Certain Prey

and looked at the clock. Five minutes after five. She got to her feet, picked up both guns, cocked them, and headed for the kitchen, moving slowly, careful not to bump anything, to set off a vibration, absolutely silent in her bare feet. She was still wearing the thin rubber gloves, hot and tacky on her hands. The gloves were ivory-colored, and she could see them better than she could see her arms, like two disembodied fists floating through the dark.
    Whoever was in the hall had hesitated at the door. She moved past it and stepped into a closet with sliding doors. The left door was half open, and she moved behind it, where she could still see through the open panel. Then the man outside knocked, and called her name, quietly. “Clara? Clara?” Another soft knock, then a key.
    He had a key, which meant the man in St. Louis must have copied hers. Stupid. She just left her keys lying around, the keys to everything. She worried that there were more security lapses that she’d never known about. Then she pushed the worry out of her head and focused on the weight of her guns. T HE DOOR OPENED, a darkening shadow, then the man stepped inside; she was less than two feet away, and he stepped inside far enough that she could see that he was carrying something in his right hand. From the way he was carrying it, it had to be a gun. She lifted her own gun, ready to fire, when the man whispered—the softest breath— “Easy . . .”
    She thought he was talking to her and almost blurted something out, when she heard more soft movement—and the man she could see wasn’t moving. There were two of them.
    The first moved down the hall toward her bedroom, while the second moved quietly across the living room to the second bedroom, which Rinker used as a TV room and home office. After a long minute of silence, the man down the hall came back, stepped toward the second bedroom. And the second man stepped out of the second bedroom.
    “Not here yet,” he said quietly.
    “Then we wait until Wooden Head calls,” said the first man.
    “In the dark?”
    “Yeah, in case she comes.”
    “I’m dead on my ass,” the farther man said. “I get the couch, if that’s a couch.” T HE SECOND MAN lay down on the couch; the first sat in an easy chair, lit a cigarette. Rinker never allowed cigarettes in her house. The second man said from the couch, “What if she smells that smoke?”
    The smoker said, “Shit,” and dropped the cigarette butt on the hardwood floor and ground it out with his foot. She’d sanded the floors herself, and sealed them. The man’s action almost moved Rinker, but not quite.
    “You seen this chick?” one man asked.
    “Once, I think. Gotta nice rack.”
    “The Guy seemed kind of scared of her. You know, like he was all that, Get her quick, don’t give her a shot .”
    “Never seen a chick who could take me,” said the second man. “In fact, if this is the same chick I’m thinking about, I wouldn’t mind fuckin’ her first.”
    “Don’t think that way. If the Guy’s nervous, we don’t want to be fuckin’ around.”
    “Yeah, yeah.”
    “Now shut up; I’m gonna get some sleep.”
    “Listen for the shots,” the second man said. “Then you’ll know she got here.” F IVE MINUTES LATER, Rinker heard the first tentative snore from the man on the couch; the man on the chair sat unmoving, as far as she could tell. They were like that for another five minutes, the man on the couch breathing deeper, snoring more regularly; then the man on the couch stood up, lit a cigarette and started toward her. She withdrew just an inch into the deeper darkness of the closet. When he brushed by, a shoulder width away, she stepped sideways, then out of the closet in a dance step, her left pistol arm coming up. He never heard her, saw her or suspected her. She fired a double-tap into the back of his head and took three quick steps to the couch. The man on the couch snorted when the first man hit the floor, and may have been about to wake up. Rinker fired two more shots into his forehead.
    Lights.
    She got the lights on. The man on the floor was bleeding, but the blood was running out on vinyl. She could get that. The other one wasn’t bleeding much, just two small bubbles of blood over his brow ridges: slugs never exited.
    She’d have to hurry, she thought. The sky outside seemed brighter: the summer dawn was not far away. She ran to the kitchen, got a roll of duct tape, and taped the wounds on the men’s