Certain Prey

said, “Here’s the first question. What did you tell the police about the people you saw in the hallway?”
    Davis glanced down at the girl and then back at Rinker: “They had pictures. We didn’t tell them anything, because Heather didn’t see anything. She couldn’t even make one of those drawing pictures.”
    “Did the police talk to anybody upstairs?”
    “They talked to everybody in the house, but nobody saw anything. Everybody’s been talking to everybody, but nobody even saw you and . . . the other person . . . leaving. Nobody saw . . .”
    “Nobody.”
    “No.” Davis shook her head, and Rinker was struck with the straightforwardness of it. She looked at the little girl.
    “And what did you do, little girl?”
    Heather told her: how she went to the police station, how she tried to make a drawing, but she didn’t know any faces. They showed her pictures, but she didn’t know them. As she spoke, she stood up tall, with her feet together, as if she were a Marine standing at attention. And Rinker suddenly knew that the child understood what was happening. That she was talking for her life. Rinker suddenly teared up, and said to Davis, “Send her back to the bedroom.”
    “Go, honey.”
    “You come, too, Mom,” Heather said, pulling at her mother’s hand.
    “I’ve got to talk to this lady,” Davis said, and the fear lay right on the surface of her eyes. Heather saw it as clearly as did Rinker.
    “Don’t worry, kid, I’m not going to hurt anybody,” Rinker said. “We’ve just got to have some grown-up talk.”
    “I’ve heard grown-up talk before,” the girl said.
    Rinker looked down at her. All right; she probably had. She looked back at the mother: “You don’t tell anybody I was here. You could actually provide them with a little more information about me—how tall I am, what my voice sounds like. I couldn’t tolerate that. If you do that, if you tell anyone I was here, I’ll come back and kill you. And if they kill me first, then one of my associates will come here and kill you, because they’ll feel like they’ve got to make the point. And they won’t let you go. They don’t give a shit about people like you. Do you understand?”
    The vulgarity, the shit, hung in the air between them, and lent Rinker’s speech authority—a killer’s authority—and Mom nodded dumbly. “We’ll never tell. Honest to God, we’ll never tell,” Jan Davis said.
    “Go sit on the couch,” Rinker said. “Don’t get up for five minutes, no matter how much you want to. I’m going to walk out of the house, and I don’t want you to see my car.”
    Mom nodded again, and pulled the child across the living room to the couch, and they sat down.
    Rinker stepped back to the door, stopped, brought the pistol up, and fired a single shot. A photograph of Davis, in earlier years, with two other women, fell off the wall, a perfect pencil-thick hole punched through the glass and Davis’s eyeball, in the photo.
    “Absolute and complete silence,” Rinker whispered.
    And she was gone.
    Out the door, down the stoop, up the street, in the car. And she breathed out.
    “L ET’S GO HOME,” Black said. “They’re gonna be here all night.”
    “Best time to pull something is about five o’clock in the morning,” Sherrill said, but she yawned.
    “Yeah, and if we really think that, we should put a twenty-four-hour watch on them. But we can’t do twentyfour hours ourselves. I’m so fuckin’ bored, I can’t think, and the back of my boxer shorts is about five inches up my ass because I’ve been sitting here too long.”
    “Take a walk,” Sherrill said.
    “I’d get mugged.”
    “Not in this neighborhood.”
    “By the goddamn security patrol. You see those guys? Would you give those guys a gun?”
    “All right.” Sherrill sighed and turned the key, cranked the car. “There’s gotta be something else we can do. I can’t believe we sat in this car for eight hours and never came up with a decent idea.”
    “There’s nothing left. If Carmel did it, and I’m not giving you that . . . she’s gonna walk.” J AN DAVIS LAY in bed, all night, barely closing her eyes. She fought down an impulse to flee to her parents’ home in Missouri—she wouldn’t be completely welcome since the divorce. Her parents had liked Howard better than they liked her, she thought, feeling alone and isolated. Besides, she’d seen the Godfather movies, and she knew about these people, the Mafia. Running