Mortal Prey

7

Dorothy Pollock was a heavyset, hard-faced woman, pale from a life under fluorescent lights, a duck waddler with bad feet from standing on concrete floors, a victim of Ballard-McClain Avionics, where she worked at a drill-press station.

Her job came to this: She would take a nickel-sized aluminum disk from a Tupperware pan full of disks, and an extruded aluminum shaft, about the length and thickness of a pencil, from a pan full of shafts.

Each disk had a collar at the center, with a hole through the collar, so it looked like a small wheel. Pollock would fit the end of a shaft through the hole, make a1 32-inch freshly drilled hole through the collar and shaft, and then tap an aluminum rivet into the hole. Finally, she'd use a pair of hand pinchers to crush the ends of the rivet, fixing the disk to the shaft. She'd drop the finished shaft, which would become a tuning knob on a radio, into another plastic bin. Then she'd make another one.

Every hour or so the foreman would come by and take away the finished shafts. Pollock was expected to finish a hundred shafts every shift. She got two fifteen-minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and a half hour for lunch, which she could stretch to forty minutes if she didn't do it too often. She made $9.48 an hour, and the year before had gotten a 28-cent-an-hour raise, which worked out to a little more than three percent, or $11.20 a week.

She'd taken the raise, but hadn't been doing any handsprings about it. If she saved all the extra money for a month, she'd have just enough, after deductions for Social Security, state and federal income taxes, and union dues, to pay for a bad haircut. She wasn't all that unhappy when Clara Rinker came along and offered to pay her a thousand dollars a week for her spare room.

Not that she had much choice, if she'd thought about it. Twelve years earlier, in Memphis, Pollock had killed her husband, Roger, in his sleep, by hitting him six times on the head with a hammer. While she was hiding out in Alabama, she'd read a smart-ass newspaper column in the Commercial-Appeal that quoted a prosecutor as saying the first four whacks could have been emotional, but the last two indicated intent: They were looking for her on a first-degree murder warrant.

The cops never caught up with her. Rinker had, in fact, taken her in, had hidden her, had used her special skills to get Pollock a new name, an apartment and a job.

Pollock had been walking home from work, sweating from the humid evening heat, through the bread-smelling yeasty air outside the Anheuser-Busch brewery, carrying a plastic grocery sack containing a loaf of white bread, a vacuum-sealed variety pack of sliced salami, and a six-pack of low-cal custard puddings, when she saw Rinker cutting across the street toward her.

She hadn't seen Rinker for three years, except in the newspapers.

She stopped and said, delighted, smiling, "Clara! My Lord! Where you been, girl?"

"Been a while, Patsy," Clara said, smiling back, and calling Pollock by her real name.

"My Lord, you look good, " Pollock said. And thought: She does. She and Rinker went back to childhood, growing up in similar trashy small towns. Both had changed, Pollock for the worse, Rinker for the better.

Pollock had always been too tall, too skinny, with hands and feet too big for her bones. Over the years, she'd put on sixty pounds, and limped with the weight and weariness, like a woman fifteen years older. Rinker, on the other hand, was wearing jeans and a white blouse that looked fitted to her, with a haircut that cost a hell of a lot more than thirty dollars; and she held herself as rich ladies did, straight up, easy-walking, casual-eyed. Small hoop earrings that looked like gold.

"You still drink beer?" Clara asked.

" 'Course I do. You got some?"

"A sackful of Corona and a couple of lemons. I gotta talk to you about something."

Rinker got a grocery bag out of her car and she and Pollock walked side by side down the slanting sidewalk. Pollock had a two-bedroom apartment in a red brick house that had been painted white and looked as though Mark Twain might have walked past it. An elm tree had once stood in the patch of front yard, but had died years back of Dutch elm disease. The stump was still there, along with what her neighbors called a sucker maple, a clump of foliage that was a cross between a tree and a bush.

Pollock's apartment was two-bedroom only technically-the second bedroom might have been more useful as a closet. Pollock called it her shit room, because that's where she put all the shit she didn't use much. The place smelled of twelve years of baked potatoes and cheddar cheese and nicotine and human dirt. A small dry aquarium sat in a corner, the goldfish long gone. A photograph of Jesus hung over the TV, his hands pressed together in prayer, his eyes turned heavenward, his sacred heart glowing through his robe.

Rinker followed Pollock through the door and looked around. She didn't say, "Nice place," because Pollock was too old a friend, and they both knew exactly what kind of place it was: the kind of place that you could still rent for two hundred and fifty dollars a month, utilities included.

Pollock dropped her grocery sack on the kitchen table and said, "You want some ice in that beer?"

"Wouldn't mind," Rinker said. They'd drunk iced beer when they were kids. She put her bag on the table next to Pollock's, fished out a couple of bottles, and twisted the tops off. Pollock found glasses and filled them with ice, put a slice of lemon in each and a dash of salt. They went out to the front room, and Pollock dropped on her couch. Rinker took the La-Z-Boy, poured a little of the Corona over the ice, and held her glass up. "Big City," she said.

Pollock held hers up: "Big City." They both took a sip, and then Pollock said, "What's going on?"

"I'm running from the cops," Rinker said. "I need a place to stay for a couple of weeks."

"You got one," Pollock said promptly.

"More complicated than that, Patsy," Rinker said. "This is heavy shit. Everybody in the world is gonna be looking for me. The FBI, the St. Louis cops. If they find me here, and take you in, and fingerprint you, you're toast."

Pollock shook her head. "Makes no never-mind to me. You got a place. When I was running, you kept me for three months. Besides, they put me in jail, couldn't be no fuckin' worse than this place and my job."

"I got a load of money," Rinker said. "It won't cover the risk, but I'll give you a thousand a week plus whatever I got left over at the end." Pollock opened her mouth to object, but Rinker held up an imperious finger. "Don't want to hear about it. I'm leavin' the money, and you take it and spend it on something stupid."

"I can do that, no doubt about it," Pollock said. "Maybe buy a stair-climber, or something." She sucked up an ice cube, ran it a couple of times around her mouth, and then spit it back into the beer. "So tell me what you're up to."

Pollock threw most of the shit out of the shit room, and Rinker put down an inflatable guest mattress she'd bought at a Target store, with a sheet and an acrylic blanket. Her clothes stayed in her suitcase. Pollock's landlady had an extra space in the garage next door, and Pollock walked around the house and rented it, thirty dollars a month, so that Rinker would have a place to put the California car. That night, Rinker left Pollock in front of her television and began to scout the men she'd come to kill.

Nanny Dichter was the richest of the bunch, with a home in Frontenac; he had a fountain on the front lawn. The fountain, in the figure of a small girl with a water jug on her back, was carved out of golden marble imported from Austria. Dichter sold drugs, and had for most of his adult life. He'd been one of the first to make cocaine imports into a business, instead of an adventure. He was married, had two sons and four daughters, and three or four live-in servants. He owned the majority interest in a chain of midwestern mall-based import stores that sold native art to the aesthetically impaired, and provided a convenient network for his bulk cocaine sales.

Paul Dallaglio worked with Dichter, taking care of competitive issues, which was how he'd met Rinker. He'd used her nine times and paid her a little more than a half million dollars. He lived not far from Dichter in a home on a heavily wooded lot in Creve Coeur. He was executive vice president and part owner of the import chain.

Andy Levy was a banker, and worked a straight job as vice president of development with First Heartland National of St. Louis; he handled most of the mob money in St. Louis, including Rinker's, before she moved to Wichita. He lived in a huge old redbrick cube in Central West End, and was a patron of the performing arts-he dated dancers, and sometimes actresses. Rinker had killed Levy's wife and her lawyer when the marriage went on the rocks, and the lawyer was foolish enough to threaten Levy with the exposure of his money operation. Levy liked to walk in Forest Park. He'd once been banned from the zoo for throwing center-cut pork chops to the lions.

Finally there was John Ross, who'd originally recruited Rinker and taught her the gun trade. Ross ran an overworld liquor distributorship, and had interests in vending machine and trucking businesses. He had parallel shadow businesses in cocaine, sports betting, and loan-sharking. He was retail, to Nanny Dichter's wholesale. He'd also acted as Rinker's agent, selling her guns for cash, and taking his cut in clout rather than money. Ross lived off a semiprivate street in Ladue in the center of six acres of lawn. He'd been Rinker's friend and protector, though when she'd been broken out by the cops, he'd tried to have her killed. She gave him that one, because of their history, but had warned him at the time that if there was another unsuccessful attempt, she'd be coming for him.

Dichter and Ross were smart and personally violent. Dallaglio was essentially a criminal executive who worked by remote control. He'd never gotten his hands bloody, but he did know how to protect himself. Levy barely thought of himself as criminal-he was just a guy who knew some guys, and like a bunch of Rotarians, they all threw business at each other.

Every one of the four men knew too much about each of the others, and more than enough about Rinker. While any one of the four could have authored the assassination in Cancun, it was unlikely that any one of them would have done it on his own hook. They walked carefully around each other, and none of them would want to be blamed if something had gone wrong, as it had. They'd have talked.

Rinker slept in Pollock's room for three more days, going out at night, getting a handle on the town. She knew it well from her days as a dancer, and with Ross at the liquor warehouse, but there were always changes, and she'd never really surveyed it from the perspective of an assassin.

She needed to know what was open, and when. Where she could ditch, if she ran into trouble. Where she could pick up a car in a hurry. Where the targets did their business. As she wandered around town, she refined her ideas about her approaches to the targets.

One night, she dropped Pollock at a country joint with twenty dollars and a hand-sized Sony tape recorder, and told her to sit as close to the jukebox as she could, have a couple of beers, and tape-record the bar. Pollock did all of that, and Rinker listened to the tape on the way back home. The tape sounded fine, and reminded her of the Rink.

She made the first open move on a Monday night, with a stop at the BluesNote Cafe at LaClede's Landing on the river. The BluesNote was owned by John Sellos. The club had never done well, and without a variety of minor criminal activities-the barkeeps ran a sports-betting business, and a back room became an informal office for a fence and a branch office for one of Ross's loan sharks-the place would have closed fifteen years earlier. As it was, it struggled, and Sellos worried incessantly.

Rinker wore black jeans for the job, a black blazer, and black Nike running shoes. She carried one of the nine-millimeter pistols in her jacket pocket. She parked a block from the club and sat in the car for a while, gathering herself, watching the street.

She knew she frightened people, but she knew that was only an edge. Physically, she was in good shape, but a large man was still a large man. Even an out-of-shape cigarette freak like Jackie Burke in L.A., or Jimmy Cricket in San Francisco, could pull her arms off if he was pissed, or desperate, and forgot about her reputation for a minute.

That meant that when she wanted to talk to a man, she had to get on top of him immediately. She didn't have to flash the gun, but it had to be there, in his mind's eye, right from the start. She had to be the cold-eyed killer right inside his shirt.

A blond couple, the woman a little wobbly, and a single man in cowboy boots went into the BluesNote as she watched, and one man left. The man who left stopped just outside the door and looked up and down the street: looking for action, which meant that not much was going on inside the club. When Rinker had run her bar in Wichita, she'd hated the sight of a man looking both ways on the sidewalk outside. The Rink hadn't come through for him.

After watching for ten minutes, she got out of the car, hung a purse on her shoulder, and walked down to the club. The door was surrounded with predistressed wood that was now genuinely distressed; the doorknob rattled under her hand. She stepped inside the door, paused, let her eyes adjust to the gloom. A longhaired young man sat on a dais at the end of the main room, a guitar on one knee. He was saying, "… learned this song from an old Indian guy up in Dakota. I was working the wheat harvest, this was back in '99…"

Rinker thought, Jesus.

When she could see, Rinker walked along the left wall straight back to the kitchen doors, through the doors and up the stairs. She knew the place from her years at the liquor warehouse: Nothing had changed. The door at the upper landing was closed, but there was light coming through the crack at the bottom. She put a hand on the pistol in her pocket and pushed through the door.

Sellos was sitting behind his desk. When Rinker pushed through the door, without knocking, he jumped, saw her face, and settled back into his chair.

"You scared me," he said, smiling hopefully.

"Good," she said. She kept her hand in her pocket, noticed that Sellos was watching that hand, and said, "Yeah. I got a gun."

"You gonna shoot me? I haven't done anything to you." He was a thin man, with a big nose and a yellowish tint to his skin. He looked as though somebody large had blown nicotine and tar on him; he looked like he should be wearing a brown fedora.

"I didn't come here to shoot you," Rinker said. "I need about four of your cell phones, and I need you to make a call for me."

"Whatever's good," he said.

"If you mess with me, I'll shoot you right in the heart," Rinker said. She eased her hand out of her pocket, letting him see the gun with the fat snout. "I got no patience for being messed around."

His Adam's apple bobbed once, and he said, "I don't have the phones here. I gotta make a call."

"Call." She waggled the pistol at the phone.

He picked up the telephone, punched in four numbers, and said without preface, "Have Carl bring me up four phones. And you know that poster we got under the bar? Give him that, too, I want to show it to a guy."

"Who's Carl?" Rinker asked when he hung up.

"Old guy. Works for me. Could you put the gun away?"

"You got folk music downstairs, John," Rinker said. An accusation, and it made Sellos uncomfortable. She slipped the pistol back into her jacket pocket. They listened for a minute, and heard, faintly, through the floor, the singer's scratchy voice:… the Sioux and Arikara are gone, driven by the white man's trains, across those treasured free-wind plains, where the wheat waves like dollar bills, and overflows some banker's tills…

"Gotta pay the mortgage, Clara," he said. "The guy costs me nothin'."

"How're you gonna grow your bar traffic, John, with some asshole singing about freight trains and wheat? Folk music is worse than nothing. Hiring folksingers does nothing but encourage them. It's like letting cockroaches into your house."

"I gotta have something, and I can't hire country," Sellos said defensively. "Country people won't come down here. And blues are dead, except with the corduroy university crowd, and they can make a whole night out of a beer and a dish of free peanuts." They heard footsteps in the hallway, and both turned their heads: then a knock. Sellos got up, opened the door, took the phones and a piece of paper, said, "Thanks, Carl," and shut the door again. He stepped back behind his desk, looked at the back of the telephones for a few seconds, then put them where Rinker could reach them.

"How much?" Rinker asked.

"You don't have to pay," Sellos said. "Just take the fuckin' things."

"How long are they good for?"

"Couple of weeks, anyway. Two of them are arranged, the other two are on vacation." Arranged phones were phones that the owner arranged to have stolen, for a fee. Vacation phones were lifted in burglaries of people who were out of town.

"All right. You know the numbers for these phones?" Rinker asked.

"They're on the tape on the back."

She looked at the back of one of the phones, found a piece of white adhesive tape, with a number in blue ballpoint. "Write this down," she said. She read the number off, and Sellos wrote it on his desk pad. "Soon as I leave here, I want you to call Nanny Dichter on his private line and tell him to call me at this number. I don't talk when I'm driving, so I won't turn the phone on until I'm somewhere safe. But you tell him to call me, okay?"

"Are you and Nanny, uh… are you lookin' for each other?"

"You don't want to know about this, John. You call Nanny, tell him I want to talk about John Ross. Eleven o'clock, right around there."

"Nanny'll be pissed at me. " He shook his head sadly, thinking about it.

"No, he won't. Just get in touch with him when I leave, and tell him I was pointing a gun at your head. I'll tell him the same thing."

"You gotta promise me," Sellos said. "To tell him that."

"Cross my heart," Rinker said. "Now. I need a home phone number for Andy Levy."

Sellos was puzzled. "Andy who?"

"Levy. The bank guy."

Sellos shook his head "I don't know him."

"John…"

"Honest to God, Clara, I never heard of him. He's a Jew or something? I don't know hardly any Jews. Honest to God."

Rinker looked at him for a moment, her best look, and decided that Sellos was nervous but was probably telling the truth.

"All right. I'll find it somewhere else."

"I'd do anything, Clara…"

Rinker stood up. "The best thing for you to do, John, is to give me a few minutes before you call Nanny. Or anybody else. If the cops come screaming down the street, I'll come back and kill you first."

"No problem, I won't call the cops. You ought to see this." He pushed the piece of paper across the desk. It looked like a wanted poster and had Rinker's face on it.

"Where'd you get it?"

"It's in every goddamn bar and motel in St. Louis," Sellos said. "The picture's not very good-it could be anybody. But if you know you, it looks like you."

"Why're you telling me?" Rinker asked.

He shrugged. "I always sorta liked you… when you were working out of the warehouse. I didn't know about the gun stuff until it was in the papers."

She nodded-he had liked her, she thought. She remembered that. "All right. Give me a couple minutes." She stood up and stepped away, to the office door, and then said, "Listen, John, you gotta get rid of that fuckin' folk music, okay? Promise me?" She let out a thin smile. "I mean, I'm not gonna shoot you if you don't, but just do it for… American civilization?"

Nanny Dichter lived on Chirac Road, a semiprivate dead-end lane in Frontenac. All the houses sat well back from the lane, and any car turning into it could be seen-watched-from any of the houses along it. On the other hand, any car coming out of the lane could be seen up and down Nouvelle Road, the main street. At ten minutes past ten o'clock, Rinker parked on Nouvelle Road, three blocks from Chirac. Ten or fifteen cars lined the street; a party. She parked at the end of the line closest to Chirac, turned off the lights, and slumped behind the steering wheel, watching Chirac in the rearview mirror.

Bunches of kids were still arriving at the party, and a couple left. From her spot in the street, Rinker could hear their music and see flickering multicolored lights. Some kind of techno shit, she thought. Better than folk music, anyway. A little after ten-thirty, a kid wandered out of the party, stood on the front lawn of the party house, and began vomiting. He continued for a minute, then walked on to his car, got in, got back out, vomited again, then got back in the car and drove away.

Happy trails, Rinker thought.

At ten-thirty-five, she began to wonder if Dichter was going to call her, or if he'd been home when Sellos called him-what if he'd been at his office, working late? She'd be sitting here and never know. There was no chance that he'd call from either his house or his business, though. The feds probably had him so tapped that they knew every time he opened the refrigerator.

At ten-forty, a Mercedes rolled out of Chirac Road, sat for a minute, then turned right, away from her, and headed down the street, slowly. Dichter always drove a Mercedes. Rinker reached for the key, then stopped. The Benz was a little obvious, don't you think, Clara? Rolling up and stopping like that, so anybody could get a look?

She sat still as the Mercedes disappeared at a corner three blocks away. Maybe a mistake? Maybe he'd be calling in two minutes, and she'd have no idea where he was?

Then another car rolled out of Chirac, a station wagon-a Volkswagen, she thought-and turned left, toward her. This car did not hesitate at the street entrance. When it passed her, she saw two men inside; one had a hand to his head, as thought he were talking on a cell phone-probably to the driver of the Benz, Rinker thought. She let the car get two blocks down Nouvelle, over a hump and out of sight, before she followed.

She didn't think Dichter would go far. Any phone would do, as long as it wasn't his. She started to tighten up now. Started to feel the adrenaline, the hunting hormone, flowing into her bloodstream. She'd always liked the feel of it, the stress.

And she thought about Paulo, dead on the ground in Cancun, his blood all over her, his blue eyes vacant. Thought about her baby, the way things were going to be forever. The adrenaline was a familiar thing, but now something else flowed in, a coldness that she'd felt only once before, about her stepfather.

Hate. And it was liquid and cold, like mercury flowing through her veins. Nanny Dichter, two blocks away, still breathing, while Paulo lay rotting in his grave…

She knew enough not to try to get close to the Volkswagen. She stayed way back, turned off her lights once, followed the Volkswagen around a corner west onto Clayton Road, worried that she'd lose him. Clayton Road had more traffic than the side streets, and she closed up just a bit. The Volkswagen continued on, turned north off Clayton, then west again, and finally cut into a Lincoln Inn.

She continued past the hotel, down the block, to a second entrance. Kept looking back and saw the Volkswagen pull up to the reception bay, and a man who looked very like Nanny Dichter get out and go inside.

She parked as close to a side door as she could, picked up the Sony tape recorder, and turned it on. The Dixie Chicks were singing something inoffensive. She got out of the car and walked toward the hotel's side door. The door was locked. She took a step away, looking toward the front, thinking about the second man in the Volkswagen-and saw a young guy coming down the hallway toward the side door, carrying a sleepy, red-eyed kid. The guy pushed through, and Rinker held the door, smiled, and was inside.

The telephone rang. She punched it on, held the tape recorder close to her face as she walked along the hallway, and answered. "Hello?"

"This is me," Dichter said. "What do you want?"

"I want to know whose idea it was to go to Cancun," she said. "Was that John? Or was that the whole goddamn bunch of you?"

"I didn't know anything about it until the feds told me," Dichter said. "I got with John…"

"Hold on," Rinker said. "I'm gonna go outside. I can barely hear you."

"Where are you?"

"In a bar," she said tersely. She pulled the tape recorder away from the phone, as though she were walking away from the jukebox, and clicked it off. Then: "Wait a minute, a guy's coming… Let me get over here."

A guy was coming. A hotel guy, with a chest tag that said "Chad." She put her hand over the phone's mouthpiece and asked, "Could you tell me where your pay phones are?"

"Down the hall, into the lobby, turn right, then around the corner and they're right there."

"Thanks." She continued down the hallway, into the lobby, phone to her ear. Slipped the safety on the nine-millimeter. Into the lobby, not looking at the few faces passing through it.

Glanced to the left, her vision sharp as a broken mirror, picking up everything as tiny fragments of motion-the Indian woman behind the desk, the guy with the suitcase talking to her, another guy in the tiny gift shop, a sign that said, "Elevators," and she was saying into the phone, all the time, "That fuckhead killed my guy and killed my baby, and I'm gonna take him out." The righteous anger was surging in her voice, and was real and convincing. "You can get in or get out, whatever you want, but if you're with John, I'll take you right along with him."

"Listen, listen, listen…," Dichter was saying, his voice rising.

And she turned the corner and heard the last "listen" both through the phone and in person: Dichter was there, his back to her, talking into the pay phone. He felt the movement behind him and turned, his face going slack when he saw her face and the gun leveled at his forehead. He had just time to say, "No," and Rinker shot him.

The first shot went in between his eyes. The second and third went into the side of his head as he slumped down the wall, leaving blood lines down the yellow wallpaper.

The shots, even with the silencer, were loud, enough to attract attention. Rinker shoved the gun into her jacket pocket, screamed, and ran into the lobby. "Man's got a gun," she screamed. "Man's got agun…"

She was looking over her shoulder at the hallway, and somebody else screamed and the man with the suitcase ducked but didn't run. He was looking at the hallway where Dichter had fallen. She turned down the hall where she'd come in, out of sight from the lobby, now running, banged through the side exit, heard shouting behind her, forced herself to a walk, went to her car, was in, was rolling…

Was gone.