“No. Rolo said we were only to give it to Ms. Blanca, if anything happened to him.”
“Oh.” He thought it over for a minute, as if this somehow made sense; and Carmel’s heart did a quick extra beat. “What happened to Rolo?”
“Quite a bit of money,” Carmel said. She wanted to sound nervous, and she did.
“Just a minute,” the Latino man said. The door closed and they heard him call, “Hey: Marta.”
“Marta Blanca,” Rinker muttered. “She bakes right.”
“What?” Carmel looked at Rinker as though Rinker were slipping away.
“Better biscuits, cakes and pies with Marta Blanca . . .”
Carmel shook her head, bewildered, then the man was back, and the door opened. He looked them over for a second, made a judgment, and said, “Yeah. Come in.”
Carmel led the way into the apartment, which seemed to be decorated in brown; one lamp with a nicotine-yellow shade was turned on, the shade at a tipsy angle over a stack of Hustler magazines. The odor of marijuana hung around the curtains.
“How much money?” the man asked.
“We need to ask . . .” Carmel started, but then a woman came through the kitchen, apparently from a bedroom in the back. She was tucking her blouse into the back of her jeans. “Are you Marta?”
“Yeah.” The woman still looked sleepy. “What happened to Rolando?”
“He’s dead,” Carmel said flatly. “Somebody shot him.”
The woman stopped in her tracks, the blood draining from her face: “Dead? He can’t be dead. I just talked to him yesterday.”
“The cops found him this morning,” Rinker said, stepping out of Carmel’s shadow. “Was he a good friend?”
“He was he was he was . . .” she said, shakily.
“Her brother,” the man finished. Rinker flicked a look at Carmel, who nodded almost imperceptibly. Her hand moved in her pocket.
“Half brother,” the woman said. She dropped on a chair. “Ah, Jesus,” she said.
“It was on TV,” Rinker said.
“He said he gave you a tape to hold, and that if anything happened to him, we were supposed to come and get it, because if you keep it, somebody’s gonna show up here and hurt you,” Carmel said, squatting to look the woman straight in the face. “He gave us an envelope to give you. Money.”
The man said, “We don’t got no tape,” but the woman said, reflexively, “How much?”
They had the tape, Carmel thought, and she felt a wire, tight in her spine, suddenly relax.
“Five thousand dollars,” Carmel said, speaking to the woman. The woman looked up at the man, who said, “I dunno.”
Carmel took the envelope out of her pocket. “If we could get the tape?”
The woman stood up, but the man put a hand out to her. “I think we should look at the tape first,” he said.
“Rolando said not to,” the woman said, nervously dry-washing her hands.
“We need to get that tape . . .”
The woman flipped her hands up, explaining to Carmel, “It’s one of those funny little tapes, you need to get a special holder-thing to run it . . .”
“We’re gonna look at the tape,” the man said, decisively. “If you show up here to give us five thousand . . .” He smiled brightly and said, “Then I bet it’s worth a lot more.”
“We really need the tape. Rolando wasn’t supposed to get it, and the people it belongs to, you really don’t want to mess with,” Rinker said. Her voice was flat, and sounded dangerous to Carmel’s ear. The vibration apparently went past the Latino.
He sneered at her. “What, the fuckin’ Mafia? Or the Colombianos? Fuck those people.” He turned to the woman. “We look at the tape.” And back to Carmel and Rinker, hitching up his pants. “You bitches can leave the envelope here. If it’s enough, we’ll give you the tape. If not, we’ll figure out a price.”
“Goddamnit, this isn’t necessary,” Carmel said, stepping in front of Rinker. Out at the very edge of her vision she could see Rinker’s gun hand sliding out of her pocket.
“Yeah, it’s fuckin’ necessary,” the Latino man said, his voice rising. “What I fuckin’ say is necessary, that’s what’s fuckin’ necessary, right?” He looked at Marta. “Is that right?”
She looked away, and Carmel shrugged. “If you say so.” She took another sideways step and felt Rinker’s arm come up with the gun.
The man stepped back, a little surprised, but still smiling slightly. “What, that’s supposed to scare me?”
That was the last thing he said: Rinker shot him in the center of the forehead, and he dropped in his tracks. The woman, Marta, clapped both hands to her face in disbelief, and before she could scream or make any other sound, Rinker panned the gun barrel across to her face and snapped: “If you scream, I’ll kill you.”
“Give us the tape, you get the money,” Carmel said.
“Oh my God oh my God oh my God . . .”
“The fuckin’ tape,” Rinker snarled. The woman put a hand out toward the muzzle, as though she could fend off bullets, and slowly backed away, still looking down at the man.
The tape was in the kitchen, in a cupboard, inside a Dutch oven. She handed it to Rinker, who handed it to Carmel, who looked at it and nodded. “You didn’t make any copies?”
“No, no, no, no . . .” The woman was staring fixedly at Rinker now. Then the man in the front room groaned and Rinker turned and walked toward him.
“He’s alive?” Marta Blanca asked. Rinker said, “Yeah, it happens. Sometimes the bullet doesn’t even make it through the skull bone.” She casually leaned forward, bringing the muzzle to within an inch or two of the man’s head, and fired three quick shots into his skull. His feet bounced once, and he lay still.
Marta crossed herself, her eyes now fixed on Rinker. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” she said, with the sound of certainty in her voice.
“No, I’m not,” Rinker said. She showed a tiny smile.
Carmel, who had been carrying the second gun, shot Marta Blanca in the back of the head. As she fell, Carmel stepped forward and fired five more times. Then she smiled at Rinker, her eyes bright with excitement, and said, “We got the goddamn tape. We got the goddamn tape.”
Rinker put the gun back in her jacket pocket and said, “Let’s get a drink somewhere.”
“Let’s check the tape to make sure it’s right, erase it, and then get a drink somewhere,” Carmel said.
GOING OUT into the hall, they closed the door behind themselves; they took three steps and suddenly a shaft of light fell across their faces. They both looked right, standing in the hall, and then down. A small girl stood there, looking up at them. Their faces were illuminated by the light from the interior. Then, behind the girl, a crabby mommy called, “Heather! Shut that door!”
Carmel was fumbling at the pistol in her pocket, but then another door opened above them, and a male voice said a few unintelligible words; they both looked up, and the little girl closed the door.
“Gotta go,” Rinker said urgently.
“She saw us,” Carmel said.
But there were footsteps on the landing above, and Rinker thrust Carmel toward the door. She went, hurrying, Rinker a step behind, out the door, down the sidewalk, the apartment door closing behind them.
“She was just a kid,” Rinker said. “She won’t remember. They might not find the bodies for a week.”
“Why can’t this be easy?” Carmel asked. They hurried down the dark sidewalk toward the lights of Dinkytown, and she added, “This is just like a dream I had when I was a teenager. A school dream, where I couldn’t find my locker and the bell was about to ring, and every time I was about to find it, something else happened to keep me away from it . . .”
“Everybody has that dream,” Rinker said. “We’re in the clear.”
“Maybe,” Carmel said. She turned to look back; the dark figure of a man was climbing on a bike, and then headed away from them, out on the street. “But I am
on the inside; if anything comes out of that kid, we’re gonna have to go back and clean up.”
“Let’s get that drink,” Rinker said.
THEY HAD SEVERAL DRINKS, and two midnight steaks, at Carmel’s apartment. Carmel had a rarely used grill on her balcony, and Rinker did the honors, moving the meat and sauce like a professional. “I once worked in a bar where we had an outdoor grill. Place was full of cowboys, wanted their steaks burned, ” she told Carmel.
“Make mine not-quite-rare,” Carmel said. “No blood.” Carmel was in the media room, looking at the tape: the whole episode with Rolo was on the tape, while the other tapes had only the final sequence. “So this is the original,” she told Rinker with satisfaction. “Even if there’s a copy someplace, they could get me into court, but I’d prove it was a copy and could have been altered and I’d be gone.”
“Still be best if there weren’t any copies,” Rinker said.
“You about done out there?”
“All done. Dinner is served.”
“Good. One more thing before we eat.” Carmel stripped the tape out of the cassette by hand, tossed the cassette pack into a wastebasket, squeezed the jumbled tangle of tape into a wad the size of a softball and dropped it onto the hot charcoal in the grill.
“That won’t be coming back,” she said as she watched it burn.
“Three people dead because of that tape,” Rinker said, shaking her head.
“Ah, they were nothing, a bunch of druggies,” Carmel said. “Nobody’ll miss them.”
“Even druggies have families, sometimes,” Rinker said. “I hated my step-dad and my older brother, I don’t like my mom anymore, but I’ve got a little brother, he’s out in L.A. and he does drugs, sometimes he lives on the beach . . . I’d do anything I could for him. I do everything I can for him.”
“Really,” Carmel said, impressed. They’d moved the steaks onto a seldom-used dining table. “I’ve never been like that with anybody. I mean, I give to charity and all, but I have to. I’ve never really been where . . . I do anything for somebody.”
“Not even for Hale?”
Carmel shook her head: “Not even for Hale.”
“You killed for him,” Rinker said.
“No, I didn’t,” Carmel said. “I killed for me—for something I want. Which is Hale. If he’d had his choice, who knows? He might’ve decided to stay with Barbara.”
“Mmm,” Rinker said, chewing. She swallowed, watched for a moment as Carmel worked her way into the steak and then asked, “Would you have killed the little girl?”
Carmel said, “You make me sound like a monster.” “No, no. I’m just interested,” Rinker said. “I’d do it, if it was absolutely necessary. But I’d hate doing it.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s a kid.”
“So what? None of this means anything, this”—Carmel looked around—“this life. We’re just a bunch of meat. When we think something, it’s just chemicals. When we love something, it’s more chemicals. When we die, all the chemicals go back in the ground, and that’s it. There’s nothing left. You don’t go anywhere, except in the ground. No heaven, no hell, no God, no nothing. Just . . . nothing.”
“That’s pretty grim,” Rinker said. She pointed a fork at Carmel. “I’ve seen people like you—philosophical nihilists. People who really believe all that . . . eventually, they can’t stand it. Most of them commit suicide.”
Carmel nodded. “I can see that. That’s probably what I’ll do, when I get older. If I live to get older.”
“Why not do it now?” Rinker asked. “If nothing means anything, why wait?”
“No reason, except curiosity. I want to see how things come out. I mean, killing yourself is as meaningless as not killing yourself. Makes no difference if you do or you don’t. So as long as you’re not bored, as long as you’re feeling good . . . why do it?”
“But you’d do it if you had to. Kill yourself.”
“Hell, I might kill myself if I don’t have to,” Carmel said.
“Really?”
“Sure. For the same reason that I’m staying now. Curiosity. I can’t be absolutely one million percent sure that there’s nothing on the other side; so as long as it’s one-millionth of a percent possible, why not check?”
“Man, that’s almost enough to bum me out,” Rinker said. “It does bum me out from time to time,” Carmel said. “But I get over it pretty quickly. I’m just an upper sort of person.”
“Chemically.”
“Absolutely,” Carmel said. After a couple more bites, she asked, “How about you? How do you justify all this stuff?”
“I’m kind of religious, I guess,” Rinker said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I don’t think anything really happens in this world that isn’t part of God’s plan. And if God wants somebody to die, now, if that’s that person’s fate, I can’t say no.”
“So you’re just what . . . the finger of God?”
“I wouldn’t put it exactly that way. It sounds too . . . vain, I guess. Too important. But what I do is God’s will.”
“Jesus,” Carmel said. Then, quickly, “Sorry, if that offends you, I’ll . . .”
“No, no, jeez, I hang around with Italians, for Christ’s sake. Catholics, man. Nobody talks the talk like Catholics. I’m not exactly religious that way—I mean, I used to work in a nudie bar. It’s just that I believe in . . . some kind of God. Not in heaven or hell, just in God. We’re all part of it.”
“What about stuff like guns? Where’d you learn about that?”
“We always had guns in our house when I was a kid, my step-dad was a hunter. Poacher, really. So I knew about rifles and shotguns. Then the Mafia guys taught me the basic stuff about handguns, though most of them don’t know a lot,” Rinker said. “I figured that if I was gonna do this—be a hit man—I’d better learn about them. You can get most of what you need from books. There’s an ocean of gun stuff out there.”
“So you know all about the bullets and how fast they go . . .”
“Pretty much. I don’t reload—make my own ammunition—because that would be too much of a trademark,” Rinker said. “Sooner or later they could get me on it. But factory ammo is as good as anything I could make up for my kind of work, anyway.”
“Are the guns really special? I mean . . .”
“Nah. Most of them are stolen, and they get passed around. I got a friend who picks them up for me, cuts the threads for the silencers. He checks them mechanically, and I fire them a few times to double-check, but basically, all my work is within ten feet or so. Up close. So I use fairly small calibers and fire several times.”
“You carry the silencers separately?”
“Yeah. A little plastic box with a couple of crescent wrenches and a couple pairs of pliers—if you saw them on an X ray, it’d look like a tool kit. There’s no way to hide guns, though. Not conventional guns, anyway.”
They talked for a long time, nihilism and religion, guns and ammo, and that night, very late, as Carmel was dozing off, she smiled sleepily as she replayed the conversation. She’d gone to college with a lot of finance and law students. They’d stayed up nights studying, not talking.
This night, she thought, was like what a lot of people did in college, a few beers with friends, talk about God and death.
She drifted peacefully away, and may have had a dream about a coil of videotape going up in smoke. And about guns.
EIGHT
Lucas and Black followed the Ramsey County medical examiner into the workroom, where the body of Rolando D’Aquila was stretched out on a stainless-steel tray.
“They really fucked this boy over,” Black said, with a low whistle of disbelief. He’d heard about it, but hadn’t seen the body. “Look at his kneecaps.”
“Look at his heels, if you want to see something that must’ve hurt,” the ME said. He was a dark, hairy man with a beard. A Rasputin with a Boston accent.
“So what are these letters?” L
ucas asked.
“I’ve got a photograph for you, but I thought you might want to see it in person,” the ME said. He picked up one of the dead man’s hands and turned it over. On the back of the hand were a series of bloody scrapes that looked like:
Lucas and Black squatted, got down close. “What is it?” Black asked.
“I don’t know,” the ME said. “But he did it himself, because we found the skin under his fingernails. He did it not long before he died—he had blood on his fingertips, which would have been worn away if his hands had been free, and he used them for anything. So: we think he might have known he was going to be killed, and tried to leave something behind.”
“Like the name of the killer,” Black said. “Which is probably Dew.”
“Really?” The ME bent over the hand and said, “I never saw Dew. I was looking at it the other way—I saw Mop.”
Black looked at Lucas: “What do you think? M-O-P or D-E-W?”
“Beats the shit out of me,” Lucas said, standing up. “Maybe we can actually see it better in a photo.” To the ME: “What are the chances he cut himself up just thrashing around? I mean, they were drilling holes in his kneecaps . . .”
“Who knows, if a guy’s being tortured? The scratches look deliberate—the skin looks almost plowed off the back of his hand. And the shapes look deliberate, not like thrashing or involuntary contraction . . . I think he did it on purpose.”
“Yeah.” Lucas scratched his head. “Took some balls.”
“You don’t see D-E-W?” Black asked.
“Yeah, and I see M-O-P, and I see something else, too, and I don’t know what the hell that might mean,” Lucas said.
“What?” Black and the ME turned their heads, trying the scratches at different angles.
“I can see C-L-E-W—like the British spelling of clue, ” Lucas said. “But there’s no clue. Unless it was something back at the house, near his hands.”
“Aw, man, that’s too weird,” Black said. “C-L-E-W equals clue?”
“Don’t you see it?” Lucas asked.
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