Certain Prey

by John Sandford

  '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 obutton, 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 see
med 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.'

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Rinker hauled the van full of garbage bags to a trash-transfer station, dumped them, wiped the van and left it at the airport. The pilot, looking a little sleepy, was sitting in the charter lounge reading a old copy of Fortune. He spotted her, helped her carry her three oversized suitcases to the plane, and had Rinker back in Des Moines by mid-afternoon.

  'Can I give you a ride anywhere?' he as
ked, when they were on the ground.

  'Thanks, that'd be nice. I'm going to a Holiday Inn...'

  He made a mild pass at her on the way; she was nice about saying no. He left her at the motel, where she checked out, picked up her car, and found a store that sold wigs.

  'My mama is getting chemotherapy and her hair is starting to fall out. I need to get a wig for her,' she told the sole saleswoman. The saleswoman looked sad: 'I'm sorry about your mother,' she said in a kindly way, patting Rinker's arm. 'It would be better if she were here, though, for a fitting.'