Mortal Prey

had probably agreed to do it, since they all talked to each other, wouldn’t have wanted to go against the others, and because all four must have been worried about her running around loose.
    The problem was, Rinker knew way too much. She knew where the bodies were buried, and that wasn’t a joke, not in the several states where the four men operated, all those good states having opted for capital punishment. If Rinker was taken alive, and if she decided to cut a deal…
    Rinker lay on the bed and put together an outline. She could fill it in while she drove.
     
    FROM SACRAMENTO TO St. Louis is three solid days, if you’re driving a used Oldsmobile, don’t want to attract attention, and stay with it. Rinker took four days, passing from one FM station to the next, hard rock to soft jazz to country, through two sets of mountains with a desert between them, then out on the Great Plains, I-80 to Cheyenne, I-25 into Denver, across Kansas and Missouri on I-70, into St. Louis: Red Roof Inn and Best Western, BP and Shell, McDonald’s and Burger King and Taco Bell and the Colonel. She stopped at four different shopping centers. She got her hair cut, tight to her head, punky, so that a wig would fit over it. She bought wigs, good ones, in black, red, and blond shoulder-length.
    She talked to a woman at a Nordstrom’s makeup bar about a Mexican friend of hers who had suffered a facial burn and needed some dark cover-up makeup to conceal the burn, and she got instruction on how to use it. She played with the makeup, trying to make herself look Mexican, but it never quite worked. Instead of brown, she looked orange, and odd. She eventually decided that the black wig looked okay with just a bit of dark eyebrow pencil, as long as she wore long-sleeved blouses.
    With a couple of changes of clothes—one from Nordstrom’s, one from Kmart—she’d have six distinct looks. Even a good friend of the Nordstrom’s perky Light Lady would never recognize the funky Kmart Red….
    And she made some calls, cautiously. Had to call three times, starting with the first day in L.A., before she finally got through. Said, “This is me. You remember me?”
    “Oh, my God. Where are you at?”
    “Out east. Pennsylvania. How’s life?”
    “I’ve run out of time. Like we talked about.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “You know…”
    “I’ve got an idea, but I haven’t worked it out yet. I’ll call you back. When’s good?”
    “Three o’clock is good. Like now.”
    “This line?”
    “Yeah…this is as good as any. You never know, though.” Never know what might be monitored.
    “I’ll get you a clean phone,” Rinker said. “I’ll call again. Three o’clock.”
     
    WHEN SHE’D BEEN pushed out of her life, forced to go on the run, Rinker had been killing people for a long time—felt like a long time, anyway. She was not deliberately cruel in her paid assassinations. She did the shooting and went on her way, a businesswoman taking care of business. She had once been necessarily cruel to a man in Minnesota who’d betrayed her, but that had been a matter of survival. She still thought about him from time to time. She wasn’t morbidly fascinated or neurotically fixated, but the image of his body tied to the bed sometimes popped into her mind’s eye as she drifted off to sleep.
    The fear he’d shown. She thought about the fear as she drove—and the other fears she inspired.
    The people who’d directed her, who’d used her as a weapon, had no reason to fear her guns, because Rinker was entirely loyal to friends. These were people who’d helped her out of a life that had been headed straight for a white-trash ghetto. She appreciated that. If the cops had taken her, she would have gone to the gas chamber, or the death gurney, or whatever it was, without saying a word.
    These former friends didn’t know that. Or decided they couldn’t be sure. If they’d simply tried to kill her and had failed, she might have let it go, on the rational grounds that if she hit back at them, she was putting herself at risk.
    They hadn’t just failed. They’d killed her lover, they’d killed her baby, and they were most likely still looking for her now, not just from fear of the consequences if she was caught, but fear of her guns. No matter where she went, there was always the possibility that some asshole from St. Louis would pick her out of a crowd, and another gun would be sent.
    There was no question that her survival in