by Certain Prey
'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, w
ith 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.