Mortal Prey

could taste the salt on his skin, she still expected to see him standing in the kitchen, listening to futbol on a cheap radio, his white grin and black tousled hair and his weekend bottle of American-style Corona…
     
    BY THE SECOND week on the ranch, bored but still weak, feeling more and more pressure to move while remaining determined not to move until she was solid, she began talking with her watcher. His name was Jaime, a short, hard man with a deeply burned face and brushy mustache. He was good-natured enough, and went everywhere with a pistol in his pocket and an M-16 in the back of his truck.
    Rinker said, “Show me about the M-16.”
    After a little talk, and perfunctory protests by Jaime, he hauled two chairs out to a nearby gully, set up a target range, and showed her how to fire the M-16. She did well with the weapon and he became interested—he was a gunman, deeply involved with the tools of his profession—and brought out other guns. A scoped, bolt-action Weatherby sporting rifle, a pump .22, a lever-action treinta-treinta, and a shotgun.
    They spent two or three hours a day shooting: stationary targets, bouncing tires, and, with the .22, they’d shoot at clay pigeons thrown straight away. The clays were almost impossible to hit—at the end, she might hit one or two out of ten, learning to time her shots to the top of the target’s arc.
    As they shot, Jaime talked about rifle bullets and loads, wind drift and heat mirages, uphill and downhill shooting, do-it-yourself accurizing. He liked working with her because she was serious about it, and attractive. An athlete, he thought, though she didn’t really work at it, like some gym queens he knew in Cancún—trim, smart, and pretty in a blond gringo way.
    And she knew about men. He might have put a hand on her, himself, if she hadn’t been in mourning, and mourning for the son of Raul Mejia. He remained always the professional.
    “There is no way that you can carry or keep a long gun for self-protection,” he told her. “With a handgun, you have it always by your hand, like the name says. With a rifle, which is very good if you have it in your hand, well, it will be in the bedroom and you will be in the kitchen when they come for you. Or you will be sitting in the latrine with your pants around your ankles and a Playboy in your hands—maybe not you, but me, anyway—and the rifle will be leaning against a tree, and that’s when they will come. So this gun”—he slapped the side of the M-16—“this gun is fine when you are shooting, but you must learn the handgun for self-protection.”
    She demurred. She wanted to learn the long guns, she said. Rifles and a shotgun. Not a double-barreled bird gun or anything cute, but a stubby, fat-barreled combat pump. She didn’t want to learn how to shoot any fuckin’ birds: give her a shotgun and a moving target five yards away…
    He shook his head and smiled good-naturedly and showed her the long guns, two weeks of first-class tuition, but he kept coming back to the handgun. “Just try it,” he’d say. “You are very natural with a gun. The best woman I have ever seen.”
    “Shooting’s not exactly rocket science,” she’d said, but the phrase didn’t translate well into Spanish; didn’t come off with the irony of the English.
     
    IN HER SECOND two weeks on the ranch, she went a half-dozen times into town, to her apartment, and gathered what she needed in order to move. She also wiped the place: There’d be no fingerprints if anyone came looking for her. Then one Wednesday, after she’d been on the ranch for a month, Dominic came out and said, “We’ve got word about a man who some people say might have been the driver for the shooting. We don’t know where he is, but we know where his family is, so we should be able to find him. Then we might learn something.”
    “When?” she asked.
    “By the weekend, I hope,” Dominic said. “We have to know where this came from, so we can get back to business. And for Paulo, of course.”
     
    THAT WAS ON a Wednesday. She was still not one hundred percent, but she was good enough to run. She’d handled everything she could by phone, she had documents she could get to, she’d moved the money that had to be moved. She would leave on Thursday afternoon.
    She’d already worked it out: She had two doctor’s appointments each week, on Monday and Thursday. The driver always waited in the lobby of the clinic. When she came out of the