Mortal Prey

Cancún had been a matter of luck. As Rinker had once told another woman who’d been interested in her business, anyone can be killed, if the assassin is patient enough and the victim is not aware of a particular threat. She didn’t exempt herself from that truism. She’d never felt a thing in Cancún. She hadn’t known she’d been spotted, hadn’t known she’d been stalked. The only guarantee of survival was the elimination of the threat.
     
    AND THERE WAS the revenge factor.
    She’d had few friends as a child. She’d taken care of her younger brother, who was somehow wrong in the head: not stupid, but constantly preoccupied, even as a baby, but he was not really a friend. He was too much younger, and too psychologically distant.
    There were two or three girls from school that she could recall, but only one that was close—the one she hoped was still living in St. Louis. Her stepfather and older brother had thoroughly abused her, and the sense of abuse had kept people away. In that part of the country, nobody would say much, but people would know, and stay clear. Watching Rinker grow up was like watching a slow-motion car wreck.
    Her life in St. Louis hadn’t been much different. The people she knew well, with three or four exceptions, mostly feared her. Then she’d been in Wichita, and in Wichita, there’d been two or three people that she might have become close to, but she hadn’t quite gotten there, when the cops had broken her out.
    Then she’d had to run, and almost magically, everything had changed. She’d found a friend in Mexico, in Paulo. Both a lover and a friend. The beginnings of several friendships, really, and the beginning of a family—she loved Paulo, and she also liked and laughed with and felt safe with his brothers and his parents. They seemed to like her back. She’d started taking birth control pills when things got serious with Paulo, but after a few months, when she needed to refill the prescription, she simply hadn’t. Kept thinking, Gotta do it, but didn’t.
    The missed period could have been natural, a change in the way she lived…but she knew better than that. Felt nothing stirring yet, but felt heavier, more serious.
    A child.
    Then the gun. And Paulo was gone, and the child, and the family…
     
    DRIVING ACROSS THE high plains, late at night, she had what she later thought was a vision, or wide-awake dream: She saw her child, a girl, a dark-haired kid playing on a tree swing in what must have been the Yucatán. Paulo was there, wearing a pair of white pleated shorts, bare-chested and barefoot, pushing her. Water in the background, so it must have been near the coast; and then the little girl screamed with laughter and Paulo stopped pushing her and walked around the path of the swing and Rinker could see a hand, her hand, with a Popsicle reaching toward Paulo. Their hands touched, and there was a spark, and he was gone, with the vision.
    She snapped back to the present, and far away, saw the lights of a truck approaching down the interstate. How long she’d been on mental cruise control she didn’t know, but she felt that she’d been there, in a different future. She could see the little girl now—her little girl—in her mind’s eye, and Paulo five years older, and her own life, and she began to weep, holding tight to the steering wheel, weaving down the highway.
     
    IF THE PEOPLE in St. Louis feared her guns, they had good reason.
     
    RINKER GOT OFF the interstate highway system at Kansas City, made a phone call from a mall. A man answered with an abrupt “What?”
    Rinker, leaning on a trashy south-Missouri accent, asked, “Is this Arveeda?”
    “Sound like fuckin’ Arveeda?” The phone crashed down on the hook, and she smiled: T. J. Baker was still in residence and, from the sound of it, still an asshole. Out of Kansas City, she turned south on local highways, headed for the town of Tisdale, fifteen miles east of Springfield. The biggest industry in Tisdale was the poultry-processing factory, which killed and plucked six thousand chickens a day, and left the entire town smelling like wet chickenshit and burned feathers. Hell of a thing, she thought, when the thing you remembered most about your hometown was the bad smell.
    At midafternoon she stopped again, made another call. A man answered: “Sgt, McCallum, ordnance.”
    She smiled and hung up. She dialed again, a different number, and a different man answered.
    “Yes?”
    The voice was a slap in