Mortal Prey

5

Tom and Michelle Lawton lived in a stucco house surrounded by rubber trees, with one overhanging tangerine, in Atwater Village off Los Feliz, behind a concrete ditch that everyone in Los Angeles called a river.

Down the river, if there'd been water in it, and you'd been allowed to boat it, and if you'd followed it far enough, you'd come to the Port of Long Beach-which is where the Lawtons berthed their sailboat. They got to the boat in a red '96 Jeep Cherokee with a surfboard rack on top, down I-5 and the 710, rather than down the river.

The Lawtons grew a little weed under lights, kept a couple of red-striped cats, and Michelle read mystery stories and made tangerine marmalade and worked part-time in a chain bookstore, while Tom took meetings on his screenplay. The screenplay involved the shadowy world of flesh smugglers, who ran human cargo into the States against the best efforts of outmanned and outgunned American law-enforcement officers, played by one or both of the Sheen brothers, although Tom'd take Jean-Claude Van Damme and a chick named Heather if he had to.

The few people who'd read the screenplay suggested that it wasn't realistic enough. Not enough violence, they said. Not enough brutality. A mailroom guy from ICM told Tom around a Garden Veggie sandwich in a bagel joint that it could use a little sexual and racial schtick. Maybe the human cargoes should be Chinese sex slaves, and he could try to sell the product to Jackie Chan.

What pissed Tom off was that he and Michelle were smugglers of human flesh. Neither one had ever owned a gun or had more than the briefest encounters with officers of the law, for the good reason that they smuggled only one person at a time, never anything but Americans, and those persons always had good documents, which they brought themselves or Tom supplied through a Persian guy from Pasadena who made really good Texas driver's licenses.

The Lawtons weren't overwhelmingly busy as smugglers, but their rates were high and a body a month pretty much covered their nut.

This particular body was a woman, who would come across on Wednesday evening. She had her own ID, and it was good, Tom's man-in-Mexico said.

At Wednesday noon, the Lawtons took their boat, the Star of Omaha, out the Long Beach channel. A six- or eight-knot breeze was blowing across the Islands, and they cut the diesel, put up the sails and headed south, taking their time. They weren't going to Mexico. They were going to a spot fifteen miles off San Diego. Crossing the border was the job of their Mexican contact, a guy named Juan Duarte.

Duarte owned a twenty-two-foot Boston Whaler Guardian, with a haze-gray hull, just like the American Coast Guard, but without the Coast Guard's bow-mounted fifty-caliber machine gun. The hull color, which was standard, was the closest thing on earth to the Romulans' cloaking device-from twenty feet, on a dark night, it was invisible. Juan put the body in the boat, waited for dark, then idled up the coast to a spot distinguished only by its GPS coordinates. He found the Lawtons with their sails backed, quietly waiting, a couple of cigarette coals glowing in the dark. Though the Star of Omaha 's hull was white, they were very nearly as invisible as the Whaler.

"Dude," Duarte called, using the international sailboat hailing sign.

"Juan, how are you?"

Juan tossed a bowline over the sailboat's foredeck and Tom used it to pull the two boats together; the Lawtons had dropped foam fenders over the side to keep them from knocking too hard. The body threw a bag into the sailboat, then clambered up and over the side into the sailboat's cockpit.

"Nice to see you," Tom said, nodding at her in the dark. The body nodded back; she could smell tobacco on him, a pleasant odor. Michelle passed a small package to Juan: "It's an olive-wood rosary from Jerusalem, for your mom. It was blessed in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Mt. Calvary is. Jimmy brought it back," she said.

"Thank him for me," Juan said.

"You good?" Tom called down to Juan.

Juan held up a hand, meaning that he'd been paid, and said, "Cast me off, there." Tom tossed the bowline back in the Whaler, and they drifted apart again. "See you," Juan called. "Maybe got something week after next."

"Call me," Tom said.

That was pretty much all there was to it. The Lawtons gave the body a peanut-butter-and-tangerine-marmalade sandwich, which she'd ordered in advance, through Duarte. They talked in a desultory way, as they loafed through the night. The body had a nice husky whiskey voice, and Tom thought if she kept talking he might get a little wood on the sound alone, though he'd never tell Michelle that. Tom turned on the running lights a few miles north of the rendezvous. They saw boats coming and going; nothing came close.

By morning, they were off Long Beach again, and they took their time going in. There was always a chance that they'd be stopped by the Coasties, but the passenger's documents were good and the boat was clean. Tom had no idea who the body was-his one really salient criminal characteristic was a determined lack of curiosity about his cargoes.

He was not even interested in why an American wanted to be smuggled back into the country. There were any number of people who preferred to come and go without unnecessary time-wasting bureaucratic entanglements, and Tom really didn't blame them. We were the home of the free, were we not?

A few minutes after eight o'clock in the morning, the body walked down the dock, a cheap TWA flight bag on her shoulder. The Lawtons were still on the boat, stowing equipment. The $3,000 that the body left behind was taped to Michelle's butt, just in case. Michelle last saw the other woman walking toward the corner of the ship's store. When she looked back again, a moment later, the body was gone.

Rinker caught a cab to LAX, and from LAX, another to Venice, and from Venice, after getting a quick lunch on the beach and walking along some narrow, canal-lined streets for a while, watching her back, she caught another one out to the industrial flats in Downey. The driver didn't much want to go there, but when Rinker showed him a fifty, he took the money and dropped her in front of Jackie Burke's store. Burke ran a full-time custom hotrod shop on the front side of his warehouse, and a part-time stolen-car chop shop in the back. Rinker had once solved a desperate problem for him.

Burke was a chunky man, strong, dark-complected, balding, tough as a lug nut; his store smelled of spray paint and welding fumes. He was standing beside the cash register, sweating and talking over a hardboard counter to a young Japanese-American kid about putting a nitrox tank in the kid's Honda.

He didn't recognize Rinker for a moment. Women didn't often come into the shop, and he sort of nodded and said, "Be with you in a minute," and went back to the kid and then suddenly looked back. Rinker lifted her sunglasses and smiled. Burke said, "Holy shit," and then to the kid, "Let me put you with one of my guys. I gotta talk to this lady."

He held up a finger, stuck his head through a door in the back, yelled, "Hey Chuck, c'mere." Chuck came, Burke put him with the kid, then led Rinker into the back and to a ten-by-twenty-foot plywood-enclosed office in the back. He shut the door behind them and said, again, "Holy shit. Clara. I hope, uh…"

"I need a clean car that'll run good, with good papers. Something dull like a Taurus or some kind of Buick. Sort of in a hurry," she said. "I was hoping you could help me."

His eyes drifted toward the doors, as though they might suddenly splinter. "Are the cops…?"

"No." She smiled again. "No cops. I just got back in the country, and I need a car. Not that you should mention it, if you happen to bump into a cop."

"No problem there," Burke said. He relaxed a couple of degrees. He liked Clara all right, but she was not a woman he would choose to hang out with. "I can get you something off a used-car lot. The guy'll have to file the papers on it, but he can push the date back-for a while, anyway."

"Not forever?"

"No, he'll have to put them through sooner or later, 'cause of bank inventories. If you only needed it for a month or so, he could fake it out that far. Then, if somebody inquired, the papers would show the transfer to the dealer, and he'd show the transfer to you, but there wouldn't be any license or insurance checks or anything. I can guarantee you that it'd be in perfect condition."

"That'd work. I won't need it for more than a month anyway," she said. "Where do I find the used-car guy?"

"I'll drive you over," Burke said. "You paying cash?"

"You think he'd take a check?" she asked.

Burke grinned, not bothering to answer the mildly sarcastic question, and said, "You're looking pretty good."

She smiled back and said, "Thank you. I've been down in Mexico for a while. Got the tan."

"Look like you've been working out. You've lost a little weight since… you know."

"Cut off a couple pounds, maybe," she said. "Got a little sick down there."

"Montezuma's revenge."

"More or less," she said; but her eyes were melancholy, and Burke had the feeling that the sickness had been more serious than that. He didn't ask, and after a pause, Rinker asked, "So where's your used-car guy?"

Much later that afternoon, as they were parting, she tossed her new Rand McNally road atlas onto the passenger seat and said, "If anybody from St. Louis calls, you never saw me."

"I never saw you ever," Burke said. "Don't take this the wrong way, but you make me nervous."

"No reason for it," she said. "Not unless you cross me."

Burke looked at her for a long three seconds and said, finally, "Tell you what, honey. If there was enough money in it, I might mess with the guys in St. Louis. But I'm nowhere stupid enough to mess with you."

"Good," she said. She stepped closer, stood on her tiptoes, and pecked him on the cheek. "Jackie, I owe you. I will get back to you someday and we will work something out that will make you happy."

She waved, got into the beet-red Olds she'd bought for $13,200, and drove away, carefully, like a little old lady from Iowa, down toward the freeway entrance. Burke went back inside his shop, dug behind a stack of old phone books, got his stash, got his papers, rolled a joint, and walked out back to smoke it. Cool his nerves.

Clara fuckin' Rinker, Burke thought. She was pissed about something. God help somebody; and thank God it wasn't him.

Rinker was headed east to St. Louis-but not that minute. Instead she drove north on I-5, taking her time, watching her speed. She spent a bad night in Coalinga, rolling around in a king-sized bed, thinking about old friends and Paulo and wishing she still smoked. In the morning, tired, her stomach scar aching, she cut west toward the coast and took the 101 into San Francisco.

Jimmy Cricket was a golf pro with a closet-sized downtown shop called Jimmy Cricket's Pro-Line Golf. He was folding Claiborne golf shirts when Rinker walked in, and he smiled and said, "Can I help you?" He was wearing a royal-blue V-necked sweater that nearly matched his eyes, and dark khaki golf slacks that nearly matched his tan. He had the too-friendly attitude of a man who would give you a half-stroke a hole without asking to see your handicap card.

The store was empty, other than Rinker, so she saw no reason to beat around the bush. "I'd like to buy a couple of guns," she said, her voice casual, holding his eyes. "Semiauto nines, if you've got them. Gotta be cold. I'd take a Ruger. 22 if you got it."

"Excuse me?" Jimmy's smile vanished. He was taken aback. This was a golf shop-there must be some mistake.

"I'm Rose-Anne, Jimmy," Rinker said. "You left me that gun I used to kill Gerald McKinley. You put it in a tree up in Golden Gate Park and picked up two thousand dollars in twenties. You remember that."

"Jesus," Jimmy said. His Adam's apple bobbed. "McKinley." He hadn't known what happened with the gun, what it would be used for. The McKinley killing had been in the papers for weeks, as had the somewhat (but not too) bereaved young wife and the very bereaved older ex-wife.

"It was a sad thing," Rinker said. "A man in his prime, cut down like that."

"Well, jeez, Rose-Anne, I don't know."

"Cut the crap, Jimmy. I'll give you two thousand bucks apiece for either two or three guns."

Jimmy processed this for a minute, and she could see it all trickling down through his brain, like raindrops of thought on a windowpane. Okay, he'd been offered money, in the face of his denials. If she was a cop, it'd be entrapment. And if she was a cop, and knew about the tree in the park, he was probably fucked anyway. And if she were Rose-Anne and he didn't sell her the guns, then he might be truly and ultimately fucked. Therefore, he would sell her the guns.

"Uh… maybe you should step into the back." The back was behind a green cloth curtain, smelled of bubble wrap and cardboard, and was full of golf-club shipping boxes and club racks. At the far end was a workbench with a vise. Jimmy pushed a couple of boxes aside and pulled out a tan gym bag, unzipped it, and said, "This is what I got."

Rinker, watching his eyes, decided he was okay, took the bag, stepped back, and looked inside. Three revolvers and three semiautos. All three semiautos were military-style 9mm Berettas. She took one out, popped the magazine-the magazine was empty-cycled the action a couple of times, did the same with the other two, and said, "I'll take them." She looked at the revolvers: One was a. 22, and she put it with the automatics. "You got any long guns?"

"No. I know where you might be able to pick some up, if you want to run down to Bakersfield."

She shook her head. "Naw. I can get my own. How about ammo?"

"I can give you a couple of boxes of Federal hollowpoint for the nines, but I don't have any. 22 on hand."

"Give me the nine," she said. "Silencer?"

"Um, I usually charge two thousand. Good ones are hard to get."

"Can you get it quick?"

"Yes."

"Another two thousand, if it's a good one."

"It's a Coeur d'Alene."

"I'll take it."

He fished around in another box and came up with a purple velvet bag that had once contained a bottle of Scotch. He handed it to her and said, "Quick enough?"

She took the bag, slipped the silencer out. It was a Coeur d'Alene, all right; the absolutely faultless blued finish was the signature. Somewhere, a master machinist was doing artwork. She screwed the silencer onto one of the nines and flipped it out to arm's length, to test the balance. "Good. I'll take the whole bunch."

Jimmy nodded, said, "Okay," moved some more boxes around, picked up a small one, reached inside, and produced two boxes of nine-millimeter ammunition. He handed them to her and asked, "You in town for long?"

Her mouth wasn't grim, but she wasn't exactly radiating warmth. "I was never here," she said.

"Gotcha," said Jimmy Cricket.

Rinker spent the night in a motel outside Sacramento, drawing squares and triangles on a yellow legal pad. Killing wasn't hard: Any asshole could kill somebody. Doing it often, and getting away with it every time, was much harder. What had made her a good killer-besides the lack of revulsion with the job-was her ability to plan. She planned with yellow pads, not in words and paragraphs, but in triangles and spirals, a few with names above them, some with lines connecting them to other symbols. Sometimes she made maps.

Aside from the killing, Rinker hadn't been much different from other young successful businesswomen in Wichita, Kansas, until her facade broke down and she'd had to run. She'd owned a friendly country bar called the Rink, with dancing all the time and live music on weekends. She had a nice apartment that she'd decorated herself, went part-time to Wichita State, and would have liked to have had a pet, but traveled too much to feel good about it. She didn't like fuzzy stuffed animal toys or chocolate hearts, but did tarry at times in front of Victoria's Secret display windows. She had an interest in makeup, read a couple of women's magazines, liked to dance, got a massage once a month, and would drink a beer or a glass of wine.

She liked guns, and the power that grew out of them. Knew enough about semiautos to do her own trigger jobs. Wasn't much interested in cars. Like that.

Lying on the bed in Sacramento, she wrote four names on her legal pad: John Ross, Nanny Dichter, Andy Levy, Paul Dallaglio. All of them knew her face. All of them had the clout to send a gun to kill her. All of them had probably agreed to do it, since they all talked to each other, wouldn't have wanted to go against the others, and because all four must have been worried about her running around loose.

The problem was, Rinker knew way too much. She knew where the bodies were buried, and that wasn't a joke, not in the several states where the four men operated, all those good states having opted for capital punishment. If Rinker was taken alive, and if she decided to cut adeal…

Rinker lay on the bed and put together an outline. She could fill it in while she drove.

From Sacramento to St. Louis is three solid days, if you're driving a used Oldsmobile, don't want to attract attention, and stay with it. Rinker took four days, passing from one FM station to the next, hard rock to soft jazz to country, through two sets of mountains with a desert between them, then out on the Great Plains, I-80 to Cheyenne, I-25 into Denver, across Kansas and Missouri on I-70, into St. Louis: Red Roof Inn and Best Western, BP and Shell, McDonald's and Burger King and Taco Bell and the Colonel. She stopped at four different shopping centers. She got her hair cut, tight to her head, punky, so that a wig would fit over it. She bought wigs, good ones, in black, red, and blond shoulder-length.

She talked to a woman at a Nordstrom's makeup bar about a Mexican friend of hers who had suffered a facial burn and needed some dark cover-up makeup to conceal the burn, and she got instruction on how to use it. She played with the makeup, trying to make herself look Mexican, but it never quite worked. Instead of brown, she looked orange, and odd. She eventually decided that the black wig looked okay with just a bit of dark eyebrow pencil, as long as she wore long-sleeved blouses.

With a couple of changes of clothes-one from Nordstrom's, one from Kmart-she'd have six distinct looks. Even a good friend of the Nordstrom's perky Light Lady would never recognize the funky Kmart Red…

And she made some calls, cautiously. Had to call three times, starting with the first day in L.A., before she finally got through. Said, "This is me. You remember me?"

"Oh, my God. Where are you at?"

"Out east. Pennsylvania. How's life?"

"I've run out of time. Like we talked about."

"What are you going to do?"

"You know…"

"I've got an idea, but I haven't worked it out yet. I'll call you back. When's good?"

"Three o'clock is good. Like now."

"This line?"

"Yeah… this is as good as any. You never know, though." Never know what might be monitored.

"I'll get you a clean phone," Rinker said. "I'll call again. Three o'clock."

When she'd been pushed out of her life, forced to go on the run, Rinker had been killing people for a long time-felt like a long time, anyway. She was not deliberately cruel in her paid assassinations. She did the shooting and went on her way, a businesswoman taking care of business. She had once been necessarily cruel to a man in Minnesota who'd betrayed her, but that had been a matter of survival. She still thought about him from time to time. She wasn't morbidly fascinated or neurotically fixated, but the image of his body tied to the bed sometimes popped into her mind's eye as she drifted off to sleep.

The fear he'd shown. She thought about the fear as she drove-and the other fears she inspired.

The people who'd directed her, who'd used her as a weapon, had no reason to fear her guns, because Rinker was entirely loyal to friends. These were people who'd helped her out of a life that had been headed straight for a white-trash ghetto. She appreciated that. If the cops had taken her, she would have gone to the gas chamber, or the death gurney, or whatever it was, without saying a word.

These former friends didn't know that. Or decided they couldn't be sure. If they'd simply tried to kill her and had failed, she might have let it go, on the rational grounds that if she hit back at them, she was putting herself at risk.

They hadn't just failed. They'd killed her lover, they'd killed her baby, and they were most likely still looking for her now, not just from fear of the consequences if she was caught, but fear of her guns. No matter where she went, there was always the possibility that some asshole from St. Louis would pick her out of a crowd, and another gun would be sent.

There was no question that her survival in Cancun had been a matter of luck. As Rinker had once told another woman who'd been interested in her business, anyone can be killed, if the assassin is patient enough and the victim is not aware of a particular threat. She didn't exempt herself from that truism. She'd never felt a thing in Cancun. She hadn't known she'd been spotted, hadn't known she'd been stalked. The only guarantee of survival was the elimination of the threat.

And there was the revenge factor.

She'd had few friends as a child. She'd taken care of her younger brother, who was somehow wrong in the head: not stupid, but constantly preoccupied, even as a baby, but he was not really a friend. He was too much younger, and too psychologically distant.

There were two or three girls from school that she could recall, but only one that was close-the one she hoped was still living in St. Louis. Her stepfather and older brother had thoroughly abused her, and the sense of abuse had kept people away. In that part of the country, nobody would say much, but people would know, and stay clear. Watching Rinker grow up was like watching a slow-motion car wreck.

Her life in St. Louis hadn't been much different. The people she knew well, with three or four exceptions, mostly feared her. Then she'd been in Wichita, and in Wichita, there'd been two or three people that she might have become close to, but she hadn't quite gotten there, when the cops had broken her out.

Then she'd had to run, and almost magically, everything had changed. She'd found a friend in Mexico, in Paulo. Both a lover and a friend. The beginnings of several friendships, really, and the beginning of a family-she loved Paulo, and she also liked and laughed with and felt safe with his brothers and his parents. They seemed to like her back. She'd started taking birth control pills when things got serious with Paulo, but after a few months, when she needed to refill the prescription, she simply hadn't. Kept thinking, Gotta do it, but didn't.

The missed period could have been natural, a change in the way she lived… but she knew better than that. Felt nothing stirring yet, but felt heavier, more serious.

A child.

Then the gun. And Paulo was gone, and the child, and the family…

Driving across the high plains, late at night, she had what she later thought was a vision, or wide-awake dream: She saw her child, a girl, a dark-haired kid playing on a tree swing in what must have been the Yucatбn. Paulo was there, wearing a pair of white pleated shorts, bare-chested and barefoot, pushing her. Water in the background, so it must have been near the coast; and then the little girl screamed with laughter and Paulo stopped pushing her and walked around the path of the swing and Rinker could see a hand, her hand, with a Popsicle reaching toward Paulo. Their hands touched, and there was a spark, and he was gone, with the vision.

She snapped back to the present, and far away, saw the lights of a truck approaching down the interstate. How long she'd been on mental cruise control she didn't know, but she felt that she'd been there, in a different future. She could see the little girl now-her little girl-in her mind's eye, and Paulo five years older, and her own life, and she began to weep, holding tight to the steering wheel, weaving down the highway.

If the people in St. Louis feared her guns, they had good reason.

Rinker got off the interstate highway system at Kansas City, made a phone call from a mall. A man answered with an abrupt "What?"

Rinker, leaning on a trashy south-Missouri accent, asked, "Is this Arveeda?"

"Sound like fuckin' Arveeda?" The phone crashed down on the hook, and she smiled: T. J. Baker was still in residence and, from the sound of it, still an asshole. Out of Kansas City, she turned south on local highways, headed for the town of Tisdale, fifteen miles east of Springfield. The biggest industry in Tisdale was the poultry-processing factory, which killed and plucked six thousand chickens a day, and left the entire town smelling like wet chickenshit and burned feathers. Hell of a thing, she thought, when the thing you remembered most about your hometown was the bad smell.

At midafternoon she stopped again, made another call. A man answered: "Sgt, McCallum, ordnance."

She smiled and hung up. She dialed again, a different number, and a different man answered.

"Yes?"

The voice was a slap in the face, and her lingering smile vanished. The last time she'd heard the voice, she'd been threatening its owner with death. She almost hung up, but hesitated.

"Yes? Hello?"

Rinker said, "You killed my baby. I wanted you to know that. I was pregnant, and a piece of slug hit me in the stomach and I lost the baby."

He was as startled as she'd been a moment earlier. He got it together and said, "Clara, I heard something about this, but I…"

"Don't lie to me. I'm coming to kill you, and I wanted to give you time to think about it, instead of just popping up and shooting you in the head. I want you to think about what you're losing: all the rest of your life."

After a moment of silence, the man chuckled and said, "Ah, shit, what can I tell you? Bring it on, Clara. You know where to find me. I'll tell you what, though, don't let me catch you. I'd have to make an example out of you. Now, you got anything else?"

"That's about it. You'll be hearing from me."

The man laughed and said, "Yeah, well-take it easy, honey."

"You, too."

T. J. Baker lived in a weathered white house next to a creek outside the west city limit of Tisdale; the house was surrounded by a chain-link fence. Two pit bulls roamed the yard, only marginally restrained by their long chains. Baker was rough with the dogs, whipping them regularly with a wide leather belt until they screamed with anger. They'd be killing rough on anyone who crossed into the yard while they were out-though that was not likely to happen.

The fence was spotted with signs that said "Beware of Dog," and if an illiterate trespasser happened along, one look at the dogs themselves would be warning enough.

Rinker called Baker twice from Springfield, once at six o'clock and once after dinner, at seven, and got no answer. Baker had always preferred the second shift at the chicken factory, because it gave him daylight with the dogs, or to hunt. Or kill, anyway. His greatest joy was sniping rats at the landfill.

When the second call got no answer, she called the chicken factory, asked for Baker by name, and finally was put through to a man who said, "Hang on, I gotta find him. He was here a minute ago."

"Ah, that's okay. If he's not right there, I'll call back."

"Whatever."

She got in the Olds and drove out of Springfield; thought about driving past the place she'd grown up, where her mother still lived, but decided against it. There was really nothing she wanted to see, nobody she wanted to talk to. She went instead to Tisdale, through town, past the Dairy Queen and Haber's Drive-In Root Beer, which was closed, boarded up, past the bank and the pharmacy and the bakery and out the west side.

Baker's house was on a county road, his nearest neighbor a half-mile away. His driveway ended at a ramshackle garage that looked as though it had been too long blown upon by the northwest wind; it leaned toward the house, shingles peeling off, paint shedding into the pastel-pink hollyhocks that surrounded the brick foundation.

Rinker pulled nose-in to the gate. The dogs had been sitting near their stake, in the middle of the yard, in a dirt circle worn free of grass. When she pulled up, they stood, silently, watching. When she lifted the latch on the gate, they moved, like black-and-tan leopards, toward her, still silent, disciplined like soldiers, dragging their long chains. She walked the gate open, careful to stay out of range of the dogs, got back in her car, and drove up to the garage.

Now she was in killing range, and the dogs moved up to the driver's side of the car. They were snuffling, a sound that was almost a growl but not quite: The throaty slavering was actually more threatening than a growl. They sounded like they wanted to eat.

Rinker reached under the seat and took out the. 22. She'd bought a box of standard-velocity hollowpoints at a Wal-Mart in Kansas City. She checked it, almost unconsciously, then ran the window down. The bigger of the two dogs stood on its hind feet, its front feet lightly on the door. It was peering directly at her, and she remembered reading in a book somewhere about a killing dog that had eyes like coal. This was that dog: The black eyes peered at her, hungered after her. This dog wanted her.

No romantic when it came to dogs, she pointed the pistol at the animal's head and shot it between the coal-black eyes. No romantic itself, it dropped dead. The other dog took a step back, looking at its dead companion. Before it could do anything else, Rinker killed it.

The two shots sounded like nothing else but shots. If anyone was at the house a half mile away, the shots might have sounded like popcorn popping. Two light pops in the evening breeze, coming from Baker's house. She doubted that anyone would be curious.

On the other hand, there was no point in taking chances. She dragged the dead dogs back to the stake in the middle of the yard and rolled them upright, as though they were sleeping on duty.

Baker's back door had another sign: "Forget the Dog, Beware of Owner." Rinker ignored it, and used the butt of the pistol to knock a hole in the window. She reached through, flipped the bolt, and let herself in.

Baker had two gun cabinets that she knew of, both of them bolted into the concrete floor in the basement. Neither was really a safe, in the strictest sense, but they wouldn't be easy to get into, either. Rinker intended to use an ax on the doors, and if that didn't work… well, bad luck for Baker. She'd wait for him to come home.

Now she called out: "Anybody home?"

Nothing but silence. She went to the basement door, turned on the light, and went down the stairs. The two gun safes sat at the far end of the basement; one of them was open an inch. Empty? Unlikely. More likely that Baker just started feeling safe, all these years gone by with no burglaries, the dogs in the yard, his reputation…

Fuckin' Baker, she thought. Leaving the door like that was purely laziness. She reached out to pull it open, but with her hand just an inch away, she stopped. Boy, that was convenient, the way the door just hung there. Rinker didn't believe that life was easy. Something was wrong. She stepped away, looked around, spotted a length of two-by-two propped in a corner. She got it, stood back away from the safe, and eased the door open.

The shotgun blast nearly killed her-not from the steel shot, but from the shock of it. The gun was behind her, under the stairs. The blast had gone right past her into the gun safe. She staggered back away from it, her legs stinging, her hands at her ears. She was deaf, her head aching, her eyes watering. Her legs hurt. She looked down; her jeans looked okay, but when she lifted the pant legs, she found little stripes of blood trickling down into her socks.

She left the gun safe and went back upstairs and peeled off the pants in the light of the kitchen. She'd been hit by three pellets, all ricochets, all buried just beneath her skin. She popped them out with her fingertips, found some Band-Aids and a bottle of peroxide in the bathroom, wiped the wounds and bandaged them.

Fuckin' Baker. As she worked, the ringing in her ears faded, and she could again hear her feet moving around on the bathroom floor.

When she was done, she went back downstairs and looked at the now-empty double-barreled shotgun. It had been rigged with a simple wire on a pulley. The wire ran from the safe door, through a hole in the back of the safe to a pulley on the wall, up to the ceiling joists, across another pulley to the stairs, down to the trigger on the shotgun. The trigger itself had the lightest pull she'd ever experienced in a weapon. She was tempted to rig it backward, pointing up the stairs, but hell-it was his house.

She went back up the stairs, out to the garage, got Baker's ax, carried it into the basement, and went after the second gun safe. She worked at it methodically, and it took her five minutes, cutting through the front, then using the ax handle to pry a gap in the metal. There were nine rifles in the safe, all with scopes: four bolt-action varmint rifles, two in. 22-250 and two in. 223; three bolt-actions in larger calibers, a Remington 7mm Magnum, a Steyr. 308 and a Winchester. 243; plus two semiautos, a Ruger Ranch Rifle in. 223 and a military-style AR-15, also in. 223. Three gun cases were stacked beside the safes; each could handle two rifles. She packed the three larger calibers, plus the AR-15 and the two. 223 bolt-actions, and carried them up to the car. She threw the other three rifles on top of the packed guns, and around them she stacked seventeen boxes of ammunition, two shooters' sandbags, two packs of paper targets, and a sawhorse with a clamp on the bottom, which was used to hold the targets.

She didn't need all the stuff, but couldn't afford to be selective. Gun thieves wouldn't be, and she'd prefer that nobody got the idea that Clara Rinker had long guns. As she was leaving, she thought again about the shotgun, and thought about burning the house down. Decided against it, looking at the lumps of dead dog in the front yard. Pretty even, she thought, though her ears were still ringing.

She left Tisdale an hour after dark, headed northeast, toward St. Louis. In the dark she crossed a river, stopped, and threw the three loose rifles into the dark water. She spent the night halfway up the state, in a cash motel in the town of Diffley. There was an abandoned quarry outside Diffley, where the locals sighted-in their guns. Not many people went, and in her gunning days, she'd often driven down from St. Louis to work with new pistols.

The next morning she got an egg-and-sausage McMuffin at McDonald's, then drove out to the quarry. She was alone, and spent an hour sighting the rifles, leaving the AR-15 for last. The AR-15 looked a lot like Jaime's M-16, and even had a selector switch. She fired off a couple of single rounds, landing them just where she'd expected. Then she flipped the selector switch, aimed it, and squeezed off a burst.

Whoa. It was full-auto. She looked around, a little self-consciously-if anyone had heard that, she could be in trouble.

All the guns were right on, as she expected. After the burst of automatic fire, she decided she'd better get out of town. She quickly but carefully repacked the guns, got out of the quarry, and drove the familiar, homey roads into St. Louis.

She'd always liked the place. Neat town, lots of things to do. Good bars, and she was a student of good bars. Rolled down along Forest Park, stopped in Central West End and got a sandwich, picked up a book, and walked around in the afternoon, getting back into the feel of the place. She did a little shopping, and then, at four o'clock, went down to the southeast corner of the city, to Soulard, along the Mississippi. She sat in the car and drew more triangles and squares on her yellow legal pad as she watched the people come and go on the sidewalk. She thought about the vision she'd had of the dark-haired girl, closed her eyes, and let the feeling come back. But now all she had was a memory. The vision was gone.

Outside the car, a woman walked by, carrying a string bag with what looked like a green glass lamp inside. She was a large woman, and Rinker sat up when she saw her coming. Then she thought, after a minute, Too old.

The woman she was looking for was three years older than Rinker. Her name-now-was Dorothy Pollock.