Mortal Prey

Dichter, taking care of competitive issues, which was how he’d met Rinker. He’d used her nine times and paid her a little more than a half million dollars. He lived not far from Dichter in a home on a heavily wooded lot in Creve Coeur. He was executive vice president and part owner of the import chain.
    Andy Levy was a banker, and worked a straight job as vice president of development with First Heartland National of St. Louis; he handled most of the mob money in St. Louis, including Rinker’s, before she moved to Wichita. He lived in a huge old redbrick cube in Central West End, and was a patron of the performing arts—he dated dancers, and sometimes actresses. Rinker had killed Levy’s wife and her lawyer when the marriage went on the rocks, and the lawyer was foolish enough to threaten Levy with the exposure of his money operation. Levy liked to walk in Forest Park. He’d once been banned from the zoo for throwing center-cut pork chops to the lions.
    Finally there was John Ross, who’d originally recruited Rinker and taught her the gun trade. Ross ran an overworld liquor distributorship, and had interests in vending machine and trucking businesses. He had parallel shadow businesses in cocaine, sports betting, and loan-sharking. He was retail, to Nanny Dichter’s wholesale. He’d also acted as Rinker’s agent, selling her guns for cash, and taking his cut in clout rather than money. Ross lived off a semiprivate street in Ladue in the center of six acres of lawn. He’d been Rinker’s friend and protector, though when she’d been broken out by the cops, he’d tried to have her killed. She gave him that one, because of their history, but had warned him at the time that if there was another unsuccessful attempt, she’d be coming for him.
    Dichter and Ross were smart and personally violent. Dallaglio was essentially a criminal executive who worked by remote control. He’d never gotten his hands bloody, but he did know how to protect himself. Levy barely thought of himself as criminal—he was just a guy who knew some guys, and like a bunch of Rotarians, they all threw business at each other.
    Every one of the four men knew too much about each of the others, and more than enough about Rinker. While any one of the four could have authored the assassination in Cancún, it was unlikely that any one of them would have done it on his own hook. They walked carefully around each other, and none of them would want to be blamed if something had gone wrong, as it had. They’d have talked.
     
    RINKER SLEPT IN Pollock’s room for three more days, going out at night, getting a handle on the town. She knew it well from her days as a dancer, and with Ross at the liquor warehouse, but there were always changes, and she’d never really surveyed it from the perspective of an assassin.
    She needed to know what was open, and when. Where she could ditch, if she ran into trouble. Where she could pick up a car in a hurry. Where the targets did their business. As she wandered around town, she refined her ideas about her approaches to the targets.
    One night, she dropped Pollock at a country joint with twenty dollars and a hand-sized Sony tape recorder, and told her to sit as close to the jukebox as she could, have a couple of beers, and tape-record the bar. Pollock did all of that, and Rinker listened to the tape on the way back home. The tape sounded fine, and reminded her of the Rink.
     
    SHE MADE THE first open move on a Monday night, with a stop at the BluesNote Cafe at LaClede’s Landing on the river. The BluesNote was owned by John Sellos. The club had never done well, and without a variety of minor criminal activities—the barkeeps ran a sports-betting business, and a back room became an informal office for a fence and a branch office for one of Ross’s loan sharks—the place would have closed fifteen years earlier. As it was, it struggled, and Sellos worried incessantly.
    Rinker wore black jeans for the job, a black blazer, and black Nike running shoes. She carried one of the nine-millimeter pistols in her jacket pocket. She parked a block from the club and sat in the car for a while, gathering herself, watching the street.
    She knew she frightened people, but she knew that was only an edge. Physically, she was in good shape, but a large man was still a large man. Even an out-of-shape cigarette freak like Jackie Burke in L.A., or Jimmy Cricket in San Francisco, could pull her arms off if he was pissed, or