Certain prey

Chapter Five

For the rest of the evening, Carmel worked her way through alternate rages and periods of calm; fantasized the painful end of Rolando D'Aquila. And finally admitted to herself that she was in a corner.

She called Rinker, left a number and said, 'This is really urgent. We've got a big problem.'

The next day, a little after one o'clock in the afternoon, Rinker called on

Carmel's magic cell phone. She didn't introduce herself, she simply said in her dry accent, 'I'm calling you back. I hate problems.'

Carmel said, 'Hold on: I want to lock my door.' She stuck her head out into the reception area, said to the secretary, 'I need ten minutes alone,' stepped back inside and locked the door.

'All right…' she began, but Rinker cut her off.

'Is your phone safe?'

'Yes. It's registered under my mother's name -she's remarried, and has a different last name. Like the Volvo. It's good for… special contacts.'

'You have a lot of those in your job?'

'Enough,' Carmel said. 'Anyway, I'm calling about Rolando D'Aquila, who is the guy who put me in touch with you.'

'What happened?' Rinker asked.

Carmel explained, quickly, then said, 'I would have thought the people on your side would have been warned against this. You push somebody into a corner…'

'What? What would you do?' Carmel could feel the warning edge on the other woman's voice.

'I'm sure as hell not going to turn you in, or talk to the police, if that's what you're worried about,' Carmel said, defensively. 'But there has to be some kind of resolution. Rolo's a junkie. If I give him every dime I've got, he'll put it up his nose. When he's got every dime, he'll still have the tape, and he'll start looking around for somebody to sell it to. Like TV. Then I'm gone – and you, too. The cops will put Rolo through the wringer before they give him any kind of immunity, and you can't tell what'll come from that.'

'Maybe nothing,' Rinker said. 'He's off there on the edge of things.'

'Bullshit. Sooner or later, he'll give them the guy he called about you,' Carmel argued. 'Then they'll squeeze that guy. You know how it works. This is murder we're talking about; this is thirty years in the state penitentiary for everybody involved. That's a lot of squeeze. And believe me, I'm well enough known in the Cities that there'd be a hurricane of shit if this got out. This is not something the cops would let go.'

'When are you paying him off? This Rolo guy?' Rinker asked.

'I'm supposed to meet him in the Crystal Court tomorrow at five o'clock. I put him off as long as I could, told him it'll take time to get the money together. The Crystal Court is this big interior court.. .'

'I was there,' Rinker said.

'Okay. Anyway, I give him the money, and he gives me the tape. I insisted that he show up, personally. But the best he'll do is give me a copy of the tape. He says there's only one, but he's lying. He'll want to come back for more money.'

'You're sure about that?'

'He's a fuckin' dope dealer, for Christ's sakes.'

After a couple of seconds silence, Rinker said, 'There's a flight into

Minneapolis tomorrow morning. I can be there at eleven thirty-five.'

'I don't know…' Carmel started. Then, in a rush, 'I don't know if I want to see your face. I'm afraid you'll have to kill me.'

'Honey, there're a couple of dozen people who know my face,' Rinker said. 'One more won't make any difference, especially when I know she paid me for a hit.

I'd rather you not see me, but we've got to fix this thing. You're gonna have to help.'

Carmel didn't hesitate: 'I know that.'

'The thing is, we're gonna have to talk to him about where the tape is,' Rinker said.

'Yes. Talk to him privately,' Carmel said. 'I'd figured that out.'

'That's right… Why'd you insist that he meet you in person?'

'Because I thought you might want in… at that point,' Carmel said.

Rinker chuckled: 'All right. You ever kill anybody?'

'No.'

'You might be good at it. With a little training.'

'Probably,' Carmel said. 'But it doesn't pay enough.'

Rinker chuckled again and said, 'See you at eleven fifty-five. Bring the Jag.

And wear jeans and walking shoes.'

Carmel hadn't known what to expect. A tough-looking, square-faced hillbilly with bony wrists and shoulders, maybe – or somebody beefy, who might have been a prison guard at Auschwitz. The next day, at noon, she looked right past the first passengers getting off the plane from Kansas City, looking for somebody who fit the assorted images she'd created in her mind. When Rinker's voice came out of a well-dressed young woman with carefully-coiffed blonde-over-blonde hair and just a slight aristocratic touch of lipstick, Carmel jumped, startled. The woman was carrying a leather backpack, and was right at Carmel's elbow.

'Hello?'

'What?'

Rinker grinned up at her. 'Looking for somebody else?'

Carmen wagged her head once and said, 'It's you?'

'It's me, honey. I checked a bag.'

As they started up the concourse, Carmel said, 'God, you really don't look like

… you.'

'Well, what can I tell you?' Rinker said cheerfully. She looked past Carmel to her right, where a tall, tanned man was angling across the concourse to intercept them. 'Carmel,' he said, dragging out the last syllable.

'James.' Carmel turned a cheek to be kissed and, after James kissed it, asked,

'Where're you off to?'

'Los Angeles… My God, you look like an athlete. I never suspected you had jeans or Nikes.' The guy was at least six-six and looked good, with a receding hairline; like an athletic Adlai Stevenson. He turned to Rinker and said, 'And you're cute as a button. I hope you're not a raving left-wing feminist like

Carmel.'

'I sometimes am,' Rinker said. 'But you're cute as a button your own self.'

The guy put one hand over his heart and said, 'Oh my God, the accent. I think we should get married.'

'You've been married too often already, James,' Carmel said drily. She took

Rinker's arm and said, 'If we don't keep moving, he'll drown us in bullshit.'

'Carmel…'

Then they were past him and Rinker glanced back and said, 'Nice-looking guy.

What does he do?'

'He's an accountant,' Carmel said.

'Hmm,' Rinker said. Carmel caught the tone of disappointment.

'But not a boring one,' Carmel said. 'He stole almost four million dollars from a computer-software company here.'

'Jesus.' Rinker glanced back again. 'They caught him?'

'They narrowed it down to him – they figured out that he was the only one who could have pulled it off,' Carmel said. 'He hired me to defend him, but he never seemed particularly worried. Eventually, the company came around and said if he gave the money back, they'd drop charges. He said that if they dropped charges, and apologized for the mistake, he'd tell them about the software glitch that they might want to patch up before their clients started getting ripped off, and they found themselves liable for a billion bucks or something.'

'They did it?'

'Took them a week to agree,' Carmel said. 'They hated to apologize – hated it.

But they did it. Then he insisted on a contract that would pay him another half million for isolating the bug. Said it was severance pay, and he deserved it.

They eventually did that, too. I guess they got their money's worth.'

Rinker shook her head: 'Don't people just work for money anymore?'

Carmel didn't want to think about that question. Instead, she said, 'Um, listen, what do I call you?'

'Pamela Stone,' Rinker said. 'By the way, do you know how to get to South

Washington County Park?'

'No, I don't think so.'

Til show you on a map,' Rinker said. 'We gotta get my guns back. Can't fly with them, you know.'

Carmel kept looking at Rinker as they headed out of the airport to the parking ramp; looking for some sign that she could be an executioner for the mob. But

Rinker wasn't a monster. She was a chick, chattering away about the flight, about an airline-magazine article on body piercing, and about the Jaguar, as they pulled through the pay booths: 'I drive a Chevy, myself.'

Carmel listened for a while and then Rinker put a hand on Carmel's forearm and said, 'Carmel, you've gotta relax. You're tighter'n a drum. You look like you're gonna explode.'

'That's because I don't want to spend the next thirty years locked in a closet like some fuckin' squirrel,' Carmel said.

'They're locking squirrels in closets now?' Rinker asked.

Carmel had to smile, despite herself, and loosened her grip on the steering wheel. 'You know what I mean.'

'Ain't gonna happen anyway,' Rinker said. 'We'll get this Rolo fellow in a quiet place, explain the situation to him, and get the tape.'

'And kill him?'

Rinker shrugged. 'Maybe he's made three or four copies. If he tells us about two of them, and the third one is hidden somewhere… maybe if he's gone, it'll never be found.'

'We can't take the chance that there's the third one. We have to make sure we can get them all before we do it. Kill him.'

'We'll scare him,' Rinker said. 'I can guarantee that. But there's no way we can finally be sure…'

'How'll we do it?'

'Leave it to me. I'll pick him up with you, tag him, and when he's alone, I'll take him. Is there a farm store around here? Or a truck store? Or a big hardware place?'

'Yeah, I suppose.'

'We're gonna need some chain and a couple of padlocks and some other stuff…'

South Washington County Park was twenty miles south of St. Paul, a complex of hiking and skiing trails. Only two cars were parked in the entry lot, but their drivers were nowhere to be seen.

'Park down at the end,' Rinker said, pointing. Carmel parked, and they got out.

Rinker, carrying her leather backpack, led the way down a trail along a tiny creek, then up a hillside covered with thick-trunked oaks. At the top of the hill, she took a long look around, then led the way off the trail, back into the trees. After a minute, they came to a fence separating the park from a farm field. Rinker turned down the fence, finally said, 'Here.'

She stepped away from the fence, knelt next to an oak, and probed between two of its roots. The dirt was soft, and came away easily. After a minute, she pulled two automatic pistols from the ground, the dirt still clinging to them.

At that moment, Carmel was aware that she was out of sight of everyone, in a nearly deserted park, with a killer who now had two guns. If Rinker killed her, here and now, who would know, until some hiker way off the beaten path found her body? Rinker could take the Jag and park it downtown. Or who was to say that she hadn't somehow pre-positioned one of those cars in the parking lot down below?

The whole scenario flitted through Carmel's mind in a half-second. Rinker brushed dirt off the two pistols, put them in her leather backpack, and said,

'You worry too much.'

'I anticipate,' Carmel said.

'Why didn't you anticipate that Rolo was making a movie?' Rinker asked politely.

Carmel didn't dodge the question. She grimaced and said, 'I fucked up. I knew something wasn't right. I remember thinking that he wasn't embarrassed by the fact that he was living in a shit-hole, after years of being a big-time dealer.

Wasn't embarrassed. That was wrong.'

'At least you know you messed up,' Rinker said. The guns clinked in the bag as she hung it over one shoulder. 'We need to get some oil. When we get the chains and padlocks. Oil for the guns.'

'Doesn't burying them… sort of wreck them?'

'Yeah, it would if I left them buried for more than a couple of days. In a week they'd be rusted wrecks.

Then, even if somebody found them, there'd be no way to connect them to the death of Barbara Allen.' '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'd better get back to town.'

The Crystal Court 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'd 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 sakes, Rolo, I can 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'd 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, jay-walking when she caught a red light, wondering what was happening with Rinker.

Rolando D' Aquila 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 grey suited man with a briefcase between them. Then grey 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 car-side 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.'

Carmel 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 US 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 protested. 'Look, I can call my friend..'

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 again, with her foot, 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 pair of yellow plastic kitchen gloves at a K-Mart. 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 safety 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.

Carmel and Rinker 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.'

'In the bank,' he snarled. He'd won, he thought.

'Fuck you.' Carmel got the roll of tape and reached forward to slap it over his mouth, but he turned his head away. 'Turn your head this way,' she said.

'Hey, fuck you,' he said; and there was a tone in the way he said it.

'He's just achin' to be shot a little more,' Rinker said from the doorway.

'You'll kill me if you shoot me a little more,' Rolo said. 'I'm still bleeding from my leg. And if you kill me, the cops are going to open the safety deposit box… Hey!'

He said Hey! because Carmel had crawled on top of him. She sat on his chest, grabbed his head by the hair and pulled forward, hard, until he was choking on the chain. He thrashed some more, but had started making gargling sounds when she let his head drop. 'Keep your head straight,' she said, as he took a half dozen rasping breaths. 'You fuckin'…'

He kept his head straight and she took a half-dozen wraps of duct tape across his mouth. 'Now what?' Rinker asked, as Carmel crawled off him.

'I'm very good at cross-examination,' Carmel said. 'One thing you could do is to get out a mop, and get the broom, and brush over every place we've walked…'

'We've walked everywhere,' Rinker said.

'Yeah, you don't have to clean it, you just have to stir it up good, so if the crime lab comes through, they won't know what's old and what's new'

'The crime lab?'

'Yeah,' Carmel said. She leaned close to Rinker. 'It's pretty clear that after I cross-examine him, we're gonna have to kill him. Eventually they'll find him, and then the crime lab will come through.'

'What about the video tape?' Rinker asked.

'We'll have the tape,' Carmel said. They were in the kitchen, and she went to the tool drawer they'd dumped, and picked up the electric drill and a box of drill bits. 'We will have the tape.'

Carmel went back to the bedroom, and as Rolo strained to watch, plugged the drill into an electric outlet and said to Rolo, 'Did I ever tell you that I was crazy? I mean, absolutely fuckin' nuts? Well, I am, and I'm gonna prove it,' she said. She climbed back on the bed and sat on his legs: 'This is an eighth-inch drill bit,' she said. 'I'm now going to drill a hole through your knee cap.'

He flopped and strained against the chains and grunted, and she shook her head:

'No, no, no. No negotiation. We'd just waste more time screwing around. So I'll drill first.'

And she did it. He bucked against her, but with his neck and feet tightly chained, was unable to move enough to lose her. She rode his legs, and with brutal efficiency drove the drill bit through his knee cap, the drill whining and sputtering, bringing up flakes of white bone, and black blood, driving it in until the drill chuck touched his jeans. Rolo bucked against it, his screams muffled by the tape; at the end, with the drill silent, he made an eerie dying animal sound, a high keening groan. Across the room, Rinker turned away, finally walking to the living room, where she sat down on a chair and put her hands over her ears.

When the drill bit had gone in as far as it would go, Carmel wiggled it, and said, 'Feel good, fucker? Feel good? Tape is in the bank? What a crock of shit.. .' A little spot of white saliva appeared at one corner of Carmel's eyes; Rolo fainted.

'Now, you probably think I'm just gonna take the tape off and ask you again; but

I'm not gonna,' Carmel said, conversationally, when he was conscious again. 'I'm gonna drill a hole in your other knee instead.'

And she did it all over again, Rolo strangling himself on the chain, kicking his heels, Carmel riding his legs.

Then, 'You know what I bet would really hurt? A hole in your heels.'

And she drilled a hole through both of his heels, taking her time, developing a technique. Halfway through the first heel, Rolo fainted again; and again, halfway through the second.

'Get me some ice cubes out of the sink,' Carmel called to Rinker. 'If there are any left…'

There were a few, and Carmel dumped a bowl ofice water and cubes on Rolo's face.

A minute later, his eyes flickered open.

Carmel said, 'A guy like you, you know what would really hurt? What would hurt a lot?' Her fingers went to his belt line and she unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his pants, and started to drag them down. Rolo lay limp, unresisting. Carmel got his pants down on his thighs and then the animal keening began again, and Carmel stopped and said, 'What? You won't want me to drill out your dick? I'd be happy to do it…'

He went, 'Uh-uh, Uh-uh,' and Carmel asked, 'Are you gonna tell us where the tape really is?'

'Uh-huh, uh-huh.'

Carmel pulled the tape off his face and he turned toward her, his eyes glazed, and groaned. 'I'm dying,' he said. 'My heart busted.'

'Look, if you're gonna bullshit us, I'll put the tape back on and start the drill again. I could do this all night.'

'Tape's in the car,' Rolo said. 'In with the spare.'

Carmel looked at Rinker and she said, 'Oh, shit. How could we be that stupid?'

'I'll go get it,' Rinker said. 'You've got some blood…' Carmel looked down at her blouse: the droplets of blood looked like fine embroidery.

Rinker went out; another nice evening. She could hear music playing up the block, through an open window somewhere. She stopped to listen, but couldn't identify the music, then went to Rolo's car, popped the trunk, and pulled the cover off the limited-use spare. The tape was tucked behind it. She looked at it, weighed it in her hands, sighed, and went back inside.

'Get it?' Carmel asked.

'Got a tape,' Rinker said. She pushed it into the VCR. The picture came up immediately: and Carmel came to watch.

'Good light,' Rinker grunted.

'He had all the windows open. That's another thing I should have noticed. He's not an open-windows guy.'

'Boy…' Rinker said, as the tape wound out. 'You were gone, if the cops got this.'

"That's why I had to get it back.,' Carmel said.

'You think this is it?' Rinker asked.

'I don't know. I could go drill him some more,' Carmel said.

Rinker looked toward the bedroom. 'He looked pretty rough in there

… I don't think he could take any more, and I don't think we'll get any more out of him.

More'n what we've got.'

'So we gotta call it,' Carmel said.

'It's your face on the tape.'

Carmel looked at the bedroom door for a moment, then said. 'All right. We're done. If there's a copy, we'll have to deal with it later. But I think we're still gonna have to kill him. After the drill, he might be so pissed he'd go to the cops,' Carmel said.

'You wanna do it?' Rinker asked. 'I mean, you yourself?'

'Sure. If you want,' Carmel said.

'Not if you'd feel bad,' Rinker said.

'No, no, I don't think I would, not really,' Carmel said. "What do I do?'

Rinker explained as they went back into the kitchen. Rolo saw them coming with the gun and didn't bother to struggle. 'See you in hell,' he said.

'There's nothing as silly as hell,' Carmel said. 'Don't you know that yet?' And then to Rinker, 'What, I just put it at his head, and pull the trigger?'

'Easy as that.'

Rolo turned his head away, and Carmel put the muzzle of the pistol at his temple and then waited a few seconds.

'Do it,' Rolo said.

'Made you sweat, didn't I?' Carmel asked. Rolo started to turn his head back; a little hope? She could see it in his eyes.

Carmel shot him six times; then the bullets ran out.

Rinker and Carmel spent another ten minutes in the house, closing up, obscuring anything that might even theoretically provide evidence against them.

'We can drop the guns in the Mississippi – I know a good spot down by the dam,'

Carmel said.

'And burn the tape,' Rinker said.

'As soon as we get back to my place. We oughta go back to my place and change, and get rid of these clothes, and get showered off and everything.'

'Maybe we could go out someplace tonight,' Rinker said. 'My plane isn't until the day after tomorrow.'

'That'd be fun,' Carmel said. 'Maybe we could rent a movie or…"

She stopped in mid-sentence, looking back at the kitchen. 'What?' Rinker asked.

Without answering, Carmel went back to the kitchen, squatted next to the video camera that Rinker had tossed on the floor. Touched it, turned it over.

'What?' Rinker asked again.

'That fuckin' Rolo. This camera is a VHS-C. This tape…' She held up the tape they'd found. '… this tape is a full-sized VHS tape. If you were making a copy using your cheap-ass VCR and the camera, this is what you'd use to pick up the copy. So there's another tape – aVHS-C

'You're sure?' Rinker asked.

'Look,' Carmel said. She picked up the camera, turned it over, opened the cartridge compartment. The tape they had was at least twice as big as the compartment.

'Bad news,' Rinker said.

Carmel glanced at her, sideways and quickly: if Rinker were to shoot her now, at least all of Rinker's troubles would be over. She could walk away and not have to worry at all.

'You worry too much,' Rinker said.

'I anticipate,' Carmel said. She looked at Rinker. 'Let's get back to my place.

Do you still have those address books?'

'Yeah.'

'And let's get his wallet and the phone book and whatever else that might have names in it… I've got to think about this.'

'You don't think it's in a safe-deposit box?'

'He's a drug dealer. He'd never have a safe-deposit box, not under his own name, anyway. We didn't find any fake IDs that he could use to get to a box under a different name, and we didn't find any keys… I suspect he did what drug dealers usually do: he left it with somebody he trusts.'

'Like who?'

'Like a lawyer. Except that I'm his lawyer. He could have another one, I suppose; I can find out. But he's a spic, so it's probably a relative. Anyway, we've got to do some research. In a hurry…'

'I'll cancel my plane ticket,' Rinker said. 'I guess we keep the guns.'

On the way back to Carmel's, Rinker glanced at her and asked, 'How much did you enjoy that? Back there?'

Carmel started to answer, then changed directions and asked a question of her own: 'Have you been to school? To college?'

'Well, yeah.'

'Really? I didn't think… you know'

'Professional killer and all,' Rinker said.

'Yeah.' Carmel nodded. 'What'd you major in?'

'Psychology. Actually, I'm about eight credits away from my B.A. I should have it finished next spring.'

'Good school?'

'Okay school.'

'But you're not going to tell me which.'

'Well…'

'That's okay,' Carmel said. 'Anyway, I did sort of enjoy it, just a little bit, maybe. Whether I did or not, he had to go.'

'You enjoyed it just a little bit? Maybe?'

'Didn't you?' Carmel asked.

'No. I couldn't stand that sound he was making. That smell when he

… you know.

I didn't like it at all.'

Now Carmel took her eyes off the road for a moment, to look at Rinker. 'Don't worry, I'm just a sociopath. Like you. I'm not a psychopath or anything.'

'How do you know I'm not a psychopath?'

'From what Rolo told me – what he'd heard about you. Quiet, professional, clean.

You do it because you can, and because you can make money at it, and because you're good at it; not because you have some slobbering lust to kill people.'

'Slobbering lust?'

'Listen, I've handled a couple of cases…'

Carmel had Rinker laughing by the time they got back to her place. And as they got out of the car, Rinker looked at her over the roof and said, 'Wichita

State.'

'What?'

'That's where I go to school.'

Carmel had the sense that Rinker had told her something important. After a few moments, realized that she had. She'd told Carmel where she could be found.

Where home was.