Certain Prey

heads. Stop the bleeding: leave no more traces than she had to. The back window, overlooking the communal Dumpster, would open wide enough, she thought, and the screen would swing free. She dragged the man on the couch to the window, opened it, laboriously shoved him into the window hole, took a last look around and pushed him out. He hit the tarmac below with a dull sloppy whock.
    The second guy, the one on the vinyl, was smaller, and she moved him more easily, over the sill, out the window; the impact, broken by the man already on the ground, was softer.
    With the two men outside, she hurried, quietly as she could, down to the van, backed it up to the Dumpster and dragged the two bodies into the back.
    She was tired. The bigger of the two guys probably went two-ten, maybe two-twenty. He was a lot of work. She sat for a moment in the van, catching her breath, and then started out. Ten minutes later, she was in the countryside. Fifteen minutes after the Dumpster, she was crawling down a one-lane track, next to a creek. She remembered the place from a country ramble earlier in the year; she remembered the unfenced cornfield that bordered on the track.
    The dawn was coming as she dragged the men through a patch of weeds, ten rows back into the corn. With any luck, they wouldn’t be found until October, when the corn was picked. Before she left, she took their wallets, pocketed the money—a little over a thousand, total—and their driver’s licenses. On the way back to town, she fed the miscellaneous paper in the wallets out the window, little anonymous scraps every couple hundred yards or so. In town, she stopped at a trash can and dumped the two empty wallets themselves.
    Done.
    Back to the apartment, up the stairs. A little after six o’clock in the morning: a little less than three hours before the banks opened. She’d spend it, she decided, wiping the place. Every coat hanger, every Coke can, every can and bottle in the cupboards and refrigerator. At the end, she wrote two notes—the first, a note to the landlord:
    Sorry to do this to you, Larry, to skip out on the lease, but you’ve got the last month’s rent, and I’m sure you can move the place in a hurry. I’ve got bad personal problems with my ex—if the asshole does find me he’s gonna kill me—and I gotta get out of here. You can have the furniture and everything else in the place, instead of the rent. Sorry again, and have a good life. —Clara.
    The landlord was greedy enough that he’d be moving the furniture out ten minutes after he got the note. If he could move somebody else in, in a hurry, she’d have that much less to worry about, involving fingerprints.
    The second note she put in an envelope, which she sealed. She scrawled the St. Louis guy’s name on it, and under that wrote, “Private.”
    The bank took five minutes, in a private booth. She spent most of the time wiping the box; much of the rest of the time putting one hundred and eighty thousand dollars in a brown paper bag. She also collected a brown cardboard folder that held her best, bottom-line, last-chance ID: credit cards, a Missouri driver’s license, a passport and up-to-date plates and registration for her car.
    And a deed: the deed sold the Rink to James Larimore—Wooden Head—for $175,000, a fair price six years ago when she’d bought the place, and then two months later sold it to Wooden Head. The sale had been a technical one, though witnessed by all the proper authorities. Until Wooden Head had the deed in his hands, Rinker was the owner. Now he would get it; and he was getting a deal. W OODEN H EAD was waiting at the bar, in the back. He had a head the size of a regulation NBA basketball, but squared a bit, and small, delicate features and tight, dry eyes all squeezed into the middle of his face. He brought a briefcase with him.
    “What we’ve got to do is this,” Rinker told him. “You gotta take a walk, so you don’t see it. Then I’m gonna get a bottle of Lysol and wipe everything in the office, and up and down the stairs. I’ll take everything out of the files that you need, and we’ll run it through the Xerox machine. Probably no more than fifty or sixty pieces. I don’t want any prints left behind.”
    “When do you want me back?”
    “Give me an hour. It’d be best if you just sat across the street in the doughnut place, read the papers for a while. Then I could find you if I need you.”
    “Okay.”
    “You guys are getting a deal,”