Certain Prey

or more.
    “Forget it,” Rinker said. “We’ll have to come back.”
    They retreated down the steps, walked up the street to Carmel’s Volvo and left.
    M. Blanca’s house was a long step down in affluence, one of a row of old asbestos-shingled houses just north of a University of Minnesota neighborhood called Dinkytown. Four mailboxes hung next to a single door.
    “It’s an apartment,” Rinker said, her voice low.
    “Lot of them are,” Carmel said.
    “We gotta take care—there’ll be other people around. You got the money?”
    “Yeah.” A few more steps and Carmel asked, “What do I look like?” Rinker was wearing her red wig; they’d both wrapped dark silk scarves around their heads.
    “You look like one of those religious ladies who always wear scarves,” Rinker said.
    “All right,” Carmel said. She added, “So do you.”
    At the front door, Carmel pointed a pocket flash at the mailboxes. The box on the left said Howell; the next one showed a strip of paper, which had been peeled off. The third said in pink ink Jan and Howard Davis, with a green ink addition, in a child’s hand, And Heather. The fourth said Apartment A . She opened the left one, Howell, and found it empty. The box with the strip of paper contained a phone bill addressed to David Pence, Apartment C. She skipped the Davis box, and checked the box on the far right. Empty.
    “I think, but I’m not sure, that we want apartment A,” she whispered to Rinker. Rinker nodded and they pushed through the outer door into a short hallway. Stairs led away to the right, and a high-tech Schwinn bicycle was chained to the banister. “Not like my old Schwinn,” Rinker muttered.
    Down the hall, on the left wall, was a pale yellow door. Another door, this one a pale Paris green, was at the end of the hall. The first door had a large metal B on it; the Paris-green door had an A. Rinker put her hand in her pocket, where the gun was, and Carmel stepped forward and knocked on the door.
    The knock was answered by deep silence; Carmel knocked again, louder. This time, there was an answering thump, like somebody getting up off a couch or a bed. A moment later, the door opened a crack and a sleepy Latino man peered out through the crack and said, “What?”
    “We need to talk to Ms. Blanca,” Carmel said quietly.
    “She’s sleeping,” he said, and the crack narrowed.
    “We’ve got some money for her,” Carmel said quickly. The crack stopped narrowing, and the man’s eyes were back at the crack. He didn’t argue. He simply said, “I’ll take it.”
    “No. Rolo said we were only to give it to Ms. Blanca, if anything happened to him.”
    “Oh.” He thought it over for a minute, as if this somehow made sense; and Carmel’s heart did a quick extra beat. “What happened to Rolo?”
    “Quite a bit of money,” Carmel said. She wanted to sound nervous, and she did.
    “Just a minute,” the Latino man said. The door closed and they heard him call, “Hey: Marta.”
    “Marta Blanca,” Rinker muttered. “She bakes right.”
    “What?” Carmel looked at Rinker as though Rinker were slipping away.
    “Better biscuits, cakes and pies with Marta Blanca . . .”
    Carmel shook her head, bewildered, then the man was back, and the door opened. He looked them over for a second, made a judgment, and said, “Yeah. Come in.”
    Carmel led the way into the apartment, which seemed to be decorated in brown; one lamp with a nicotine-yellow shade was turned on, the shade at a tipsy angle over a stack of Hustler magazines. The odor of marijuana hung around the curtains.
    “How much money?” the man asked.
    “We need to ask . . .” Carmel started, but then a woman came through the kitchen, apparently from a bedroom in the back. She was tucking her blouse into the back of her jeans. “Are you Marta?”
    “Yeah.” The woman still looked sleepy. “What happened to Rolando?”
    “He’s dead,” Carmel said flatly. “Somebody shot him.”
    The woman stopped in her tracks, the blood draining from her face: “Dead? He can’t be dead. I just talked to him yesterday.”
    “The cops found him this morning,” Rinker said, stepping out of Carmel’s shadow. “Was he a good friend?”
    “He was he was he was . . .” she said, shakily.
    “Her brother,” the man finished. Rinker flicked a look at Carmel, who nodded almost imperceptibly. Her hand moved in her pocket.
    “Half brother,” the woman said. She dropped on a chair. “Ah, Jesus,” she