Certain prey

Chapter Twenty

Carmel called Rinker at the hotel, and said, without preface or identification,

'Get out of there now. Your picture's on TV.'

'What?' Rinker's heart started thumping, and she looked wildly around the room, looking for clothes, looking for anything with prints, ready to sprint.

'Davenport's got a composite photograph of you, and it's on TV. They're going to show it again on Channel Three in about one minute.'

'Hang on'.

Rinker picked up the TV remote and brought up Channel Three. A talking head, a serious brunette who looked like a former Miss America, was saying, '… an

Avis rental car at the airport. Two Avis personnel, whose identities are being withheld, provided police with a composite photograph, shown here. If you have seen this woman…'

Rinker looked at the picture for a moment, then told Carmel. 'That doesn't look like me.'

'To you it might not look like you, but to me it does – in a general way,'

Carmel replied. 'And they'll be taking it around to hotels and motels and every thing else, asking for anybody who fits the general description.'

Rinker nodded at the phone. 'All right, I'm outa here in fifteen minutes.'

'Go on down to Iowa,' Carmel said. 'Des Moines. They don't get the Cities TV stations there, and you can be back here in three hours, if you need to be. Give me a call on this phone when you get there, give me a number.'

'What're we going to do?'

'We have to go to Plan B. Somehow, he's onto us. I don't know how, but he's working something.'

'Ah, man, can you handle it?'

'I can handle it,' Carmel said grimly. 'Now get out of there.'

'I'm gone.'

Two detectives, Swanson and Franklin, responded to a tip from a bellhop at the

Regency-White, and took the composite photograph to the manager, who shook his head. 'I don't know the lady, but I only see a fraction of the people who come through.'

'Could we find out how many single woman are in the hotel, and go from there?'

Franklin suggested. 'Then maybe we could talk to the room maids.'

'Most've them have gone home already,' the manager said. He had a small mustache but otherwise, Franklin thought, looked a lot like PeeWee in PeeWee's Big

Adventure. 'I can get the room service people, and the bellhops.'

Between the available desk people, they narrowed it to four women: two who more or less fit the composite, and two who nobody could remember seeing. The bellhop, who everybody called Louis, didn't know what room she was in, but swore she fit the picture. 'That's her,' he told Swanson. Swanson called Lucas and told him they had a possible ID.

'Wait for me,' Lucas said.

They waited, working through people on the restaurant staff: two of them had seen the woman, they thought, but then maybe not. The picture wasn't that good, was it?

Lucas arrived on the run, left the Porsche at the curb and said, 'If a cop comes along, tell him it belongs to Chief Davenport,' he told the doorman.

'Right, chief,' the doorman said, and saluted. Just like New York, or something.

Franklin met him in the lobby and said, 'We're ready to go up.'

'Any more IDs on her?' Lucas asked.

'Couple of possibles – but they say they can't quite tell from the photo.'

'Yeah, but it's the best we've got,' Lucas said. He studied the picture for a few seconds with the same strange feeling of deja vu that he'd experienced when he'd first seen it. He felt that he knew the woman, because, he thought, she was a perfect type: a cheerleader. Cute, busty, athletic. He knew a hundred women just like her: hell, there were twenty just like her on the police force.

Sherrill was just like her, take away the black hair…

'Michelle Jones/ the manager muttered, tapping on a door.

'Just a minute,' a woman's voice called.

The three cops took a step back, leaving the manager looking quizzically at them. Then he realized that the woman might come out shooting, and started to take a step back. Then the door opened, just two inches, and Michelle Jones looked out: she was black.

'Sorry, wrong room,' Swanson said. 'We're checking a security problem.'

There was no answer at the next room. Lucas nodded at the manager, who used his key and stepped hastily away. Swanson turned the door knob and they went in.

'Christ, it looks like somebody was beaten to death,' Franklin said. Clothing was strewn around the room and across the bed; two pair of panty hose, apparently damp, hung from a door, and a wool sweater lay on the rug, drying on top of a bath towel. Two suitcases, both open on the floor, looked like they'd been rifled by a fast-moving thief.

'Nah, it just look like my wife's been here,' Swanson said. 'This is just a fuckin' woman.'

The manager crooked his head out from behind the protective bulk of Franklin: 'I think the gentleman is right,' he said. 'Single women… and you should see what they put in the toilets. Women'll put anything in a toilet. We once had a woman whose dog died, and she tried to flush it down the toilet.. .'

'Small dog?' Franklin asked.

'Well, yeah.' The manager's eyes seemed to cross. 'I mean, nobody'd try to flush a German shepherd.'

The third room was also empty: but very empty. No sign of a presence other then the disturbed covers on the bed.

'You're sure there's supposed to be somebody in here?' Lucas asked.

'Oh, yeah,' the manager said, looking around in disgust. 'She skipped. I know what that feels like. She's skipped.'

'Then this is her,' Lucas said. 'Let's get the crime scene guys in here.'

'Four hundred bucks,' the manager said.

'Yeah, well, don't touch anything,' Franklin growled.

Franklin and Swanson went to the last room on the list, while Lucas looked around the empty room, and a moment later, Franklin came back: 'Better have a look at this chick.'

This one fit, too: a cheerleader, with the blonde hair, blue eyes, good shape, a little busty. And again, Lucas had the sense of deja vu: 'Do I know you?' he asked.

'No,' the woman said, a little angry and a little more scared. 'Who are you?'

'I'm a deputy chief of police,' Lucas said. 'Where are you from?'

'From Seattle…'

Lucas spotted a wedding ring. 'And you're married?'

'Yes, and I'd like to know…'

'What are you doing here? Are you in town on business?'

'What's going on?' she demanded, the fear fading, and the anger growing.

'Just tell me,' Lucas said patiently. 'Are you here on business?'

'Yes, I'm here for the perio convention at the Radisson…'

'What's a perio?' Franklin asked. He was a very large black man in a yellow plaid sport coat, and he loomed in the doorway like a dark moon.

'A periodontist. I'm a dentist,' she said.

'Thanks,' Lucas said. He glanced at Franklin and shook his head and said to the woman, 'We've got a situation here, which Detective Franklin will explain to you

…'

Outside in the hall, Swanson said to Lucas, 'A gum gardener.'

'A what?'

'A gum gardener. That's what periodontists are called by other dentists.'

'Yeah? I'll treasure that piece of information.'

Lucas went back to the empty room to wait for the crime-scene crew. He wanted only one piece of information: that the china handles on the bathroom fixtures had been wiped. If they'd been wiped, this was the room, and they were too late.

Franklin went off to check on the last room again.

Then the two crime-scene guys arrived, and Lucas told them what he wanted to know. One of them stepped into the bathroom, looked at the china handles on the sink, took what looked like a perfume bottle out of his briefcase and sprayed a steel-colored dust on the handles. Then he stuck his head in the sink so he could get a closer look. When he emerged, he said, 'Wiped. Slick as a whistle.'

'Goddamn it, I knew it,' Lucas said.

Franklin returned. 'Last lady came in, from that room that was all torn up.

She's fifty, and she'd got a dog. A small one. I offered to flush it for her, but she said no.'

'Okay,' Lucas said. To the crime-scene guys, 'She probably wiped the place down, but I want you to dust everything. Anything we get..'

'Look at this,' the second crime scene guy said. He was emerging from the shower, and he was holding a small hotel-sized bar of soap.

'What?' Lucas asked.

'I think she forgot to wipe the soap.'

'She forgot to wipe the what?' Mallard asked 'The soap,' Lucas said. 'A bar of soap.' 'You can't leave prints on a bar of soap. Wet soap?' 'Well, you can one way,' Lucas said. 'If the soap squirts out of your hand and you leave it on the floor, and then get out and dry yourself and remember the soap, and pick it up and put it back in the soap dish, then you can leave prints. At least, that's what we think – one corner of the soap was squared off and cracked, like it'd been dropped. The hard part was getting the soap back to the office without screwing up the prints. That was a goddamned nightmare.'

'How're you processing it?'

'We put it in a refrigerator down in Identification.'

'You put it in what?'

Lucas was irritated: 'Do we have a bad connection or something? I can hear you perfectly.'

'Why'd you put it in the goddamn refrigerator?' Mallard asked. He was getting loud, for a guy who looked like an accountant, even with the thick neck.

'We figure if we can harden it up enough, we can dust it and pick up the prints,' Lucas said. 'I mean, we can see them, we're just scared to death of doing anything to them. If you blow on them, they could fade.'

'Ah, Jesus. I'm gonna call the fingerprint guys here and get them in touch with your guys,' Mallard said. 'Maybe we can help.'

'Did you get the composite?' Lucas asked

'Yeah. We're running it against all former suspects, anybody who's ever been around one of these cases.'

'What ever happened to the guy in Wichita? Is he still peddling dope?'

'Little asshole,' Mallard said. 'We've still got a watch on him, I still got

Malone out there with the team, but she's bitching thirty-six hours a day about getting back. And if you know the suspect was in Minneapolis, and we know Lopez wasn't, then I'll call her off.'

'She was here, the shooter was,' Lucas said.

'Then I'll tell Malone to wrap it up. Still can't believe it's a woman. Anyway,

I'm gonna drag the files over to witness protection and have a talk with them.

We got enough on their boy out there to send him away for three hundred years.'

'Just because Lopez didn't pan out, doesn't mean that some kind of Wichita connection isn't good,' Lucas said.

'I know that; and if you've got any suggestions, I'd be happy to have Malone look into them. It'll take her a couple of days to wrap things up.'

'I've got nothing, not at the moment,' Lucas said. 'And look, have your guys call our ID guys right now; I'm scared to death about what's gonna happen when we take that bar of soap out of the crisper.'

'The what?' Mallard asked.

'The crisper, you know, where you keep the lettuce and radishes and…'

'Don't tell me. Please, just don't tell me.'

A guy named Manual found Lucas in the Homicide office talking to Sloan, and said, 'We're gonna try to take the prints.'

'Ah.' Lucas and Sloan both got up and headed down to ID. In the Identification section, they found four people standing around a hippie with shoulder-length hair and a dangly silver earring. He appeared to be about sixteen, and was holding a Nikon F5 camera with a weird lens. The bar of soap sat on a

Tupperware lid on the desk.

'What's going on?' Lucas asked, looking at the hippie.

'Don't touch me,' the kid said. 'If anything falls on the soap, spit or anything, it's all over.'

He was looking down at the soap through the camera, which he held no more than a foot above the bar. 'He's my kid,' a cop named Harry muttered to Lucas. 'Great photographer. That there's what you call your basic ring-light, there on the end of the lens. It's really a flash, and he's looking right down on the prints, with half the ring-light turned off so he'll get some shadow…'

'Shut up,' the kid said.

Everybody shut up and Lucas was about to open his mouth and ask if he knew what he was doing, when the flash went; then again. The kid shot twenty-four pictures in five minutes, using the ring-light, then no ring-light, and finally with reflected light from a sheet of tinfoil. When he was done, he looked at Lucas and said, 'I could see them, pretty good. Three prints, a little smudged, but coming right up at me.'

'You think you got them?'

'If I can see them I got them,' the kid said. 'I'm gonna run this over to a one hour slide processor by Rosedale. It'd help if you could call them and tell them to put me at the front of the line.'

'You did slides?'

'Yeah; I get a lot better resolution that way, when I scan them. ..' Lucas must have looked puzzled. The kid added, 'I assumed you wanted a digital file. We can phone it to the FBI and they can start the search.'

Lucas turned to Sloan: 'Go find somebody to run this kid over to Rosedale in a squad, lights and sirens. Tell the picture people to start running the film as soon as he gets there. We want it.' He turned back to the kid. 'I'll sign you up for a consultant's fee. I'll give the forms to your dad. If the pictures come out.'

The kid left with Sloan, and Harriet Ashler, the chief fingerprint-specialist, said, 'All right; back in the fridge for a minute, just to firm things up.'

She put the soap back in the fridge, and they all stood around looking at the refrigerator for three minutes – it was a small brown office model from Sears, with two lunch sacks and an aging apple on one shelf, and a bottle of cran-apple juice in the door – and then she took it back out and touched an unmarked piece of it. 'Still nice and hard,' she said. 'Let's try it.'

The technique, which they agreed upon with the FBI, was to blow a light dry graphite dust across the prints, then try to softly pick up the dust with a piece of Magic Mending Tape. Ashler sprayed dust on the smallest, least-clear print, then squatted next to the bar of soap. 'Tape.'

Somebody handed her the roll of Magic Mending tape. She gently lowered a loop of the tape across the first print, let it rest on the carbon particles for a moment, then lifted it.

'Shoot,' she said, squinting at the tape. She picked up a magnifying glass and looked again.

'What happened?'

'No print,' she said. She looked back at the soap. 'It just sorta pulled little tiny pieces of the soap away… it's totally wrecked.'

'All right, stop,' Lucas said. 'Let's get it back in the fridge, and talk to the

Feebs again. Maybe we ought to do some experiments on another bar of soap with our own fingerprints before we try again.'

Ashler nodded. 'That'd be best – but I thought we needed it in a hurry.'

'Maybe not, if Harry's genius kid came through-'

Harry's genius kid came through. Sloan had personally taken him to the Roseville store, because Sloan liked to drive fast in city cars with lights and sirens, and they were back in less than an hour. 'Four of them are pretty good,' the kid said. 'If Mr. Sloan can take me back to my place, I'll scan them in and we can ship them over to the FBI.'

Lucas was looking at the slides, holding them up to a fluorescent light. They didn't look like much, but they looked better than other prints he'd seen. They looked better than what he'd been able to see with the naked eye. 'Harry,' he said to the kid's father, 'Your kid is a fuckin' genius.'

Rinker got to Des Moines a little after five o'clock in the afternoon, checked into a Holiday Inn, and called Carmel on the cell phone.

'More bad news,' Carmel said. 'My guy in the police department says they've got your fingerprints.' 'I wiped everything,' Rinker said, but she could feel the uncertainty in her own voice.

'He says they took them off a bar of soap they found in a room at the Regency White,' Carmel said. 'Davenport's guys.' 'A bar of soap?'

'Yeah. He said they were sending them to the FBI.' 'I'll call you back,' Rinker said. She remembered picking up the soap. She hadn't thought to wipe it. She rang off before Carmel could protest, and sat quietly on the bed, pulling herself together for a moment. Despite her self-control, a tear trickled down her cheek: that fuckin' Davenport. She took three deep breaths, exhaled, then punched nine numbers into the phone. 'This is Rinker,' she said, when the man answered. 'I gotta pull the plug.'

After a long silence, the man said, 'You're sure?' 'It's the Minneapolis deal.

They've been to my place, even if they don't know it; but they're sniffing around Wichita. They've got a bad picture of me, but it's a picture, one of those computer deals. Now I think they might have my fingerprints.'

'How could this happen?' Disbelief in his voice. 'You wouldn't believe it. But you tell Wooden Head to get out to Wichita with the money. I'm gonna clean out the bank there, go to my bottom-line ID – I'm shredding everything else – and

I'll leave him the papers. He can take the bar and find a new manager; but my prints'll be all over the place. He should try to wipe everything he can, but I don't think he'll get everything.'

'What about your apartment?'

'I'm gonna try to get in and out, quick,' she said. 'I'll check the place first.'

'I didn't think anybody had your prints.'

'They don't. I've never been printed. That's the good news. But they've been getting too close, and sooner or later, they just might put things together. I can't take the chance.'

'All right. Jeez, Clara…'

'Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll get back in touch, when I can.'

'Where are you now?'

'Minneapolis. I'll be leaving here in a couple of hours, I've got some cleaning up to do. But if I drive straight through the night, I ought to be in Wichita by the time the banks open.'

When she finished, she called Carmel back: 'I'm closing down my life,' she said.

'I'll just be a figment of your imagination by this time tomorrow'

'You mean you're… giving up the bar?'

'Everything,' Rinker said: 'Now listen: do you still think we go for Plan B?'

'Well, if you got caught, or if there's something more on me… I mean, that'd settle things.'

'All right. I've got to run to Wichita. I'll see you tomorrow night, probably.'

She made two calls to the airport, then called a cab. She left her car and luggage at the Holiday Inn, but took her guns. The cab dropped her at Shack

Direct Air, where a laconic pilot who looked far too young to be allowed in airplanes was waiting in the pilot's lounge, reading the Wall Street Journal.

'You Miss Maxwell?'

'Yes.'

'I was supposed to get some money.'

She took two thousand dollars out of her purse and handed it to him. 'We're outa here,' he said.

She arrived in Wichita a few minutes before midnight, took a cab straight to the bar, said, 'Hey, Johnny,' to the bartender who said, 'You're back?' and she said, 'Yeah, but I'm running. See you tomorrow.'

'Heavy date?'

'Something like that. I'm taking the van, so don't worry about it.'

'Okay.'

From the back room she got a dozen liquor boxes and the keys for the bar's van, a big practical Dodge. On the way back to her apartment, she stopped at a convenience store, bought a package of plastic garbage bags, and hauled them with the liquor boxes back to her apartment. She lived on the second floor, and carried the boxes up in three trips, four at a time, and tossed them into the kitchen. After the third trip, she shut the door behind her, and started packing.

Tried not to think about it: just packed. She packed a sock bunny that her mother had made her, when her mother was still functioning as a human being, before her step-dad had beaten the liveliness out of her.

She'd gotten the bunny for Christmas when she was six; it was the single oldest thing she possessed. She packed the photographs taken with other dancers at two or three bars around St. Louis, with people at the booze warehouse, where she'd worked after the dancing ended. She packed the first two-dollar bill that the bar had taken in – they'd saved the first two-dollar bill because they'd forgotten to save the first dollar.

She packed: she'd lived in the place for six years, and it had been as much a home to her as anything she'd ever had, and it took a while. She hummed while she packed. Hummed like an angry bumble bee. 'That fuckin' Davenport,' she said.

'That fuckin' Davenport.'

When she'd packed everything important to her, including her school books and papers, she realized that she couldn't pack everything that was important to her. She couldn't pack the place. She sat on the bed and smoothed the sheet, and went once more through the chest of drawers, where even the tired cotton underwear suddenly seemed important…

"That fuckin' Davenport…' And this time, she cried. Let it go, couldn't stop it.

Ten minutes later, eyes red, she was wiping the place with Lysol.

By three-thirty in the morning, she was finished. If the cops really took the place apart, they might find a print or two, but it'd take weeks. She took the last of the boxes down to the van, moved the van down the street, then went back to the apartment. Her apartment was at the end of a hall, and when she'd first moved in, she'd made a small change: she'd placed a wireless movement alarm, which she bought at Wards, just above the window at the end of the hall. The alarm, when tripped, set off a buzzer or a strobe on a small console next to her bed. She chose strobe, put the console next to her face, placed her guns on the floor next to her bed, and let herself slip into a fitful sleep.

She hadn't thought that the man in St. Louis would ever harm her; she had almost that much faith in him. But not quite that much. She'd told him she hoped to be in Wichita by the time the banks opened. If he were going to make a move against her, probably using one or the other muscle heads that always seemed to be around, the guy most likely would be waiting at her apartment, waiting for her to open the bank and then come back.

Coming from St. Louis, even by air, would put him in Wichita at least a few hours later than her. He'd have to be found, and an airplane would have to be rounded up, or he'd have to get in his car and drive… If he was coming, she really wouldn't expect him before six o'clock or so.

He was better than that. He arrived at five.

She thought she actually woke a minute before the alarm went. Whatever, she sat up with the strobe flashing in her face. She hit the o^button, and looked at the clock. Five minutes after five. She got to her feet, picked up both guns, cocked them, and headed for the kitchen, moving slowly, careful not to bump anything, to set off a vibration, absolutely silent in her bare feet. She was still wearing the thin rubber gloves, hot and tacky on her hands. The gloves were ivory-colored, and she could see them better than she could see her arms, like two disembodied fists floating though the dark.

Whoever was in the hall had hesitated at the door. She moved past it and stepped into a closet with sliding doors. The left door was half open, and she moved behind it, where she could still see through the open panel. Then the man outside knocked, and called her voice, quietly. 'Clara? Clara?' Another soft knock, then a key.

He had a key, which meant the man in St. Louis must have copied hers. Stupid.

She just left her keys laying around, the keys to everything. She worried that there were more security lapses that she'd never known about. Then she pushed the worry out of her head, and focused on the weight of her guns.

The door opened, a darkening shadow, then the man stepped inside; she was less than two feet away, and he stepped inside far enough that she could see that he was carrying something in his right hand. From the way he was carrying it, it had to be a gun. She lifted her own gun, ready to fire, when the man whispered – the softest breath – 'Easy…'

She thought he was talking to her and almost blurted something out, when she heard more soft movement – and the man she could see wasn't moving. There were two of them.

The first moved down the hall toward her bedroom, while the second moved quietly across the living room to the second bedroom, which Rinker used as a TV room and home office. After a long minute of silence, the man down the hall came back, stepped toward the second bedroom. And the second man stepped out of the second bedroom.

'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 further man said. 'I get the couch, if that's a couch.'

The 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.'

Five 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 mens' 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 drivers 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 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 again. 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

8175,000, 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.

Wooden Head 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 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.

Wooden 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 drivers' 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.'