Certain Prey

lucky.”
    “Ah, Christ,” Sherrill said. “I’ll do it, but I have a feeling I’m gonna be pulling my weenie.” R INKER BROUGHT a wig with her: she’d have big hair, Texas hair, when she went in. She’d wear jeans, gym shoes, rubber kitchen gloves, two pistols under a black sport jacket, a handkerchief and a nylon rolled up tight as a watch cap.
    Carmel would be wearing a slinky bloody-red dress with spangles, matching red shoes and lipstick. “How do I look?” she asked.
    “You look terrific,” Rinker said, admiration riding in her voice. “God, if I could look like that . . .”
    “You’re beautiful,” Carmel said.
    “No, I’m not,” Rinker said. “I’m cute. I look like I should be in the Playboy college issue, Duke University’s Miss Perky Nipples.”
    “Does Miss Perky Nipples carry twenty-two Colt Woodsmans . . . would it be Woodsmans, or Woodsmen?”
    “No, she probably wouldn’t. I don’t know the correct grammar, but I got two of them, and they were stolen fourteen years ago from a gun store in Butte, Montana, and haven’t seen the light of day since. I’m cool.”
    Carmel nodded. “You are cool.” She took a last look at herself in a full-length mirror, twirled and said, “When I get that boy home tonight, I am going to fuck him rudely. Rudely.”
    “Good luck,” Rinker said. “I sorta wish I was . . . involved with somebody. It’s been a while.”
    “Is it hard to meet guys in Wichita?” Carmel asked, screwing on an earring clasp.
    “It’s hard for me, ” Rinker said. “You know, a gal who runs a bar? I never told you about that. What kind of guys am I going to attract?” She answered her own question: “Most of them have got a bottle of Jim Beam in the trunk.”
    “Too bad you couldn’t hook up with Davenport,” Carmel said, jokingly.
    “He’d be a possibility,” Rinker admitted. “He could be fun, in a big-galoot way.”
    “Mean big-galoot,” said Carmel.
    “I could see that,” Rinker said. “I could feel it.” After a second, “But he sorta . . . handles you. Moves you around. Touches you. Not feeling you up or anything, but he’s just . . . I don’t know. All over the place.”
    “If he sees you here, we’re fucked,” Carmel said.
    “Unlike when I saw him in Wichita,” Rinker said. Then, “I thought about coming on to him a little, but that would’ve been . . . too much. Anyway, I don’t expect to see him again the rest of my life.”
    She picked up the first of the pistols, jacked a shell into the chamber, set the safety and slipped it into her gun girdle, under the jacket. Rinker looked at Carmel. “You ready?”

EIGHTEEN

    Black canceled a date and climbed into the back of Sherrill’s Mazda with a pepperoni pizza and a bag of hot nacho cheese crackers.
    Sherrill said, “You’re a cruel fuck. If I ate any of that stuff, it’d go right straight to my thighs.”
    “So don’t eat it. Concentrate on other things. Flowers. Small children,” Black said.
    “I’m having a hard time concentrating. With my future husband on his way up to . . .”
    “. . . slip a little English bacon to Carmel Loan.”
    “You’re so crude. And whatever he’s got in there, I doubt that it resembles bacon.”
    “You mean, in stripes, or in flatness?”
    She giggled: “God, I love talking dirty with you. It’s so jocklike, so . . .”
    She couldn’t think of a word; through the plate-glass doors of Carmel Loan’s building, they could see Hale Allen’s back as he signed into the building. Then a short redhead came around the corner from the elevators, into the lobby, and Sherrill said, “Here comes . . . nope.”
    The redhead walked past Allen, giving him the once-over, pushed through the glass doors, looked left and right, put her hands deep in the pockets of her black sport coat, and headed down the block. Inside, Allen walked away from the security desk and around the corner to the elevators.
    As they watched them, a patrol car pulled in behind the Mazda and the red lights began to flash. “Ah, man,” Sherrill said, looking in her rearview mirror. The loudspeaker on the cop car blared, “Drop your car keys out the passenger window. Now.”
    Instead of dropping her keys out of the window, Sherrill held her badge case out. After a minute, the flashing lights stopped, and the driver of the cop car approached from the back, shining a flashlight on the badge case. Sherrill pushed the door open, dropped her feet to the street, looked at the