Certain Prey Read Free

wooden stairs and said, “Gonna be a load ’n’ a half getting his ass outa the basement.”
    “You got that right,” Ernie said, adding, philosophically, “I coulda told him there ain’t no free pussy.”
    D ALE - S OMETHING WENT into the Mississippi and his truck was parked across the river in Granite City, from which spot it disappeared in two days. Nobody ever asked about Dale, and Rinker went back to dancing. A few weeks later, Ernie asked her to sit with an older guy who came in for a beer. Rinker cocked her head and Ernie said, “No, it’s okay. You don’t have to do nothin’.”
    So she got a longneck Bud and went to sit with the guy, who said he was Ernie’s aunt’s husband’s brother. He knew about Dale-Something. “You feeling bad about it yet?”
    “Nope. I’m a little pissed that Ernie told you about it, though,” Rinker said, taking a hit on the Budweiser.
    The older man smiled. He had very strong, white teeth to go with his black eyes and almost-feminine long lashes. Rinker had the sudden feeling that he might show a girl a pretty good time, although he must be over forty. “You ever shoot a gun?” he asked.
    T HAT’S HOW R INKER became a hit lady. She wasn’t spectacular, like the Jackal or one of those movie killers. She just took care of business, quietly and efficiently, using a variety of silenced pistols, mostly .22s. Careful, close-range killings became a trademark.
    Rinker had never thought of herself as stupid, just as someone who hadn’t yet had her chance. When the money from the killings started coming in, she knew that she didn’t know how to handle it. So she went to the Intercontinental College of Business in the mornings, and took courses in bookkeeping and small business. When she was twenty, getting a little old for dancing nude, she got a job with the Mafia guy, working in a liquor warehouse. And when she was twenty-four, and knew a bit about the business, she bought a bar of her own in downtown Wichita, Kansas, and renamed it the Rink.
    The bar did well. Still, a few times a year, Rinker’d go out of town with a gun and come back with a bundle of money. Some she spent, but most she hid, under a variety of names, in a variety of places. One thing her step-dad had taught her well: sooner or later, however comfortable you might be at the moment, you were gonna have to run. C ARMEL L OAN.
    Carmel was long, sleek and expensive, like a new Jaguar.
    She had a small head, with a tidy nose, thin pale lips, a square chin and a small pointed tongue. She was a Swede, way back, and blond—one of the whippet Swedes with small breasts, narrow hips, and a long waist in between. She had the eyes of a bird of prey, a raptor. Carmel was a defense attorney in Minneapolis, one of the top two or three. Most years, she made comfortably more than a million dollars.
    Carmel lived in a fabulously cool high-rise apartment in downtown Minneapolis, all blond-wood floors and white walls with black-and-white photos by Ansel Adams and Diane Arbus and Minor White, but nobody as gauche and come-lately as Robert Mapplethorpe. Amid all the blackand-white, there were perfect touches of bloody-murderred in the furniture and carpets. Even her car, a Jaguar XK8, had a custom bloody-murder-red paint job.
    On the second of the three unluckiest days in Barbara Allen’s life, Carmel Loan decided that she was truly, genuinely and forever in love with Hale Allen, Barbara Allen’s husband.
    Hale Allen, a property and real estate attorney, was the definitive heartthrob. He had near-black hair that fell naturally over his forehead in little ringlets, warm brown eyes, a square chin with a dimple, wide shoulders, big hands and narrow hips. He was a perfect size forty-two, a little over six feet tall, with one slightly chipped front tooth. The knot of his tie was always askew, and women were always fixing it. Putting their hands on him. He had an easy jock-way with the women, chatting them up, playing with