Mortal Prey

“I know you know Honus.”
    “I know Honus.”
    “Honus said that if they find out I’m lying about you, that he’d spend some time with me. He said it in that real queer way, and he touched me on the cheek. I’ve been washing my cheek every five minutes.”
    “But you lied.”
    “Well, I like you, Clara. But I’m really scared now. Between the cops and you and Honus.”
    “I’m sorry about this,” Rinker said. “If I were you, John, I’d go away for a while. It really would be for the best. For you. In six weeks, it’ll all be over.”
    “What if you’re over. Honus Johnson—”
    “Before I leave, I’ll take care of Honus Johnson,” Rinker said. “So: Go away, John.”
    “I got the club, Clara.”
    “Yes, I know. But you can’t add value to the club if you’re dead. Be very calm, make arrangements with your accountant and the bartenders, and then go.”
    “Oh, man…”
    “That’s my last word, John. Good luck to you. Goodbye.” She hung up, and thought, That answers that. The feds had Levy’s name, and that meant they were probably crawling all over him by now. More to think about. And she had to consider Honus Johnson and his toys. Honus once told her that in his work for Ross, he preferred Craftsman tools from Sears, because of the guarantee. It hadn’t made her laugh, because Honus had been serious.
    Then it occurred to her that luck had been with her this time; Sellos had provided a lot of critical information. And then she thought, As long as the cops weren’t monitoring Sellos’s phone. She looked around for a cop car, a finger of fear touching her heart, then peeled out of the BP lot, and didn’t start breathing again until she was back on the interstate.
     
    AT POLLOCK’S , she turned on the television, looking for the local news. When you don’t need it, you can’t find anything else. When you do need it, you can never find it. She spent an hour clicking around the local channels, then clicked over to CNN Headline News and, after a twenty-minute wait, saw a short piece of tape of federal marshals taking Gene into what was either a courthouse or a jail. She saw Malone again, apparently supervising. The tape made her so angry that she jumped off the couch and walked around the house, back and forth, punching at the air, talking to herself, “Fucking hurt him, you fuckin’ hurt him,” imagining what she’d do if they fuckin’ hurt him.
    In the tape, Gene had looked utterly forlorn. He couldn’t take much jail time. He was claustrophobic, along with everything else. If Davenport didn’t get him out of there, she’d have to do something. Move on the FBI? That would kill her.
    Maybe she should simply leave. She thought about that. Her money was well hidden, and she had a place to go, a warm place with beaches—if it weren’t for Gene, she could just give it up, make a call to Ross to warn him off again, let Dichter stand as a warning. She could leave. Now she couldn’t, not until Gene was taken care of.
     
    POLLOCK USUALLY GOT home around three o’clock. When she was going out, Rinker liked to go with Pollock, because then Pollock became part of the disguise. By two o’clock, she’d been thinking about Gene for so long, and had looked at the Post-Dispatch article so many times, that she finally said the hell with it and went back out, looking for another phone. In the morning, she’d gone east, so this time she turned west, out I-64. She eventually stopped at an upscale shopping center called Plaza Frontenac to make the call.
    She called the Post-Dispatch, but it wasn’t easy. The Post-Dispatch operator switched her to the reporter who’d written that morning’s story about Gene, but the reporter wasn’t in, and his voice mail handed her to a woman on the city desk. The woman sent her back to the same reporter before Rinker could object, and the voice mail sent her back to the city desk again. This time, she told the desk woman that “I just need to talk to somebody who covers this Clara Rinker thing. I used to know her.”
    The woman on the other end was unimpressed with the information, and said, in as close to a monotone as anyone could manage, “I could switch you to either Fabian Broeder, who’s our organized-crime reporter, or to Sandy White, the metro columnist.”
    “Well, which one do you think? Who’s the most important?”
    “Sandy’s the best known. He’s working on a Rinker column for tomorrow.”
    “Let me talk to him.”
    She was