Certain Prey

at the phone books, and pulled the trigger. The slug hit the front phone book with a whack!, and they fell over. The slug hadn’t made it through the first one. “Get the phone books, and let’s go,” Rinker said as she picked up the empty shell.
    Ten minutes later, they were back at Allen’s place. “We can’t go back now,” Rinker said. “If we go back now, nothing will make any sense.”
    “I don’t have any intention of going back,” Carmel said.
    “I sorta thought, when we got right down to it . . .”
    “You sorta thought right. But you’ve got to have priorities,” Carmel said. “That’s one of the first things we were taught in law school: prioritize. Besides, he was getting on my nerves even before this Louise Clark thing. You ever been with a man who lays in bed at night and picks the calluses on his feet?”
    “No . . . And tell you the truth, that seems kind of minor.”
    “Not if you’ve got a ten o’clock appearance the next day and there’s all kinds of pressure and you need sleep more than anything, and he’s over there, pick, pick, pick . . . And he tries to sneak it in, so I won’t hear it, so I wait . . . God!”
    “How do you want to do it?”
    “I’ll just do it,” Carmel said. “There’s nothing else to do at this end. No arrangements of anything.”
    “I’ll go around the block,” Rinker said. “Hurry.” C ARMEL GOT OUT, walked down the block to Allen’s. He met her in a bathrobe, at the door, with a big grin. “God, you got off,” he said. “That’s great.”
    “Gotta make a call,” she said. She called the office law library, the answering machine, dropped the receiver on the table, said, “C’mere,” and walked around him back to the bedroom.
    “What?” He looked at the phone, puzzled, then went after her.
    He was six or seven steps behind her. At the bedroom door, she slowed, let him catch up, turned with the gun, bringing it up. His warm brown puppy-dog eyes had no chance to show fear or anything else. She pulled the trigger and the gun went whack! And Hale Allen, as dead as his former wife, started falling backward. Carmel fired three more times as he fell, and afterward stepped up beside him, pointed the gun down at his forehead and fired twice more: whack, whack. And again into his heart: whack.
    “Goddamnit, Hale,” she said as she walked back into the bedroom. “You were my one true love.” Her photo smiled at her from the bedstand as she opened the folded piece of notebook paper, and let the odd strands of Clark’s pubic hair fall on the sheet. On the way out, she hung up the phone, then looked back at Hale Allen’s motionless body.
    “You prick,” she snarled. “Screw around on me . . .”
    She kicked him in the chest, and then again, in the face, and then in the arm; and, breathing hard, went to the door. On the street, Rinker was coming around for the first time. Carmel stepped out and Rinker pulled over. “That was quick,” Rinker said as Carmel got in the car.
    “No point in messing around,” Carmel said. “Let’s move.”
    “Did you say good-bye?”
    “I didn’t say anything,” Carmel said. “I did the phone thing, got him walking and shot him in the head.”
    “Huh.” Rinker continued on for a block, then said, “You know something?”
    “What?”
    “We’re good at this. If I’d met you ten years ago, I bet we could have set things up so that all of my outside jobs pointed somewhere else.”
    “Not too late for that,” Carmel said. “When you get to wherever you’re going, you get established, set up a couple new IDs, cool off for a while . . . and then come talk.”
    “It doesn’t bother you? At all?”
    “Actually, I kind of like it,” Carmel said. “It’s something different, you know? You get out of the office. You see lawyers on television, running around the courthouse, but ninety percent of my time is sitting in front of a computer. This is a little exercise, if nothing else.” B ACK AT CLARK’S, Rinker carefully pulled the clip, pressed an extra shell into the bottom of the clip using a piece of toilet paper to keep her prints off of it, then reloaded the cartridges in the same order that they’d come out. They left the gun next to Clark’s hand on the bed, but pointed away. “I saw a suicide once, one of my clients,” Carmel said. “The gun was like that.”
    “Then that’s good,” Rinker said. She took a last look around. “We’re done.” O N THE SIDEWALK outside, Carmel