Mortal Prey Read Free Page B

do-it-yourself accurizing. He liked working with her because she was serious about it, and attractive. An athlete, he thought, though she didn’t really work at it, like some gym queens he knew in Cancún—trim, smart, and pretty in a blond gringo way.
    And she knew about men. He might have put a hand on her, himself, if she hadn’t been in mourning, and mourning for the son of Raul Mejia. He remained always the professional.
    “There is no way that you can carry or keep a long gun for self-protection,” he told her. “With a handgun, you have it always by your hand, like the name says. With a rifle, which is very good if you have it in your hand, well, it will be in the bedroom and you will be in the kitchen when they come for you. Or you will be sitting in the latrine with your pants around your ankles and a Playboy in your hands—maybe not you, but me, anyway—and the rifle will be leaning against a tree, and that’s when they will come. So this gun”—he slapped the side of the M-16—“this gun is fine when you are shooting, but you must learn the handgun for self-protection.”
    She demurred. She wanted to learn the long guns, she said. Rifles and a shotgun. Not a double-barreled bird gun or anything cute, but a stubby, fat-barreled combat pump. She didn’t want to learn how to shoot any fuckin’ birds: give her a shotgun and a moving target five yards away…
    He shook his head and smiled good-naturedly and showed her the long guns, two weeks of first-class tuition, but he kept coming back to the handgun. “Just try it,” he’d say. “You are very natural with a gun. The best woman I have ever seen.”
    “Shooting’s not exactly rocket science,” she’d said, but the phrase didn’t translate well into Spanish; didn’t come off with the irony of the English.
     
    IN HER SECOND two weeks on the ranch, she went a half-dozen times into town, to her apartment, and gathered what she needed in order to move. She also wiped the place: There’d be no fingerprints if anyone came looking for her. Then one Wednesday, after she’d been on the ranch for a month, Dominic came out and said, “We’ve got word about a man who some people say might have been the driver for the shooting. We don’t know where he is, but we know where his family is, so we should be able to find him. Then we might learn something.”
    “When?” she asked.
    “By the weekend, I hope,” Dominic said. “We have to know where this came from, so we can get back to business. And for Paulo, of course.”
     
    THAT WAS ON a Wednesday. She was still not one hundred percent, but she was good enough to run. She’d handled everything she could by phone, she had documents she could get to, she’d moved the money that had to be moved. She would leave on Thursday afternoon.
    She’d already worked it out: She had two doctor’s appointments each week, on Monday and Thursday. The driver always waited in the lobby of the clinic. When she came out of the doctor’s office, if she turned left instead of right, she would be at least momentarily free on the streets of Cancún, and not ten yards from a busy taxi stand.
    She should have half an hour before the driver became curious. If she got even two minutes, she’d be gone. She’d done it before.
     
    RINKER AND JAIME went for one last shooting session on Thursday morning, with the shotgun. Jaime had six solid-rubber, fourteen-inch trailer tires that he could haul around in a John Deere utility wagon. They went out to the gully and Jaime rolled the tires, one at a time, down the rocky slope. The tires ricocheted wildly off the rocks, while Rinker tried to anticipate them with the twelve-gauge pump. When she hit them, at ten yards, she’d knock them flat, but on a good day, she struggled to hit half of them with the first shot. She learned that a shotgun, even at close range, wasn’t a sure thing.
    When she’d emptied the shotgun, they’d pick up the tires and Rinker would drive them to