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 Yucatán. 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, R
inker 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.
6
BEFORE THEY LEFT CANCÚN ,LUCAS asked Malone if she could either lend him a copy of the Rinker file he’d scanned in the plane coming down, or make a copy and send it to him in Minneapolis. She shook her head: “A lot of that stuff is speculation. We’re not even supposed to show it to you the first time.”
“You mean it’s classified or something?”
“Like that.”
“Like if it got out, Rinker could sue you?”
“Like if it got out, there are about a hundred people who could sue us. They wouldn’t, but they’d be calling up their friends in Congress, who’d be pissing and moaning about violations of privacy and human rights and the way we spend our budget.”
“If I can’t copy it, could I read it overnight? Spend some time with it?”
“Sure.” She said it without thinking, because she didn’t actually know him very well. “Give it back to me in the morning.”
• • •
THE BLUE PALMS didn’t have a business center, but the Hilton did.
In the evening, after dinner, Lucas told Mallard he felt like a walk. The heavy food and all. He strolled six blocks down to the Hilton and talked to the concierge about the business center. He was a writer from Los Angeles, he said, and he needed access to a xerox machine very late in the evening, as soon as he finished compiling his research. Would it be possible to rent one of the Hilton’s machines for a couple of hours?
That courtesy was not usually extended outside the hotel, the concierge said. He would have to think about it—and after thinking about it, he decided that it would be a generous thing to do, and would help the Hilton’s image with traveling businessmen. At one in the morning, Lucas walked back with the file, met the concierge, and took care of the rental and courtesy fees. By two-thirty, he’d finished copying the file, and by three o’clock, was safely back in bed, the copy snugged away with his shirts.
The next morning, they gathered in the lobby to check out, and Lucas gave Mallard a look. Mallard turned away. There’d been no moment with Malone, Lucas thought. He muttered “Chicken,” and Malone asked, “What?”
“Nothing.”
Lucas held on to Malone’s copy of the Rinker file until they got to Houston, where they split up. “If there’s anything I can do, call me,” Lucas said. He handed the file back to her. “Sorry I wasn’t more help in Cancún. If I think of anything from the file, I’ll call.”
“You helped,” Mallard said. “Between us, we gave old man Mejia, ummm, a clearer view of the situation. There are things that Malone and I just can’t say.”
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