Certain Prey

currency and laid it on the table. Rolo picked it up, riffled it expertly with a thumb. “I’ll tell you this,” he said. “When they come and ask for it, pay every penny. Every penny. Don’t argue, just pay. If you don’t, they won’t try to collect. They’ll make an example out of you.”
    “I know how it works,” Carmel said, with an edge of impatience. “They’ll get it. And nobody’ll be able to trace it, because I’ve had it stashed. It’s absolutely clean.”
    Rolo shrugged: “Then if you say ‘Yes,’ I’ll call them tonight. And they’ll kill Barbara Allen.”
    This time, she didn’t flinch when Rolo spoke the name. Carmel stood up: “Yes,” she said. “Do it.” R INKER CAME to town three weeks later. She had driven her own car from Wichita, then rented two different-colored, different-make cars from Hertz and Avis, under two different names, using authentic Missouri driver’s licenses and perfectly good, paid-up credit cards.
    She stalked Barbara Allen for a week, and finally decided to kill her on the interior steps of a downtown parking garage. In the week that Rinker trailed her, Allen had used the garage four times, and all four times had used the stairs to get to the skyway level. Once in the skyway, she’d gone straight to an office with the name “Star of the North Charities” on the door. When Rinker knew that Allen was not at Star of the North, she’d called and asked for her.
    “I’m sorry, she’s not here.”
    “Do you expect her?”
    “She’s usually here for an hour or two in the morning, just before lunch.”
    “Thanks, I’ll try again tomorrow.” B ARBARA A LLEN.
    On the last of the three unluckiest days of her life, she got out of bed, showered, and ate a light breakfast of Raisin Bran and strawberries—with Hale for a husband, it paid to watch her figure. As the housekeeper cleared away the breakfast dishes, Allen turned on the television to check the Dow Jones opening numbers, sat at her desk and reviewed proposed charitable allocations from the Star of the North Charities trust, then, at nine-thirty, gathered her papers, pushed them into a tan Coach briefcase, and headed downtown.
    Rinker, in a red Jeep Cherokee, followed her until she was sure that Allen was heading downtown, then passed her and hurried ahead. Allen was a slow, careful driver, but traffic and traffic lights were unpredictable, and Rinker wanted to be at least five minutes ahead of her by the time they got downtown.
    Rinker had picked out another parking garage, also on the skyway system, a little less than a two-minute fast walk from the killing ground. She wheeled into the garage, parked, walked to her own car, which she’d parked in the garage earlier that morning, and climbed into the backseat. She glanced up and down the ramp, saw one man leaving, heading toward the doors. She reached down, grabbed the carpeting behind the passenger seat and popped open a shallow steel box, which held two Remington .22 semiautomatic pistols, silencers already attached, on a bed of foam peanuts.
    Rinker was wearing a loose shift, with a homemade elastic-girdle beneath it. She pushed the .22s into the wide pockets of the shift, through another slit cut through the insides of the pockets, and into the girdle. The .22s were held tight against her body, but she could get them out in a half-second. With the guns tucked away, Rinker hopped out of the car and headed for the skyway. B ARBARA A LLEN, a sturdy, German blonde with short, expensively cut hair, a dab of lipstick, a crisp white cotton blouse, a navy skirt and matching navy low-heels, went into the stairwell of the Sixth Street parking garage at 9:58 A.M. Halfway down, she met a small woman coming up, a redhead. As she passed her, looking down, the other woman smiled, and Allen, who knew about such things, looked at the top of her head and thought, Wig.
    That was the last thing she thought on the unluckiest day of her life.
    R INKER, CLIMBING THE STAIRS, had mistimed it. She knew the lower ramp was clear, and wanted to take Allen low. But Allen came down the narrow steps slowly, and Rinker, now in plain sight, didn’t feel she should stop and wait for her. So she continued climbing. Allen smiled and nodded at her as they passed, and as they passed, Rinker pulled the right-hand .22, pivoted, and fired it into the back of Allen’s head from a range of two inches. Allen’s hair puffed out, as though somebody had blown on it, and she started to