Stairs led away to the right, and a high-tech Schwinn bicycle was chained to the banister. 'Not like my old Schwinn,' Rinker muttered.
Down the hall, on the left wall, was a pale yellow door. Another door, this one a pale Paris green, was at the end of the hall. The first door had a large metal
B on it; the Paris-green door had an A. Rinker put her hand in her pocket, where the gun was, and Carmel stepped forward and knocked on the door.
The knock was answered by deep silence; Carmel knocked again, louder. This time, there was an answering thump, like somebody getting up, off a couch or a bed. A moment later, the door opened a crack, and a sleepy Latino man peered out through the crack and said, 'What?'
'We need to talk to Ms. Blanca,' Carmel said quietly.
'She's sleeping,' he said, and the crack narrowed.
'We've got some money for her,' Carmel said quickly. The crack stopped narrowing, and the man's eyes were back at the crack. He didn't argue. He simply said, 'I'll take it.'
'No. Rolo said we were only to give it to Ms. Blanca, if anything happened to him.'
'Oh.' He thought it over for a minute, as if this somehow made sense; and
Carmel's heart did a quick extra beat. 'What happened to Rolo?'
'Quite a bit of money,' Carmel said. She wanted to sound nervous, and she did.
'Just a minute,' the Latino man said. The door closed and they heard him call,
'Hey, Marta.'
'Marta Blanca,' Rinker muttered. 'She bakes right.'
'What?' Carmel looked at Rinker as though Rinker were slipping away.
'Better biscuits, cakes and pies with Marta Blanca…'
Carmel shook her head, bewildered, then the man was back, and the door opened.
He looked them over for a second, made a judgment, and said, 'Yeah. Come in.'
Carmel led the way into the apartment, which seemed to be decorated in brown; one lamp with a nicotine-yellow shade was turned on, the shade at a tipsy angle over a stack of Hustler magazines. The odor of marijuana hung around the curtains.
'How much money?' the man asked.
'We need to ask…' Carmel started, but then a woman came through the kitchen, apparently from a bedroom in the back. She was tucking her blouse into the back of her jeans. 'Are you Marta?'
'Yeah.' The woman still looked sleepy. 'What happened to Rolando?'
'He's dead,' Carmel said flatly. 'Somebody shot him.'
The woman stopped in her tracks, the blood draining from her face: 'Dead? He can't be dead. I just talked to him yesterday.'
'The cops found him this morning,' Rinker said, stepping out of Carmel's shadow.
'Was he a good friend?'
'He was he was he was…' she said, shakily.
'Her brother,' the man finished. Rinker flicked a look at Carmel, who nodded almost imperceptibly. Her hand moved in her pocket.
'Half-brother,' the woman said. She dropped on a chair. 'Ah, Jesus,' she said.
'It was on TV,' Rinker said.
'He said he gave you a tape to hold, and that if anything happened to him, we were supposed to come and get it, because if you keep it, somebody's gonna show up here and hurt you,' Carmel said, squatting to look the woman straight in the face. 'He gave us an envelope to give you. Money.'
The man said, 'We don't got no tape,' but the woman said, reflexively, 'How much?'
They had the tape, Carmel thought, and she felt a wire, tight in her spine, suddenly relax.
'Five thousand dollars,' Carmel said, speaking to the woman. The woman looked up at the man, who said, 'I dunno.'
Carmel took the envelope out of her pocket. 'If we could get the tape?'
The woman stood up, but the man put a hand out to her. 'I think we should look at the tape first,' he said.
'Rolando said not to,' the woman said, nervously dry-washing her hands.
"We need to get that tape…'
The woman flipped her hands up, explaining to Carmel, 'It's one of those funny little tapes, you need to get a special holder-thing to run it.. .'
'We're gonna look at the tape,' the man said, decisively. 'If you show up here to give us five thousand…' He smiled brightly and said, 'Then, I bet it's worth a lot more.'
'We really need the tape. Rolando wasn't supposed to get it, and the people it belongs to, you really don't want to mess with,' Rinker said. Her voice was flat, and sounded dangerous to Carmel's ear. The vibration apparently went past the Latino.
He sneered at her. 'What, the fuckin' Mafia? Or the Colombianos? Fuck those people.' He turned to the woman. 'We look at the tape.' And back to Carmel and
Rinker, hitching up his pants. 'You bitches can leave the envelope here. If it's enough, we'll give you the tape. If not, we'll figure out a price.'
'Goddamnit, this isn't necessary,' Carmel said, stepping in front of Rinker. Out at the very edge of her vision she could see Rinker's gun hand sliding out of her pocket.
'Yeah, it's fuckin' necessary,' the Latino man said, his voice rising. 'What I fuckin' say is necessary, that's what's fuckin' necessary, right?' He looked at
Marta. 'Is that right?'
She looked away and Carmel shrugged. 'If you say so.' She took another sideways step, and felt Rinker's arm come up with the gun.
The man stepped back, a little surprised, but still smiling slightly. 'What, that's supposed to scare me?'
That was the last thing he said: Rinker shot him in the center of the forehead, and he dropped in his tracks. The woman, Marta, clapped both hands to her face in disbelief, and before she could scream or make any other sound, Rinker panned the gun barrel across to her face and snapped: 'If you scream, I'll kill you.'
'Give us the tape, you get the money,' Carmel said.
'Oh my god oh my god oh my god…'
'The fuckin' tape,' Rinker snarled. The woman put a hand out toward the muzzle, as though she could fend off bullets, and slowly backed away, still looking down at the man.
The tape was in the kitchen, in a cupboard, inside a Dutch oven. She handed it to Rinker, who handed it to Carmel, who looked at it and nodded. 'You didn't make any copies?'
'No, no, no, no…'The woman was staring fixedly at Rinker now. Then the man in the frontroom groaned and Rinker turned and walked toward him.
'He's alive?' Marta Blanca asked. Rinker said, 'Yeah, it happens. Sometimes the bullet doesn't even make it through the skull bone.' She casually leaned forward, bringing the muzzle to within an inch or two of the man's head, and fired three quick shots into his skull. His feet bounced once, and he laid still.
Marta crossed herself, her eyes now fixed on Rinker. 'You're going to kill me, aren't you?' she said, with the sound of certainty in her voice.
'No, I'm not,' Rinker said. She showed a tiny smile.
Carmel, who had been carrying the second gun, shot Marta Blanca in the back of the head. As she fell, Carmel stepped forward and fired five more times. Then she smiled at
Rinker, her eyes bright with excitement, and said, 'We got the goddamn tape. We got the goddamn tape.'
Rinker put the gun back in her jacket pocket and said, 'Let's get a drink somewhere.'
'Let's check the tape to make sure it's right, erase it, and then get a drink somewhere,' Carmel said.
Going out into the hall, they closed the door behind themselves; they took three steps and suddenly a shaft of light fell across their faces. They both looked right, standing in the hall, and then down. A small girl stood there, looking up at them. Their faces were illuminated by the light from the interior. Then behind the girl, a crabby mommy called, 'Heather! Shut that door!'
Carmel was fumbling at the pistol in her pocket, but then another door opened above them, and a male voice said a few unintelligible words; they both looked up, and the little girl closed the door.