Mortal Prey

desperate, and forgot about her reputation for a minute.
    That meant that when she wanted to talk to a man, she had to get on top of him immediately. She didn’t have to flash the gun, but it had to be there, in his mind’s eye, right from the start. She had to be the cold-eyed killer right inside his shirt.
    A blond couple, the woman a little wobbly, and a single man in cowboy boots went into the BluesNote as she watched, and one man left. The man who left stopped just outside the door and looked up and down the street: looking for action, which meant that not much was going on inside the club. When Rinker had run her bar in Wichita, she’d hated the sight of a man looking both ways on the sidewalk outside. The Rink hadn’t come through for him.
    After watching for ten minutes, she got out of the car, hung a purse on her shoulder, and walked down to the club. The door was surrounded with predistressed wood that was now genuinely distressed; the doorknob rattled under her hand. She stepped inside the door, paused, let her eyes adjust to the gloom. A long-haired young man sat on a dais at the end of the main room, a guitar on one knee. He was saying, “…learned this song from an old Indian guy up in Dakota. I was working the wheat harvest, this was back in ’99…”
    Rinker thought, Jesus.
    When she could see, Rinker walked along the left wall straight back to the kitchen doors, through the doors and up the stairs. She knew the place from her years at the liquor warehouse: Nothing had changed. The door at the upper landing was closed, but there was light coming through the crack at the bottom. She put a hand on the pistol in her pocket and pushed through the door.
    Sellos was sitting behind his desk. When Rinker pushed through the door, without knocking, he jumped, saw her face, and settled back into his chair.
    “You scared me,” he said, smiling hopefully.
    “Good,” she said. She kept her hand in her pocket, noticed that Sellos was watching that hand, and said, “Yeah. I got a gun.”
    “You gonna shoot me? I haven’t done anything to you.” He was a thin man, with a big nose and a yellowish tint to his skin. He looked as though somebody large had blown nicotine and tar on him; he looked like he should be wearing a brown fedora.
    “I didn’t come here to shoot you,” Rinker said. “I need about four of your cell phones, and I need you to make a call for me.”
    “Whatever’s good,” he said.
    “If you mess with me, I’ll shoot you right in the heart,” Rinker said. She eased her hand out of her pocket, letting him see the gun with the fat snout. “I got no patience for being messed around.”
    His Adam’s apple bobbed once, and he said, “I don’t have the phones here. I gotta make a call.”
    “Call.” She waggled the pistol at the phone.
    He picked up the telephone, punched in four numbers, and said without preface, “Have Carl bring me up four phones. And you know that poster we got under the bar? Give him that, too, I want to show it to a guy.”
    “Who’s Carl?” Rinker asked when he hung up.
    “Old guy. Works for me. Could you put the gun away?”
    “You got folk music downstairs, John,” Rinker said. An accusation, and it made Sellos uncomfortable. She slipped the pistol back into her jacket pocket. They listened for a minute, and heard, faintly, through the floor, the singer’s scratchy voice: …the Sioux and Arikara are gone, driven by the white man’s trains, across those treasured free-wind plains, where the wheat waves like dollar bills, and overflows some banker’s tills…
    “Gotta pay the mortgage, Clara,” he said. “The guy costs me nothin’.”
    “How’re you gonna grow your bar traffic, John, with some asshole singing about freight trains and wheat? Folk music is worse than nothing. Hiring folksingers does nothing but encourage them. It’s like letting cockroaches into your house.”
    “I gotta have something, and I can’t hire country,” Sellos said defensively. “Country people won’t come down here. And blues are dead, except with the corduroy university crowd, and they can make a whole night out of a beer and a dish of free peanuts.” They heard footsteps in the hallway, and both turned their heads: then a knock. Sellos got up, opened the door, took the phones and a piece of paper, said, “Thanks, Carl,” and shut the door again. He stepped back behind his desk, looked at the back of the telephones for a few seconds, then put them