Mortal Prey

that.”
    “Well, jeez, Rose-Anne, I don’t know.”
    “Cut the crap, Jimmy. I’ll give you two thousand bucks apiece for either two or three guns.”
    Jimmy processed this for a minute, and she could see it all trickling down through his brain, like raindrops of thought on a windowpane. Okay, he’d been offered money, in the face of his denials. If she was a cop, it’d be entrapment. And if she was a cop, and knew about the tree in the park, he was probably fucked anyway. And if she were Rose-Anne and he didn’t sell her the guns, then he might be truly and ultimately fucked. Therefore, he would sell her the guns.
    “Uh…maybe you should step into the back.” The back was behind a green cloth curtain, smelled of bubble wrap and cardboard, and was full of golf-club shipping boxes and club racks. At the far end was a workbench with a vise. Jimmy pushed a couple of boxes aside and pulled out a tan gym bag, unzipped it, and said, “This is what I got.”
    Rinker, watching his eyes, decided he was okay, took the bag, stepped back, and looked inside. Three revolvers and three semiautos. All three semiautos were military-style 9mm Berettas. She took one out, popped the magazine—the magazine was empty—cycled the action a couple of times, did the same with the other two, and said, “I’ll take them.” She looked at the revolvers: One was a .22, and she put it with the automatics. “You got any long guns?”
    “No. I know where you might be able to pick some up, if you want to run down to Bakersfield.”
    She shook her head. “Naw. I can get my own. How about ammo?”
    “I can give you a couple of boxes of Federal hollowpoint for the nines, but I don’t have any .22 on hand.”
    “Give me the nine,” she said. “Silencer?”
    “Um, I usually charge two thousand. Good ones are hard to get.”
    “Can you get it quick?”
    “Yes.”
    “Another two thousand, if it’s a good one.”
    “It’s a Coeur d’Alene.”
    “I’ll take it.”
    He fished around in another box and came up with a purple velvet bag that had once contained a bottle of Scotch. He handed it to her and said, “Quick enough?”
    She took the bag, slipped the silencer out. It was a Coeur d’Alene, all right; the absolutely faultless blued finish was the signature. Somewhere, a master machinist was doing artwork. She screwed the silencer onto one of the nines and flipped it out to arm’s length, to test the balance. “Good. I’ll take the whole bunch.”
    Jimmy nodded, said, “Okay,” moved some more boxes around, picked up a small one, reached inside, and produced two boxes of nine-millimeter ammunition. He handed them to her and asked, “You in town for long?”
    Her mouth wasn’t grim, but she wasn’t exactly radiating warmth. “I was never here,” she said.
    “Gotcha,” said Jimmy Cricket.
     
    RINKER SPENT THE night in a motel outside Sacramento, drawing squares and triangles on a yellow legal pad. Killing wasn’t hard: Any asshole could kill somebody. Doing it often, and getting away with it every time, was much harder. What had made her a good killer—besides the lack of revulsion with the job—was her ability to plan. She planned with yellow pads, not in words and paragraphs, but in triangles and spirals, a few with names above them, some with lines connecting them to other symbols. Sometimes she made maps.
    Aside from the killing, Rinker hadn’t been much different from other young successful businesswomen in Wichita, Kansas, until her facade broke down and she’d had to run. She’d owned a friendly country bar called the Rink, with dancing all the time and live music on weekends. She had a nice apartment that she’d decorated herself, went part-time to Wichita State, and would have liked to have had a pet, but traveled too much to feel good about it. She didn’t like fuzzy stuffed animal toys or chocolate hearts, but did tarry at times in front of Victoria’s Secret display windows. She had an interest in makeup, read a couple of women’s magazines, liked to dance, got a massage once a month, and would drink a beer or a glass of wine.
    She liked guns, and the power that grew out of them. Knew enough about semiautos to do her own trigger jobs. Wasn’t much interested in cars. Like that.
    Lying on the bed in Sacramento, she wrote four names on her legal pad: John Ross, Nanny Dichter, Andy Levy, Paul Dallaglio. All of them knew her face. All of them had the clout to send a gun to kill her. All of them