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 The Prey Series Certain Prey The Kidd Series Other Novels Etcetera | Certain Prey The Prey series contains strong language and scenes
of graphic violence and sex, and it may thus be inappropriate or offensive to
some readers. The excerpt below is the complete first chapter of
Certain Prey, and it has not been censored in any way. If you are
offended by this sort of material, or will get in trouble for reading it (e.g.
if your parents think it would be inappropriate for you), do not
continue. Thank you. Clara Rinker. Of the three unluckiest days in Barbara Allen's life, the
first was the day Clara Rinker was raped behind a St. Louis nudie bar called
Zanadu, which was located west of the city in a dusty checkerboard of truck
terminals, warehouses and light assembly plants. Zanadu, as its chrome-yellow
I-70 billboard proclaimed, was E-Z On, E-Z Off. The same was not true of Clara
Rinker, despite what Zanadu's customers thought. Rinker was sixteen when she was raped, a small athletic girl,
a dancer, an Ozarks runaway. She had bottle-blond hair that showed darker
roots, and a body that looked wonderful in v-necked, red-polka-dotted,
thin-cotton dresses from K-Mart. A body that drew the attention of cowboys,
truckers, and other men who dreamt of Nashville. Rinker had taken up nude dancing because she could. It was
that, fuck for money, or go hungry. The rape took place at two o'clock in the
morning on an otherwise delightful April night, the kind of night that
midwestern kids are allowed to stay out late and play war, when cicadas hum
down from their elm-bark hideaways. Rinker had closed the bar that night; she
was the last dancer up. Four men were still drinking when she finished. Three were
hound-faced long-distance truckers who had nowhere to go but the short beds in
their various Kenworths, Freightliners and Peterbilts; and a Norwegian
exotic-animal dealer drowning the sorrows of a recent mishap involving a box of
boa constrictors and thirty-six thousand dollars worth of illegal tropical
birds. A fifth man, a slope-shouldered gorilla named Dale-Something,
had walked out of the bar halfway through Rinker's last grind. He left behind
twelve dollars in crumpled ones and two small sweat rings where his forearms
had been propped on the bar. Rinker had worked down the bar-top, stopping for
ten seconds in front of each man, for what the girls called a crack shot.
Dale-Something had gotten the first shot, and he stood up and walked out as
soon as she moved to the next guy. When she was done, Rinker hopped off the end
of the bar and headed for the back to get into her street clothes. A few minutes later, the bartender, a University of Missouri
wrestler named Rick, knocked on the dressing room door and said, "Clara? Will
you close up the back?" "I'll get it," she said, pulling a fuzzy pink tube-top over
her head, shaking her ass to get it down. Rick respected the dancers' privacy,
which they appreciated; it was purely a psychological thing, since he worked
behind the bar, and spent half his night looking up their... Anyway, he respected their privacy. When she was dressed, Rinker killed the lights in dressing
room, walked down to the ladies room, checked to make sure it was empty, which
it always was, and then did the same for the men's room, which was also empty,
except for the ineradicable odor of beer-flavored urine. At the back door, she
snapped out the hall lights, released the bolt on the lock, and stepped outside
into the soft evening air. She pulled the door shut, heard the bolt snap,
rattled the door handle to make sure that it was locked, and headed for her
car. A rusted-out Dodge pickup crouched on the lot, two thirds of
the way down to her car. A battered aluminum camper slumped on the back, with
curtains tangled in the windows. Every once in a while, somebody would drink
too much and would wind up sleeping in his car behind the place; so the truck
was not exactly unprecedented. Still, Rinker got a bad vibe from it. She almost
walked back around the building to see if she could catch Rick before he went
out the front. Almost. But that was too far and she was probably being silly
and Rick was probably in a hurry and the truck was dark, nothing
moving... Dale-Something was sitting on the far side of it, hunkered
down in the pea gravel, his back against the driver's-side door. He'd been
waiting for twenty minutes with decreasing patience, chewing breath mints,
thinking about her. Somewhere, in the deep recesses of his mind, breath mints
were a concession to gentility, as regarded women. He chewed them as a favor to
her... When he heard the back door closing, he levered his butt off
the ground, peeked through a car window, saw her coming, alone. He waited,
crouched behind the car: he was a big guy, much of his bigness in fat, but he
took pride in his size anyway. And he was quick: Rinker never had a chance. When she stepped around the truck, keys rattling in her hand,
he came out of the dark and hit her like an NFL tackle. The impact knocked her
breath out; she lay beneath him, gasping, the gravel cutting her bare
shoulders. He flipped her over, twisting her arms, clamping her both of her
skinny wrists in one hand and the back of her neck in the other. And he said, his minty breath next to her ear, "You fuckin'
scream and I'll break your fuckin' neck." She didn't fuckin' scream because something like this had
happened before, with her step-father. She had screamed and he almost
had broken her fuckin' neck. Instead of screaming, Rinker struggled
violently, thrashing, spitting, kicking, swinging, twisting, trying to get
loose. But Dale-Something's hand was like a vise on her neck, and he dragged
her to the camper, pulled open the door, pushed her inside, ripped her pants
off and did what he was going to do in the flickering yellow illumination of
the dome light. When he was done, he threw her out the back of the truck, spit
on her, said, "Fuckin' bitch, you tell anybody about this, and I'll fuckin'
kill ya." That was most of what she remembered about it later: lying naked on
the gravel, and getting spit on; that, and all the wiry hair on Dale's fat
wobbling butt. Rinker didn't call the cops, because that would have been the
end of her job. And knowing cops, they probably would have sent her home to her
step-dad. So she told Zanadu's owners about the rape. The brothers Ernie and
Ron Battaglia were concerned about both Rinker and their bar license. A nudie
joint didn't need sex crimes in the parking lot. "Jeez," Ron said, when Rinker told him about the rape. "That's
terrible, Clara. You hurt? You oughta get yourself looked at, you know?" Ernie took a roll of bills from his pocket, peeled off two
hundreds, thought about it for a couple of seconds, peeled off a third and
tucked the three hundred dollars into her back-up tube top: "Get yourself
looked at, kid." She nodded and said, "You know, I don't wanna go to the cops.
But this asshole should pay for what he did." "We'll take care of it," Ernie offered. "Let me take care of it," Rinker said. Ron put up an eyebrow. "What do you want to do?" "Just get him down the basement for me. He said something
about being a roofer, once; he works with his hands. I'll get a goddamn
baseball bat and bust one of his arms." Ron looked at Ernie who looked at Rinker and said, "That
sounds about right. Next time he comes in, huh?" They didn't do it the next time he came in, which was a week
later, looking nervous and shifty-eyed, like he might not be welcomed. Rinker
refused to work with Dale-Something at the bar, and when she cornered Ernie in
the kitchen, he told her that Goddamnit, they were right in the middle of tax
season and neither he nor Ron had the emotional energy for a major
confrontation. Rinker kept working on them, and the second time
Dale-Something showed up, which was two days after Tax Day, the brothers were
feeling nasty. They fed him drinks and complimentary peanuts and kept him
talking until after closing. Rick the bartender hustled the second-to-the-last
guy out, and left himself, not looking back; he knew something was up. Then Ron came around the bar, and Ernie got Dale-Something
looking the other way, and Ron nailed him with a wild, out-of-the-blue
round-house right that knocked Dale off the barstool. Ron landed on him, rolled
him, and Ernie raced around the bar and threw on a pro-wrestling death lock.
Together, they dragged a barely resisting Dale-Something down the basement
stairs. The brothers had him on his feet and fully conscious by the
time Rinker came down, carrying her aluminum baseball bat; or rather, t-ball
bat, which had a better swing-weight for a small woman. "I'm gonna sue you fuckers for every fuckin' dime you got,"
Dale-Something said, sputtering blood through his split lip. "My fuckin' lawyer
is doin' the money-dance right now, you fucks..." "Fuck you, you ain't doing shit," Ron said. "You raped this
little girl." "What do you want, Clara?" Ernie asked. He was standing behind
Dale with his arms under Dale's armpits, his hands locked behind Dale's neck.
"You wanna arm or a leg?" Rinker was standing directly in front of Dale-Something, who
glowered at her: "I'm gonna..." he started. Rinker interrupted: "Fuck a buncha legs," she said. She
whipped the bat up, and then straight back down on the crown of
Dale-Something's head. The impact sounded like a fat man stepping on an English
walnut. Ernie, startled, lost his death grip and Dale-Something slipped to the
floor like a two-hundred pound blob of Jello. "Holy shit," Ron said, and crossed himself. Ernie prodded Dale-Something with the toe of his desert boot,
and Dale blew a bubble of blood. "He ain't dead," Ernie said. Rinker's bat came up, and she hit Dale again, this time in the
mastoid process behind the left ear. She hit him hard; her step-dad used to
make her chop wood for the furnace, and her swing had some weight and snap
behind it. "That ought to do it," she said. Ernie nodded and said "Yup." Then they all looked at each
other in the light of the single bare-bulb, and Ron said to Rinker, "Some heavy
shit, Clara. How do you feel about this?" Clara looked at Dale-Something's body, the little ring of
black blood around his fat lips, and said, "He was a piece of garbage." "You don't feel nothin'?" Ernie asked. "Nothin'." her lips were set in a thin, grim line. After a minute Ron looked up the narrow wooden stairs and
said, "Gonna be a load 'n half getting his ass outa the basement." "You got that right," Ernie said, adding, philosophically, "I
coulda told him there ain't no free pussy." Dale-Something went into the Mississippi and his truck was
parked across the river in Granite City, from which spot it disappeared in two
days. Nobody ever asked about Dale, and Rinker went back to dancing. A few
weeks later, Ernie asked her to sit with an older guy who came in for a beer.
Rinker cocked her head and Ernie said, "No, it's okay. You don't have to do
nothin'." So she got a longneck Bud and went to sit with the guy, who
said he was Ernie's aunt's husband's brother. He knew about Dale-Something.
"You feeling bad about it yet?" "Nope. I'm a little pissed that Ernie told you about it,
though," Rinker said, taking a hit on the Budweiser. The older man smiled. He had very strong, white teeth to go
with his black eyes and almost-feminine long lashes. Rinker had the sudden
feeling that he might show a girl a pretty good time, although he must be over
forty. "You ever shoot a gun?" he asked. That's how Rinker became a hit lady. She wasn't spectacular,
like the Jackal or one of those movie killers. She just took care of business,
quietly and efficiently, using a variety of silenced pistols, mostly .22s.
Careful, close-range killings became a trade-mark. Rinker had never thought of herself as stupid, just as someone
who hadn't yet had her chance. When the money from the killings started coming
in, she knew that she didn't know how to handle it. So she went to the
Intercontinental College of Business in the mornings, and took courses in
bookkeeping and small business. When she was twenty, getting a little old for
dancing nude, she got a job with the Mafia guy, working in a liquor warehouse.
And when she was twenty-four, and knew a bit about the business, she bought a
bar of her own in downtown Wichita, Kansas, and renamed it the Rink. The bar did well. Still, a few times a year, Rinker'd go out of
town with a gun and come back with a bundle of money. Some she spent, but most
she hid, under a variety of names, in a variety of places. One thing her
step-dad had taught her well: sooner or later, however comfortable you might be
at the moment, you were gonna have to run. Carmel Loan. Carmel was long, sleek, and expensive, like a new Jaguar. She had a small head, with a tidy nose, thin pale lips, a
square chin and small pointed tongue. She was a Swede, way back, and blond
– one of the whippet Swedes with small breasts, narrow hips, and a long
waist in between. She had the eyes of a bird of prey, a raptor. Carmel was a
defense attorney in Minneapolis, one of the top two or three. Most years, she
made comfortably more than a million dollars. Carmel lived in a fabulously cool high-rise apartment in
downtown Minneapolis, all blond-wood floors and white walls with
black-and-white photos by Ansel Adams and Diane Arbus and Minor White, but
nobody as gauche and come-lately as Robert Mapplethorpe. Amid all the
black-and-white, there were perfect touches of bloody-murder-red in the
furniture and carpets and even her car, a Jaguar XK8 with a custom
bloody-murder-red paint job. On the second of the three unluckiest days in Barbara Allen's
life, Carmel Loan decided that she was truly, genuinely and forever in love
with Hale Allen, Barbara Allen's husband. Hale Allen, a property and real estate attorney, was the
definitive heart-throb. He had near-black hair that fell naturally over his
forehead in little ringlets, warm brown eyes, a square chin with a little
dimple, wide shoulders, big hands and narrow hips. He was a perfect size
forty-two, a little over six-feet tall, with one slightly chipped front tooth.
The knot of his tie was always askew, and women were always fixing it. Putting
their hands on him. He had an easy jock-way with the women, chatting them up,
playing with them. Hale Allen liked women; and not just for sex. He liked to talk
with them, shop with them, drink with them, jog with them – all without
losing some essential lupine manliness. He had given Carmel reason to believe
that he found her not unattractive. Whenever Carmel saw him, something
deep inside her got plucked. Despite his looks and easy manner with women, Hale Allen was
not the sharpest knife in the dishwasher. He was content with boiler-plate law,
the arranging of routine contracts, and made nowhere near as much money as
Carmel. That made little difference to a woman who'd found true love. Stupidity
could be overlooked, Carmel thought, if a woman felt a genuine physical passion
for a man. Besides, Hale would look very good standing next to the stone
fireplace at her annual Christmas party, a scotch in hand, and perhaps a
cheerful bloody-murder-red bowtie; she'd do the talking. Unfortunately, Hale appeared to be permanently tied to his
wife, Barbara. By her money, Carmel thought. Barbara had a lot of it, through
her family. And though Hale's cerebral filament might not burn as brightly as
others, he knew fifty million bucks when he saw them. He knew where that
sixteen-hundred-dollar black cashmere Georgio Armani sportcoat came
from... Allen's tie to his wife – or to her money, anyway –
left few acceptable options for a woman of Carmel's qualities. She wouldn't hang around and yearn, or get weepy and
depressed, or drunk enough to throw herself at him. She'd do something. Like kill the wife. Five years earlier, Carmel had gone to court and had shredded
the evidentiary procedures followed by a young St. Paul cop after a routine
traffic stop turned into a major drug bust. Her client, Rolando (Rolo) D'Aquila, had walked on the drug
charge, though the cops had taken ten kilos of cocaine from under the spare
tire of his coffee-brown Continental. The cops wound up keeping the car under
the forfeiture law, but Rolo didn't care about that. What he cared about what
that he'd done exactly five hours in jail, which was the time it took for
Carmel to organize the one-point-three million dollars in bail money. And later, when they walked away from the courthouse after the
acquittal, Rolo told her that if she ever needed a really serious favor –
really serious – to come see him. Because of previous
conversations, they both knew what he was talking about. "I owe you," he said.
She didn't say no, because she never said no. She said, "See ya." On a warm, rainy day in late May, Carmel drove her second car
– an anonymous blue-black Volvo station wagon registered in her mother's
second-marriage name – to a ramshackle house in St. Paul's Frogtown, eased
to the curb, and looked out the passenger side window. The wooden-frame house was slowly settling into its overgrown
lawn. Rain water seeped over the edges of its leaf-clogged gutters, and peeling
green paint showed patches of the previous color, a chalky blue. None of the
windows or doors was quite level with the world, square with the house, or
aligned with each other. Most of the windows showed glass; a few had black
screens. Carmel got a small travel umbrella from the back seat, pushed
the car door open with her feet, popped the umbrella and hurried up the
sidewalk to the house. The inner door was open: she knocked twice on the screen
door, which rattled in its frame, and she heard Rolo from the back: "Come on
in, Carmel. I'm in the kitchen." The interior of the house was a match for the exterior. The
carpets were twenty years old, with paths worn through the thin pile. The walls
were a dingy yellow, the furniture a crappy collection of plastic-veneered
plywood, chipped along the edges of the tabletops and down the legs. There were
no pictures on the walls, no decoration of any kind. Nailheads poked from
picture-hanging spots, where previous tenants had tried a little harder.
Everything smelled like nicotine and tar. The kitchen was improbably bright. There were no shades or
curtains on the two windows that flanked the kitchen table, and only two
chairs, one tucked tight to the table, another pulled out. Rolo, looking
smaller than he had five years ago, was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt that
said, enigmatically, Jesus. He had both hands in the kitchen
sink. "Just cleaning up for the occasion," he said. He wasn't embarrassed at being caught at house-cleaning, and a
thought flicked through Carmel's lawyer-head: he should be
embarrassed. "Sit down," he said, nodding at the pulled-out chair. "I got
some coffee going." "I'm sort of in a rush," she started. "You don't have time for coffee with Rolando?" He was flicking
water off his hands, and he ripped a paper towel off a roll that sat on the
kitchen counter, wiped his hands dry, and tossed the balled-up towel toward a
waste basket in the corner. It hit the wall and ricocheted into the basket.
"Two," he said. She glanced at her watch, and reversed herself on the coffee.
"Sure, I've got a few minutes." "I've come a long way down, huh?" She glanced once around the kitchen, shrugged and said,
"You'll be back." "I don't know," he said. "I got my nose pretty deep in the
shit." "So take a program." "Yeah, a program," he said, and laughed. "Twelve steps to
Jesus." Then, apologetically, "I only got caffeinated." "Only kind I drink," she said. And then, "So you made the
call." Not a question. Rolo was pouring coffee into two yellow ceramic mugs, the kind
Carmel associated with lake resorts in the north woods. "Yes. And she's still
working, and she'll take the job." "She? It's a woman?" "Yeah. I was surprised myself. I never asked, you know, I only
knew who to call. But when I asked, my friend said, ‘She.'" "She's gotta be good," Carmel said. "She's good. She has a reputation. Never misses. Very
efficient, very fast. Always from very close range, so there's no mistake."
Rolo put a mug of coffee in front of her, and she turned it with her
fingertips, and picked it up. "That's what I need," she said, and took a sip. Good coffee,
very hot. "You're sure about this?" Rolo said. He leaned back against
the kitchen counter, and gestured with his coffee mug. "Once I tell them ‘Yes,'
it'll be hard to stop. This woman, the way she moves, nobody knows where she
is, or what name she's using. If you say, ‘Yes,' she kills Barbara Allen." Carmel frowned at the sound of Barbara Allen's name. She
hadn't really thought of the process as murder. She had considered it
more abstractly, as the solution to an otherwise intractable problem. Of
course, she had known it would be murder, she just hadn't contemplated
the fact. "I'm sure," she said. "You've got the money?" "At the house. I brought your ten." She put the mug down, dug in her purse, pulled out a thin deck
of currency and laid it on the table. Rolo picked it up, riffled it expertly
with a thumb. "I'll tell you this," he said. "When they come and ask for it,
pay every penny. Every penny. Don't argue, just pay. If you don't,
they won't try to collect. They'll make an example out of you." "I know how it works," Carmel said, with an edge of
impatience. "They'll get it. And nobody'll be able to trace it, because I've
had it stashed. It's absolutely clean." Rolo shrugged: "Then if you say ‘Yes,' I'll call them tonight.
And they'll kill Barbara Allen." This time, she didn't flinch when Rolo spoke the name. Carmel
stood up: "Yes," she said. "Do it." Rinker came to town three weeks later. She had driven her own
car from Wichita, then rented two different-colored, different-make cars from
Hertz and Avis, under two different names, using authentic Missouri drivers'
licenses and perfectly good, paid-up credit cards. She stalked Barbara Allen for a week, and finally decided to
kill her on the interior steps of a downtown parking garage. In the week that
Rinker trailed her, Allen had used the garage four times, and all four times
had used the stairs to get the skyway level. Once in the skyway, she'd gone
straight to an office with the name "Star of the North Charities" on the door.
When Rinker knew that Allen was not at Star of the North, she'd called
and asked for her. "I'm sorry, she's not here..." "Do you expect her?" "She's usually here for an hour or two in the morning, just
before lunch..." "Thanks, I'll try again tomorrow." Barbara Allen. On the last of the three unluckiest days of her life, she got
out of bed, showered, and ate a light breakfast of Raisin Bran and strawberries
– with Hale for a husband, it paid to watch her figure. As the housekeeper
cleared away the breakfast dishes, Allen turned on the television to check the
Dow Jones opening numbers, sat at her desk and reviewed proposed charitable
allocations from the North Star Charities trust, then, at nine-thirty, gathered
her papers, pushed them into a tan Coach briefcase, and headed downtown. Rinker, in a red Jeep Cherokee, followed her until she was
sure that Allen was heading downtown, then passed her and hurried ahead. Allen
was a slow, careful driver, but traffic and traffic lights were unpredictable,
and Rinker wanted to be at least five minutes ahead of her by the time they got
downtown. Rinker had picked out another parking garage, also on the
skyway system, a little less than a two-minute fast walk from the killing
ground. She wheeled into the garage, parked, walked to her own car, which she'd
parked in the garage earlier that morning, and climbed into the back seat. She
glanced up and down the ramp, saw one man leaving, heading toward the doors.
She reached down, grabbed the carpeting behind the passenger seat, and popped
open a shallow steel box, which held two Remington .22 semi-automatic pistols,
silencers already attached, on a bed of Styrofoam peanuts. Rinker was wearing a loose shift, with a homemade elastic
girdle beneath it. She pushed the .22s into the wide pockets of the shift,
through another slit cut through the insides of the pockets, and into the
girdle. The .22s were held tight against her body, but she could get them out
in a half-second. With the guns tucked away, Rinker hopped out of the car and
headed for the skyway. Barbara Allen, a sturdy, German blonde with short, expensively
cut hair, a dab of lipstick, a crisp white cotton blouse, a navy skirt and
matching navy low-heels, went into the stairwell of the Sixth Street Parking
Garage at 9:58 a.m. Halfway down, she met a small woman coming up, a redhead.
As she passed her, looking down, the other woman smiled, and Allen, who knew
about such things, looked at the top of her head and thought,
Wig. That was the last thing she thought on the unluckiest day of
her life. Rinker, climbing the stairs, had mistimed it. She knew the
lower ramp was clear, and wanted to take Allen low. But Allen came down the
narrow steps slowly, and Rinker, now in plain sight, didn't feel she should
stop and wait for her. So she continued climbing. Allen smiled and nodded at
her as they passed, and as they passed, Rinker pulled the right-hand .22,
pivoted, and fired it into the back of Allen's head from a range of two inches.
Allen's hair puffed out, as though somebody had blown on it, and she started to
fall... The silencers were good. The loudest noise in the stairwell
was the cycling of the pistol's action. Rinker got off a second shot before
Allen fell too far; then stepped down to the sprawled body and fired five more
shots into Allen's temple. As she stepped away from the body, ready to head down the
stairs, a cop came through the door in the stairwell above them. He was in
uniform, a heavy guy carrying a manila folder. Rinker had thought about this possibility, a surprise from a
cop, though she'd never experienced anything like it. Still, she'd rehearsed it
in her mind. "Hey," the cop said. He put up a hand, and Rinker shot
him. |
13 April 2008  The Prey series, the Kidd series, The
Night Crew, Dead Watch, Dark of the Moon, The Eye and the
Heart: The Watercolors of John Stuart Ingle, and Plastic Surgery: The
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