dry eyes all squeezed into the middle of his face. He brought a briefcase with him.

“What we’ve got to do is this,” Rinker told him. “You gotta take a walk, so you don’t see it. Then I’m gonna get a bottle of Lysol and wipe everything in the office, and up and down the stairs. I’ll take everything out of the files that you need, and we’ll run it through the Xerox machine. Probably no more than fifty or sixty pieces. I don’t want any prints left behind.”

“When do you want me back?”

“Give me an hour. It’d be best if you just sat across the street in the doughnut place, read the papers for a while. Then I could find you if I need you.”

“Okay.”

“You guys are getting a deal,” Rinker said. “And here— you can read this while you’re eatin’ the doughnuts.” She handed him the deed. “This place is worth four, if it’s worth a dime. You might get four and a half.”

“We’re taking a risk,” he grunted. “Covering for ya.”

“A lot less risk if you keep wiping the place after I’m gone,” Rinker said. “When the cops show up, if they do, you don’t want to have anything to do with me. I left a note for my landlord saying I was having trouble with my ex, so you might say I told you that.”

“It’s weak,” Wooden Head said.

“So what? It’s what I got, and it’s better than nothing. Half the cops’ll figure I’m buried in a cornfield somewhere.” Wooden Head’s eyes slid away from hers. He knew about the two guys at the apartment, she thought.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

The bar was a quick rerun of the apartment: she wiped everything, Xeroxed critical papers using plastic disposable gloves, dumped everything she didn’t want in plastic garbage bags and cried for a while. When Wooden Head came back, she was ready to go.

“By the way,” she said. “Give this note to the Guy. It’s private.” She handed him the sealed envelope, picked up her briefcase, took a last look around.

“You going back to the apartment?” he asked.

“Yeah. I’ve gotta wipe that, too,” she said. “But who knows? Maybe the cops’ll never find it.” She looked at her watch: almost ten. The pilot would wait until noon. Plenty of time.

“The money’s clean,” Wooden Head said, as his good-bye. “Enjoy yourself.”

She stopped at that, peered at him: “You know what I do? For a living?”

“I’ve got an idea.”

“Then you’ll take me seriously when I tell you this: if this money’s not clean, I’ll come for you.”

And she was gone.
W
OODEN HEAD
WALKED
out to the main bar and watched through the windows as Rinker climbed into the beat-up van and drove away. Then he picked up a phone, called a number in Los Angeles and was tripped through a switchboard to St. Louis.

“Yeah?”

“It’s me. She’s on her way to the apartment.”

“Okay. You give her the money?”

“Yeah. She says if it’s not clean, she’ll come for me.”

“Nothing to worry about, in five minutes,” the Guy said.

“It’s clean, anyway,” Wooden Head said. “By the way, she gave me an envelope to give to you.”

“What’s in it?”

“I don’t know.” He held it up to a kitchen light. “It’s sealed up, and it says ‘Private.’”

“Open the fuckin’ thing.”

Wooden Head opened it, shook out the message and the two driver’s licenses. The names on the licenses meant nothing to him.

“There’s a note that says, ‘I’ll give you this one. Try again, and I’ll come visit.’ And there are two driver’s licenses. The names are . . .”

“I know the names, you don’t have to say them,” the Guy said.

After a long silence, Wooden Head said, “You still there?”

“Yeah.” More silence. Then, “Listen, you sure that money was clean?”

Wooden Head nodded at the phone. “Yeah, it was clean, it came from the political fund.”

“Good thing,” the Guy said. He sounded a little shaky. “Goddamn
good
thing.”

TWENTY-ONE

Rinker hauled the van full of garbage bags to a trash-transfer station, dumped them, wiped the van and left it at the airport. The pilot, looking a little sleepy, was sitting in the charter lounge reading an old copy of
Fortune.
He spotted her, helped her carry her three oversized suitcases to the plane, and had Rinker back in Des Moines by midafternoon.

“Can I give you a ride anywhere?” he asked, when they were on the ground.

“Thanks, that’d be nice. I’m going to a Holiday Inn . . .” He made a mild pass at her on the way; she was nice about saying no. He left her at the motel, where she checked out, picked up her car and found a store that sold wigs.

“My mama is getting chemotherapy and her hair is starting to fall out. I need to get a wig for her,” she told the sole saleswoman. The saleswoman looked sad: “I’m sorry about your mother,” she said in a kindly way, patting Rinker’s arm. “It would be better if she were here, though, for a fitting.”

“Well, she really can’t be,” Rinker said. “She’s almost exactly like me, but her head is a little larger, maybe. We measured and it’s about a quarter-inch bigger round, and
also, she’s still got a lot of hair, though it’s starting to come out. She’d like to get something big enough to fit over what hair she’s still got. She hopes she won’t lose it all.”

“Does she have a color preference?”

“We talked about that, and she wants her natural color, which is gray,” Rinker said. “It doesn’t have to be a great wig, just to get her back and forth from the house to the hospital. And then if she loses all of it, we can come back and get another one.”

“Let me show you our Autumn Sparkle series . . .” Rinker took an Autumn Sparkle, thanked the kindly saleswoman, moved on to a walk-in hair salon and walked in. An hour later, with her hair in a skull-tight punk cut, and wearing plain-glass tortoiseshell glasses, she climbed back in her car and headed up I-35 toward Minneapolis.
M
ALLARD
CALLED
L
UCAS
that afternoon and gave him the bad news. The fingerprint search was coming up dry.

“We’re gonna change some things around on the computer search, but it doesn’t look good,” Mallard said. “Tell you the truth, I’d be willing to bet she was never printed.”

“Damnit,” Lucas said. “We never quite get her. I swear to God, we didn’t miss her by more than a half-hour at the airport, maybe fifteen minutes.”

“But we’re knocking on the door,” Mallard said. “We’ve got more on her than we ever hoped for. Now it’s just a matter of time.”
L
ATE
THAT EVENING,
Hale Allen sat naked on the edge of the bed, his damp hair still tousled from the lovemaking and the shower that came afterward. He was examining his toes in the light from the nightstand, and clipping his toenails. He hummed as he did it, and every time the clippers snapped, Carmel flinched, and Allen would say something about the clipping, aloud, but mindlessly, to himself: “Got that one,”
he said, as a clipping fell on the magazine he was using to catch them. “There’s a good one.”

Carmel tried putting her fingers in her ears, but it was no use. She was about to roll out of bed when the magic cell phone went off in her purse. She crawled to the end of the bed, reached over the end-board for her purse, dug the phone out, lay back and punched the
talk
button.

“I’m back,” Rinker said.

“Where at?” Allen looked at her from his side of the bed, and she mouthed,
Sorry—business
at him. He grinned and rolled over toward her, pushed her legs apart; she let him do it.

“Hotel down by the airport.”

“Dangerous,” Carmel said. Allen put his head down and nibbled.

“I look different. A lot different,” Rinker said. “Not a problem. But the question is, do we do Plan B?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Carmel said. She ran her hands through Allen’s hair. “I guess it really wouldn’t mean much to you, but it’d get me off the hook. For good.”

“But that’s good for me,” Rinker said. “The question is, how do I do this by myself? I don’t know the details of . . .”

“You don’t do it by yourself,” Carmel said. She pulled gently on Allen’s ear, guiding him a little to the left. “I’ll help.”

“Can you get out?”

“Yeah. But I’m in the middle of something right now, I can’t really get into the details . . . Call me tomorrow morning about ten o’clock.”

“You with somebody?”

“Yeah.”

“Hale Allen?”

“You got that right,” Carmel said.

“Talk to you tomorrow,” Rinker said.

Carmel said to Hale, “Come up here, you.”

“I like it down here. It smells like bread.”

She whacked him on the side of the head and he said, “Ow, what was that for?”

“Not very romantic, like a loaf of Wonder Bread, or something.”

“I was just joking.” He held his hand to his ear; she
had
hit him a little harder than she’d intended.

She smiled and said, “Okay. I’m sorry. Come up here and I’ll make it better.”
S
HERRILL
WAS SITTING
in her own car, alone, a block from Allen’s house. A radio beeped, and she picked it up: “Yeah?”

“Another light just went on in the living room.”

“Thank God. There might be something left of Allen after all.”

The guy on the other end chuckled: “We’ll take her back home, if you want to join the parade.”

“I’ll be two blocks back.”

She dropped the radio, picked up her cell phone and dialed Lucas’s number from memory. He picked it up on the first ring.

“You up reading?” she asked, without identifying herself.

“Yeah.”

“I think we’re about to take Carmel home,” Sherrill said. “This is obscene.”

“Not a flicker out of her, huh? Not a move?”

“Nothing. Damnit, Lucas, we might have lost the chance.”

“I know; but we’ve got to hang on for a while,” Lucas said.

“And I’m getting kind of lonely.”

“So am I,” Lucas said. “But I’m not going to invite you over.”

“I wouldn’t come anyway,” Sherrill said.

“Good for both of us.”

After a pause, Sherrill said, “Yeah, I guess. See you tomorrow.”

Ten minutes later, Carmel came out of the house and walked briskly to her car. A little too briskly, on a nice night like this, a little too head-down, Sherrill thought. Of course, everything Carmel did was slightly theatrical; there was no way she could know she was in the net . . .
T
HE
NEXT DAY
was brutal: Lucas talked to Mallard, who had nothing new, and checked on the Carmel net a half-dozen times, and got cranky with everyone.

Carmel talked with Rinker twice on the magic cell phone. “See you at ten-fifteen,” she said.

Carmel went home at six, as she usually did; called Hale Allen at six-thirty, and told him that she’d have to work on the Al-Balah case that night. “I’ve got to go back to the office. Jenkins ruled that the cops can have the tire as evidence, and I’m trying to put together an instant appeal.”

“Well, all right,” Allen said. She thought she might have detected just a hair of relief in his voice. “See you when? Thursday?”

“Maybe we could catch lunch tomorrow . . . and I’ll give you a call tonight.”

“Talk to you,” he said.
C
ARMEL
GOT OUT
of her business dress, put on a shorts-leeved white shirt, jeans, tennis shoes and a light red jacket. She pushed a black sweatshirt into her briefcase. This was July, but it was also Minnesota. She didn’t feel like eating, but she did, and carried the microwave chicken dinner to the window and looked out over the city. If they were actually watching her, from one of the nearby buildings, they should see her.

When she finished, she tossed the tray from the chicken
dinner in the garbage, went back to her home office, disconnected the small answering machine from her private line and stuck it in her briefcase with the sweater. A little after seven o’clock, she rode the elevator down and walked out of the front of the building, looking at her watch, carrying her briefcase. She wasn’t absolutely sure the cops were there, but she thought they were: not looking around, trying to spot them, nearly killed her. She walked to her office building, enjoying the night, used her key to get in the front door, signed in with the security guard and rode the elevators up to her office.

The entire suite was silent, with only a few security lights to cut the gloom. She turned the lights on in the library and in her office, turned on the computer and went to work. Jenkins, the judge in the case she was working,
had
ruled the cops could have a spare tire owned by Rashid Al-Balah, and, unfortunately, there was blood on the tire. The only good aspect of it was that the cops had had the car and tire for almost a month before the blood was found, that they’d often taken it out for test drives—once to a strip joint—and, Carmel argued, the blood could have been anybody’s, given the general unreliability of DNA tests. Or even if it did belong to Trick Bentoin, Bentoin could have cut himself before he disappeared, and simply was not available to testify to the fact . . .

She got caught up in the argument, moving back and forth from the library to her office, and nearly jumped out of her skin when the security guard said, “Hi, Miz Loan.”

“Oh, Jesus, Phil, you almost gave me a heart attack,” she said.

“Just making the rounds . . . you gonna be late tonight?” She could already smell the booze: Phil was an old geezer, but he could drink with the youngest of them.

“Probably. Got a tough one tomorrow.”

“Well, good luck,” he said, and shuffled away toward the
entry. She heard the door close, and the latch snap, and looked at her watch: twenty minutes. Time to start moving.

She got the answering machine out of her briefcase, carried it into the library and plugged it into the phone there. Back in her office, she pulled the black sweater over her head. She left the computer on, and turned on the small Optimus stereo system. The system played three disks in rotation, and would play them until she turned it off. She left the red jacket draped over her chair.

Ready.

The building had a five-story parking garage. Carmel stepped out of the suite, checked to make sure that the security guard had moved on, and then trotted briskly down to the stairwell at the far end of the hall and down seven flights of steps. The cops might be watching every entrance and exit to the parking garage, but, she thought, they couldn’t be watching all of it. Of course, if they were, she was screwed . . .

But it was a good bet, she thought. She poked her head through the door on the fourth floor, saw nobody. A single empty car, a red Pontiac, sat halfway down the ramp, but she’d seen it before. Not a cop. She glanced again at her watch: one minute. She waited it out, hearing nothing at all along the concrete corridors of the building, and then opened the door again.

Here was the only spot that she’d be in the open: she walked quickly across the top of the floor, and stepped into the corkscrew exit ramp. She heard a car moving up the entrance ramp: had to be Pam, she thought. She listened, heard the car turn into the exit spiral, and nodded. The car started down, made the turn toward her. A gray-haired old lady was looking through the windshield. Carmel recoiled, then saw the hand waving her forward: “Get in.”

“That’s you?” The car stopped, just for a half-second,
and Carmel jerked open the back door and flopped on the seat, pulling the door shut without slamming it. “Get under the blanket,” Rinker said.

Carmel was already doing that, rolling onto the floor, her head on the driver’s side. She pulled the blanket over her legs and lower body and lay quietly beneath it. The entrances and exits from the building were on opposites sides, and even at this time of night, there were always a few cars coming and going. With any luck at all, the cops on the entrance side—if there were any—wouldn’t be calling out the cars coming and going, so the cops on the exit side wouldn’t notice the odd fact that a gray-haired old lady in a Japanese car had gone in one side and come right back out the other.