Certain Prey (9 page)

“So you were just going to leave them.”

“Sure. You can get them for a couple hundred bucks apiece. I just didn’t have time to deal with the airlines and all that.” Rinker glanced at her watch. “Four hours to Rolo,” she said. “We better get back to town.”
T
HE
C
RYSTAL
C
OURT
is the interior courtyard of the tallest glass tower in Minneapolis, a crossroads of the Minneapolis skyway system. Carmel met Rolo on the ground floor: she was furiously angry, which Rinker said was perfect. “If you weren’t pissed, he’d be suspicious. The madder you are, the better.”

“I can fake it if I have to, but I don’t think I’ll have to,” Carmel said. “I hate this: being extorted, somebody else squeezing you like this, and you’re powerless.” She ground her teeth, felt control slipping away; held on tight.

“Not powerless,” Rinker said. “Just the appearance of it.” “But he has to think I am. The goddamn humiliation, that cocksucker . . .”

There was nothing faked about her anger when Rolo
showed up, carrying the videotape in a brown beer sack from a convenience store. She was carrying the money in a cloth book bag.

“You fuck,” Carmel hissed at him. “You piece of shit. I should have let you go down for life, you fuckin’ greaseball.”

Rolo took it calmly enough: “Just give me the money, Carmel. I got your little movie right here, and we’re all done.”

“We better be all done,” Carmel snarled. A white-haired man in a golf shirt glanced at her face as she passed, and it occurred to her that she probably looked like a cornered wolf, her face twisted with hate, anger, and maybe fear. She took a breath, straightened up, tried to pull herself together.

“Give me the tape,” she said.

“Give me the money, first.”

“For Christ’s sake, Rolo, I can’t hardly grab it and run, can I? If a cop gets involved, I’m dead meat.”

Rolo thought about it for a minute, then said, “Let me see the money.”

Carmel pulled open the top of the bag, let him look in. He nodded, grudgingly, and handed her the sack. She looked inside, saw the tape, shook her head and said, “You fuck,” and he said, “The money, Carmel,” and she handed him the bag.

“You better not be back,” Carmel said. “I couldn’t handle that.”

“Check the tape,” Rolo said, stepped into a stream of traffic, followed it to an escalator, and went up. A minute later, he was gone. The Crystal Court was five minutes from her apartment. Carmel had walked, because parking would have taken as long as walking, and now she hurried back, jaywalking when she caught a red light, wondering what was happening with Rinker.
R
OLANDO
D’A
QUILA
had parked his broken-down piece-of-shit Dodge on the third floor of the Sixth Street parking
ramp, the same ramp where Barbara Allen had been shot. Rinker was pleased: the situation had a nice symmetry, and she knew the ramp well, because of her previous scouting. Carrying her big green Dayton’s department store bag, she’d stayed well behind Rolo in the skyways, blending with the crowd of heading-home shoppers and white-collar office workers. When she realized where they were going, she closed up, and when they pushed through the skyway door into the ramp, was a dozen steps behind, with two other people between them.

She followed Rolo down the ramp, making no effort to hide, but keeping a gray-suited man with a briefcase between them. Then gray suit turned off toward a black Buick, and she and Rolo continued on, single file. Rolo glanced back at her once, barely seeing her, and as he did, she glanced at her watch and looked diagonally past him, as if heading for a car at the end of the floor. But when Rolo turned off to the brown-shoe-colored Dodge, she was only two steps behind him. He didn’t even notice until she was a foot away. Then he turned, key in his hand, and before he could open his mouth, Rinker took the last step and the muzzle of the pistol came up from the shopping bag she was carrying and she said, “If you make one fuckin’ noise, I will shoot you in the fuckin’ heart. If you think about it, you will know who I am. And you’ll know that I’ll do it.”

Rolo stood stock-still for a long beat, then said, quietly, “You can have the money back.”

“We’ll take the money back, but we’ve got to talk for a while, you and Carmel and I.”

“Just take the money.”

“We’re gonna get in the car, Rolo, and I’m gonna slide across the seat and you’re gonna stand there, by the door, and if you make a noise, or make a move to run, I’m going to shoot you.”

“I don’t think so,” Rolo said, trying to recover. “There are too many people around.”

She shot him in the left leg. The little silenced .22 made a sound like a clapping hand, and Rolo’s leg dipped and he slumped against the car, his eyes wide.

“You shot me,” he said, his voice almost a whisper. He clasped the money bag under one arm; his free hand felt down his left leg and came away to his face, scarlet with blood; and he could feel more blood trickling down his leg.

Rinker glanced around: two other people walking down the ramp, neither one paying attention to the two of them. The gun itself was below the level of the cars, where it couldn’t be seen. “Open the car door, Rolo,” she said quietly; but the quiet tone carried the menace of death. “Or the next one goes right in your eye.”

The black hole on the end of the pistol came up, and D’Aquila was seized with the sudden conviction that he could see the head of the bullet that lay down its maw. He fumbled the key into the car lock, opened the door.

“Stand still,” Rinker said. She stepped close to him, so close that they might have been lovers sharing a carside kiss before heading home, and she pushed the muzzle of the .22 under his breastbone and said, “I’m going to get in. If you make a noise or try to run, I’ll kill you. Do you understand that?”

“You’ll kill me if I get in the car.”

Rinker shook her head. “No. We can’t be sure about the tape—how many copies you’ve made. But we figure you’ve got at least one, and we want that one. After that, you’re on warning: if a third tape ever shows up, we’re gonna kill you, no questions. But we want to make that clear to you.”

“My leg’s killing me.”

“No, it’s not. But I might be. Follow me into the car,”
Rinker said. She sat down, the end of the muzzle never leaving his breastbone. She slid across the seat, and Rolo followed. “Drive,” she said.

“Where’re we going?”

“Home,” Rinker said. “Your place.”
C
ARMEL
FOUND THEM
sitting in the front room, Rolo in an easy chair with a ripped sheet wrapped tightly around his left leg. Rinker was on a couch, her pistols held carefully across her lap. Carmel noticed that the pistols now had silencers attached to their muzzles. “I had to shoot him a little,” Rinker said, her voice flat, uninflected, as though shooting Rolo was nothing at all. “Did you look at the tape?”

“Yeah, I looked at the tape,” Carmel said. She was carrying her handbag and a sack from a hardware store, which clanked when she dropped it by her foot. “It starts out with him telling me that it was only a copy, that he has another, and that he needs a little more money.”

“I’ll give you the tape,” Rolo said. “Just get me to the hospital.”

Carmel pulled a chair up and sat in front of his and said, “Look at me, Rolo. How many tapes did you make?”

“Just two,” he said. “Honest to God, I was gonna give you the only one, but then I got to thinking . . . so I made another one. Why would I make any more? As long as I got the original, I can make as many as I want.”

“Where is it? The second one?”

“Not here,” he said. “I put it in my safe-deposit box. I figured if anything like this happened, you couldn’t kill me. You’d have to take me to the bank.”

“You put it in a safe-deposit box?” Carmel asked.

“Yeah, at U.S. Bank.”

“Look at me, Rolo.”

He looked at her, his eyes clear and honest.

“Where are the keys to the safe-deposit box?”

“Well, I . . . gave them to a friend to hold, this chick I know . . .”

“Oh, bullshit, Rolo.” Carmel looked at Rinker. “He’s lying.”

“I’m not lying,” Rolo said.

She turned back to him. “Yeah, you are. You wouldn’t give the keys to anyone, you’d hide them someplace.”

“I’m not lying,” Rolo protested. “Look, I can call my friend . . .”

“What’s her name?” Carmel asked. “Quick.”

Rolo’s eyes went sideways and he stumbled over a couple of syllables. “Um-m-m, Mary,” he said.

“Would that be the Virgin Mary?” Carmel asked sarcastically. To Rinker: “He’s lying.”

“Should I shoot him again? A little more this time?” Carmel looked at Rolo for a moment, pulled on her lower lip, then shook her head slowly. “Nope. I think we should just chain him up . . .” She touched the hardware store bag with her foot. “See about this Mary. Tear the house apart. See if we find any safe-deposit keys.”

“I don’t think there is one,” Rinker said. “I think I should shoot him again.”

“Jesus Christ,” Rolo said, listening to the argument.

“Let’s just get him on the bed, so we don’t have to watch him every minute, and try to work this out,” Carmel said to Rinker. She touched the bag with her foot again and looked at Rolo. “We’re gonna chain you to your bed and tear this place apart. Either that, or Pamela’s gonna shoot you again, and
then
we’re gonna tear this place apart. Are you gonna give us a hard time?”

“You’re gonna kill me,” he said.

“Not if we don’t have to,” Carmel said.

“You’re both fuckin’ crazy.”

“Which you should keep in mind.”

“Into the bedroom,” Rinker said, gesturing with the muzzle of the gun.

“My leg is killing me,” Rolo said.

Rinker dropped the muzzle toward his other leg and Rolo lurched forward, said, “I’m going, for Christ’s sake, I’m going.”

Rinker moved with him, just behind him, the gun pointed at his spine. “Just stretch out on the bed,” she said when they got to the bedroom door. “No problems.”

They’d gotten a package of lightweight chain at the hardware store, the kind used for children’s swings; a roll of duct tape at a pharmacy; and four keyed padlocks and two pairs of yellow plastic kitchen gloves at a Kmart. While Rinker leaned on the end of the bed, the gun ready, Carmel took a couple of turns of chain around Rolo’s neck, wrapped the chain around the end of the bed and snapped on a lock. “And his feet,” she said. She did his feet the same way.

“His arms,” Rinker said.

“Hmm,” Carmel said, looking at him. Finally she took a tight wrap of chain around one of his wrists, snapped on a padlock, leaned over the side of the bed, threw the chain beneath it, fished it out from the opposite side, took a wrap around Rolo’s other wrist, and snapped on the last padlock. “That’s it for the chain,” Carmel said. She went back to the sack for the duct tape.

“What’re you going to do with that?” Rolo asked.

“Tape up your mouth,” Carmel said.

Rolo thrashed a little against the chain, but it cut into his neck and he stopped and looked up at Carmel. “Don’t hurt me,” he said, his voice suddenly quiet.

“How many copies?” Carmel asked.

“Just the one,” Rolo said.

“And it’s in your safe-deposit box?”

“That’s right. I’ll get it for you.”

“Shut up,” Carmel said. She pulled off two feet of duct tape and wrapped it around his head, taping up his mouth.
C
ARMEL
AND
R
INKER
spent an hour ripping through the little house, working in the yellow plastic gloves. They dumped cupboards, closets and dressers, looked through the small, dank, empty basement, poking their heads up into cobwebs and bug nests; they probed the equally empty ceiling crawl space, which was stuffed with pink fiberglass insulation that stuck to their skin and tangled their hair. They dumped all the ice cube trays out of the refrigerator, dumped all the boxes in the cupboard, looked in the toilet tank, ripped the covers off all the electric outlets. They found a half-dozen tapes under the television, but their labels said they were pornographic, and when they pushed them into Rolo’s cheap VCR, pornography was what they got. They found two address books; checked his billfold and found more phone numbers. The video camera was on the floor of a closet: Rinker opened it, said, “Empty,” and tossed it on the wooden floor, where it hit hard, and rolled. They also found a few tools, a lot of clothing, and odd bits of cheap jewelry.

They checked Rolo every few minutes. The chains immobilized him, and though he grunted at them, they ignored him and went back to pulling the house apart. After an hour, it had become obvious that they weren’t going to find the tape.

“It might still be here,” Rinker said finally, after she’d torn out the under-seat lining of the couch and chair. “We can’t look everyplace—we’d need a wrecking ball.”

Carmel was in the bedroom doorway, looking at Rolo.

Finally, she walked around and ripped the tape off his mouth. He sputtered, and she said, “Last chance, Rolo; tell me where the fuck it is.”