Certain Prey

Italian.”
    “I’ll go back to the redhead, then,” Rinker said. C ARMEL HAD BEEN THINKING about Davenport: “Somehow, they’re tracking you. And for some reason, they’re pushing on me. I thought about your car, and the possibility that they’re tracking it, but that doesn’t seem likely. That would mean that they had to have two pieces of luck: to get onto Tennex, and to get the tag number. I don’t believe it. What I’m wondering is, could they have found a connection with your St. Louis friends? Could they be squeezing somebody?”
    “Only one guy in St. Louis knows exactly who I am and what I do, and there are maybe two more who suspect—a couple brothers who run a bar down there. And the brothers wouldn’t know who you are. The one guy would . . . he knows your name. He’s the guy Rolo called.”
    “My contact in the PD says that another detective, a woman named Sherrill, went down to St. Louis for a couple of days last week, and the word around the department is that she was talking to the St. Louis organized crime guys,” Carmel said.
    “I don’t know why my guy would be dealing me,” Rinker said, thinking about it for a moment. “He takes a lot of power off me: you know, he’s the guy who knows the finger of God, as you put it. The guy who can hook you up. And if I go down, he goes down.”
    Carmel took a short turn around the hotel room, checked herself in a bureau mirror, turned back and said, “Let me tell you something I learned as a lawyer: everybody will deal. Everybody. Have you ever heard of this new federal lockup in the Rockies?”
    “No . . .”
    “You got a cement cell about half the size of this hotel room. It has a concrete bed platform and stainless-steel sink and toilet fixtures in concrete stands. No bars, just a steel door and an unbreakable window that shows nothing but a rectangle of sky—you can’t even see the sun. There’s a black-and-white TV bolted in a corner. That’s it. You’re in there twenty-two to twenty-three hours a day, and you’re monitored every minute. I’ve had a couple of clients try to commit suicide in there, and neither one made it—although one made it when they put him in a hospital after his second try. He tried to kill himself by standing against one wall and running full speed into the wall across the room, with his head down. He cracked his skull. He finally managed to kill himself in the hospital—this was his third try—rather than go back. You hear what I’m saying?”
    “I’m not sure,” Rinker said.
    “What I’m saying is, torture is alive and well in the United States of America,” Carmel said. “It just doesn’t involve physical pain. It involves isolation, year after year of solitary. They could take your Mafia friend out there, show him through the place, let him talk to a couple of inmates and he’d give you up.”
    “But he hasn’t,” Rinker said. “Because if he had, they’d be on me like a hot sweat. But they’re not. I swear to God, Davenport didn’t have any idea who I was, and neither did the other cops. We danced, for God’s sake.”
    “That wasn’t too great a move,” Carmel said.
    “I had to find out if they were there for me—I couldn’t stand it,” Rinker said. “To tell you the truth . . .”
    “What?”
    “What if he’s fated to find me? That’s what scares me. I’ve got this guy I can’t shake because it’s my time.”
    “Jesus, Pam, you gotta take a couple aspirins or something,” Carmel said. “Lay down for a while. ’Cause, believe me, it’s nothing like that.”
    Rinker sighed, and let her shoulders slump. Carmel actually did make her feel better. She was so sure of herself. “Okay.”

    “S O WE STILL have the question, what do we do?” Carmel said. “Davenport knows something. He’s working off something. What could they have given him at Tennex that put him in Wichita? Why is he pushing on me?”
    “I don’t know how he got to Wichita. I was a fanatic about being careful.”
    “What about your Mafia friend? Even if he’s not deliberately giving you up, is there any way he could have pointed them at Wichita?”
    “Hmph.” Rinker had to think about it for a minute. “I didn’t let him call me there. He always came out to deliver the messages. But he’s always on the telephone. If somehow they managed to sort out his calls while he was there . . . I don’t know. It sounds weak. I mean, he goes everywhere. Why would they focus on