Silken Prey

through one of the casinos. Just get the fuckin’ money, girlie, and get it to me.”
    It was the
girlie
that did it.
    She turned to Dannon, now with an icy grip on herself, and said, “We’ll get the money somehow. Get him out of here.”
    •   •   •
    T HEY GOT HIM OUT of there, with the promise of the money inside a week. When he was gone, Taryn had turned to the two security men and said, “This won’t work.”
    Carver drawled, “No shit, Ms. Grant. He’ll be back in your face like a rat. Even if you lose, he’ll be back. If you win, it’ll be five million, ten million, he’ll be coming back forever. There’s not enough money to fill that black hole.”
    Dannon said, “But if he talks . . . if he tries to turn us in, he’ll implicate himself. He’ll be right there in prison with us.”
    Taryn shook her head. “No. I’ll tell you how this would go down. We refuse to pay, he goes to Smalls and says, ‘I can get you your Senate seat back. I want a million dollars and immunity, or I never say a thing.’ So Smalls takes it: he’s got the cash, he could fix things with the prosecutors. Tubbs gets the money up front, then he confesses, points the finger, cries for the TV cameras. He does the right thing, says his conscience couldn’t handle it. And we’re done. The prosecutors won’t care about Tubbs—he’s small change. We’re the ones they’d come for.”
    They all chewed on that for a while, then Dannon looked at Carver and said, “What do you think?”
    Carver said, “You
know
what I think, Doug. He isn’t going away, so I think we make him go away. If we’re careful, we can pull it off—but I’d like a little appreciation for doing it.”
    Taryn looked at him: “How much appreciation?”
    Carver shrugged and said, “Whatever you think.”
    She touched her lip, half turned away, considering: even rich people hate to give away money. Then she turned back and said, “A hundred thousand each. All cash. As soon as it’s done.”
    Carver said, “Hooah!”
    Dannon was less enthusiastic: “We’ll need to do some recon. We’ll need to fix it so that we’ve got alibis.”
    “You know about those things,” Taryn said. “I’m out of it. If you get caught, I’ll say I had no idea.”
    The two men nodded. Dannon said, “If we get caught, there’s no reason to drag you into it. You could help us more from the outside, than if you were inside with us.”
    “I hope that’s clear,” she said, looking at Carver.
    He said, “Clear.”
    “Then kill him,” she said.
    •   •   •
    D ANNON AND C ARVER HAD buried Tubbs north of the Cities, in a marsh along the Mississippi. Taryn had helped: they’d put Tubbs’s body in the back of Carver’s SUV, and drove to the town house complex where both men were living. They parked in back, and Carver called Dannon, and then Dannon called Taryn, and a few minutes later, Taryn called Dannon back. They then went on to bury the body, while Taryn drove to their apartments and sent e-mails to herself and to a friend of Carver’s, from their laptops in their respective apartments. All of that could be time-checked, if it ever came to that.
    Then . . . nothing much had happened until the St. Paul papers reported that the police were looking for Tubbs, and feared foul play. And now the report that a new investigator was on the job.
    When Dannon broke that news—that the new guy, Davenport, was a killer—she said, “Ah, God,” and “Let’s talk later. I need to go for a swim, and Alice’ll be here in a minute. Let’s talk tonight.”
    “I’m not sure we should talk later,” Dannon said. “I think we ought to
stop
talking about it and focus on our ignorance. We don’t know what happened with the porn, we don’t know what happened with Tubbs, we don’t know anything. If you can convince yourself of that, that you don’t know anything . . . it’ll be much easier to sell it to the cops.”
    “Focus on our ignorance.” She didn’t quite grasp the concept. She’d never been ignorant.
    “Yeah. Just rewind back before we talked to Tubbs and think what your head was like,” Dannon said. “Then think about the newspaper stories and think about your reaction to them. What you would have thought about them, if you didn’t know what really happened. Then, when the cops come, if they come, you’re confused about it all. A little scared. You ask questions, you suggest answers, you’re all over the place. But