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 o
ut 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 Cancún had been a matter of luck. As Rinker had once told another woman who’d been interested in her business, anyone can b
e 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 Cancún. 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.