Wichita and talked to the assistant manager, a shy cowboy named Art Durrell, and was assured that nothing had burned down, that the customers were happy, that the fat in the deep frier was hot enough, and the refrigerators were cold enough.
'When that asshole from the health department comes back, we want a hundred percent clean bill, Art,' Rinker said. 'You can never tell when those reports'll wind up in the local newspapers.'
'We're the cleanest place in town, Clara, and everybody down at the health department knows it,' Durrell said. 'Stop worrying. Enjoy yourself.'
At two o'clock, a rat-faced man with too-long, stringy black hair, wearing a denim jacket, jeans and cowboy boots – a man who looked the part of a movie drifter – knocked at her door and, when she answered, handed her a package wrapped in brown paper that had been cut from a grocery sack.
'From Jim. The phone's probably good until Sunday,' he said, and left. She opened the bag and took out a Colt Woodsman, a silencer, a sealed box of. 22 shells and one freshly stolen cellular phone. The package had cost her eleven hundred dollars. She screwed a silencer on the barrel of the pistol, loaded the magazine, opened a window and fired a shot through the curtain. The gun made a loud 'whuff' and the action cycled. She stepped over and looked at the curtain, and after a second found the small hole made by the. 22 slug as it passed through. Everything worked.
Louise Marker lived in an apartment complex in Bethesda, an expensive place of three-story yellow-brick buildings arranged around a series of swimming pools set in grassy lawns. If government employees lived there, Rinker thought, they were generals. There were, however, no uniforms in sight. Perhaps a hundred residents, almost all of them young to middle-aged women, lay scattered around the pools in conservative one-piece bathing suits. None of them was Marker.
Marker had never seen Rinker, but Rinker had seen Marker, a couple of times.
She'd made a point of it, for just this occasion. Wandering casually through the people around the pools, Rinker punched Marker's number into her cell phone and a woman answered on the third ring. 'Hello?'
And Rinker said, 'Jean?'
'No… You must have the wrong number.'
'Ah, sorry.'
Getting into Marker's building was not a problem: she timed her step to a couple of women in bathing suits who were headed for a side door. She followed them through the outer door, just far enough back that one of them had time to use her key on the inner door. Rinker had her own keys in her hand, jingling, but caught the door, nodded, said thanks and kept going and the other two women thought nothing of it.
Marker was on two: Rinker took the stairs, did a quick peek at the door to make sure there was nobody in the hallway, then punched Marker's phone number back into the cell phone as she walked down to Marker's door. There was interference, but at least the phone should ring on the other end.
Again, the woman's voice. 'Hello?' A little asperity this time; expecting another wrong number?
Rinker said, 'Could I speak to Mrs. Marker?' And at the same moment, she rang the bell at Marker's door.
Marker said, 'Who is this?'
'This is Mary downstairs at the office… did I hear your doorbell ring?'
'Yeah, just a minute.' Rinker heard her put the phone down. The hall was still empty, and she took the pistol out from her shirt just as the door popped open.
Marker opened her mouth to ask a question and Rinker brought the gun up to her forehead and said, 'Step back.'
Marker, the good Mafia kid, said, 'Oh, no,' and stepped back. Rinker stepped inside, then whispered, 'I am going to speak very softly: I am going to put my gun in my shirt, and we are going for a walk outside. But first, finish your phone call.'
'What?'
'Finish the phone call.'
Marker nodded, mystified, went back to the phone.
'Hello?'
'This is Mary,' Rinker said into the cell phone.
'You left your car keys down here this morning, they're at the main desk.'
'Oh, thanks,' Marker said, shakily. 'Uh, I'll be right down.'
'See you,' Rinker said, and she punched off the phone. Then she pointed her index finger at Marker, crooked it, and stepped back into the hallway. Marker followed like an automaton.
'You're going to kill me,' Marker said, when they were in the hall, the door closed behind them. 'I should scream.'
'If you scream, I'll kill you. Otherwise, I've got good reasons not to. But I've got to ask you some questions.'
'What was that about the telephone?' 'The feds may be listening in.' 'Probably are,' Marker said. Then: 'You're Tennex.' Rinker nodded. "Walk down the hall.'
'I did just like you told me…' Rinker started her rap: 'I don't want to hurt you, because if I do, then they'll know for sure thatTennex is what they're after. Do you understand that? Right now, they don't know for sure.' 'Uh, yes.'
'But I'll kill you if I have to. If I ever have any hint that you talked to them about this visit, that you're looking at photographs, then I'll come back for you. And if I'm caught, the people who run me will worry that other connections would be made, and they'll come looking for both of us. In other words, if you talk to anybody about this visit, you're dead. Do you understand?'
Marker swallowed hard and nodded.
'So who came to see you?' Rinker asked.
Marker told her all of it: starting with the first phone call, the call that seemed uncertain about Tennex – a guy's voice, baritone, educated, cool – to the raid by the FBI.
'Not a cop? The guy who called?'
'High-class cop, maybe.' She told Rinker about the FBI, about Mallard, about going down to the FBI building.
'Was one of the guys named Lucas Davenport?'
'I don't think so, but they didn't introduce everybody. There was one guy who kept wandering away. Big guy, tough guy. Didn't look FBI, he had this really nice suit. Didn't look government. Looked like, you know, a hoodlum.'
Rinker dipped in her pocket and came up with the folded page she'd taken from
BizWiz, a computer magazine that covered Twin Cities business. 'Is this the guy?'
Marker took it, looked at it for a half-second and said, 'That's him. Yeah. He looks better in real life, though.'
'Did you hear his voice? Could he have been the guy who called that first time, the confused call?'
Marker thought about it for a second. 'Yeah, you know, he could have been,' she said slowly. 'Yeah, you know…'
After a few more questions, Rinker said, 'I just want to reiterate: I was very careful coming here, very careful about wire taps and even bugs in your apartment. So nobody knows. If anybody ever knows, you're dead.'
Marker nodded rapidly. 'Okay. Good. That's good.'
'I learned a trick in a previous business of mine, when I was much younger,'
Rinker said. 'And that was, how to forget. You'd just say, "Okay, that never happened. I just dreamed it." And pretty soon, whatever happened becomes like a dream, and you start to forget it.'
'You're forgot,' Marker said fervently. 'Honest to God, you're forgot.'
Before she left town, Rinker stopped at a bank and rented a safe-deposit box.
She paid a year in advance, wiped the gun, and left it in the box. Next time she was through the area in her car, she'd pick it up.
From the airport, Rinker dialed Carmel's magic cell phone, and Carmel answered on the second buzz: 'Yes.'
'You know that guy we saw on TV?' Rinker asked.
'Yes.'
'He was here. For sure.'
'Shit. I wonder how he knew?'