Certain prey

I don't know. It sounds weak. I mean, he goes everywhere. Why would they focus on Wichita?'

'They've got all kinds of ways of doing those things – statistics,' Carmel said.

'I'd be willing to bet it's something like that, especially if Davenport didn't know who you were.'

'He didn't. I'm sure of that.'

They went over it several times, and finally Carmel said, 'You know, we're coming to the crunch, here. If Davenport's mining some kind of line of information, it might lead to you, or it might lead to me, or it might not. It's hard to put a case together. I'd say it's about fifty-fifty whether we should sit tight, or move somehow.'

'What move?'

'One possibility is, we could go talk to the kid, and the kid's mother. We could find out what they told the cops. Then we'd know about that angle.'

'What if it's a trap?'

'I don't think it is. I don't think any cop would put a kid in play, not when you're talking about professional killers,' Carmel said. 'If any cop would, it'd be Davenport – but I don't think even he would.'

'And you're saying that after we talk to them, we kill them? The kid and her mom?'

Carmel shrugged: 'If we have to.'

'We'd have to find some other way to do it. I'm not going to kill the kid – I've been thinking about it,' Rinker said. For the first time since they started meeting face-to-face, Carmel picked up the warning edge in Rinker's voice that she'd heard when they talked on the phone, when the problems began developing.

'Okay. But if you really think you're the finger of God… what's the problem?'

'I'm just not gonna kill that kid. Fuck the finger,' Rinker said.

'So we find a way not to kill them – not unless we absolutely have to,' Carmel said. 'You didn't kill that Marker woman in Washington. We should be able to figure something out.'

'You said going after the kid was one possibility. What's the other?'

'We could do something that would make it impossible for them to prosecute us, even if they figured out who we are,' Carmel said.

'How would we do that?' Rinker asked.

'I've been thinking about it, ever since you called,' Carmel said. 'I call it

Plan B.'

Plan B took a while to explain; Rinker was not so much appalled as amazed.

Lucas got back to Minneapolis late the next afternoon, dropped the BMW at the

Porsche dealership, sank into his own car with a sigh of relief, and headed downtown. He'd told Sherrill and Black when to expect him, and they were waiting in the Homicide office.

'Not so good?' Sherrill asked.

Lucas shook his head: 'He's not the guy. He's a small-time dope dealer.'

'But they still think he's the guy?'

'Mallard still thinks there's a chance. He's got a smart assistant named Malone, and Malone was ready to go back to Washington and start over,' Lucas said.

'Goddamnit,' Black said. 'Did you hear about the sniper?'

Lucas shook his head: 'What sniper?'

'Car got hit by rifle fire last night during rush hour. One car, one windshield, nobody hurt. Couldn't find a shooter, and we thought maybe it was an accident.

Then this afternoon, right at the start of the rush hour, a little after three, the guy came back. Two cars hit, a woman hit in the neck, she's in surgery. Some guy coming down the road behind her stuffed a wad of newspaper in the hole in her neck, probably saved her life. But the media's going batshit – the radio stations, all the drive-time guys. I mean, this is their audience being shot at…'

'So everybody's out?'

'Well, you know Sloan's working the Hmong thing and Swanson is still chasing down stuff on the Parker case; so people are making noises like taking us off

Allen. They say just a few days, but you know what that might mean

…'

'I'll talk to Rose Marie,' Lucas said. 'But the question is, what've we got to do? What's left that we haven't done?'

They all looked at each other, and finally, Sherrill shrugged. 'We were waiting for you to tell us.'

Lucas said, 'What're you doing tonight?'

'Nothing,' Sherrill said.

'Why don't you hang around and see if Carmel's going anywhere?' Lucas suggested.

'If we're gonna start tailing her, we're gonna need more than two guys,' Black said. 'They're gonna be hard to come by. Given the sniper and all that.'

'So we don't have a fulltime tail – just somebody hanging around. Maybe we get lucky.'

'Ah, Christ,' Sherrill said. 'I'll do it, but I have a feeling I'm gonna be pulling my weenie.'

Rinker brought a wig with her: she'd have big hair, Texas hair, when she went in. She'd wear jeans, gym shoes, rubber kitchen gloves, two pistols under a black sport jacket, a handkerchief and a nylon rolled up tight as a watch cap.

Carmel would be wearing a slinky bloody-red dress with spangles, matching red shoes and lipstick. 'How do I look?' she asked.

'You look terrific,' Rinker said, admiration riding in her voice. 'God, if I could look like that…'

'You're beautiful,' Carmel said.

'No, I'm not,' Rinker said. 'I'm cute. I look like I should be in the Playboy college issue, Duke University's Miss Perky Nipples.'

'Does Miss Perky Nipples carry. 22 Colt Woods-mans… would it be Woodsmans, or Woodsmen?'

'No, she probably wouldn't. I don't know the correct grammar, but I got two of them, and they were stolen fourteen years ago from a gunstore in Butte, Montana, and haven't seen the light of day since. I'm cool,'

Carmel nodded, 'You are cool.' She took a last look at herself in a full-length mirror, twirled and said, 'When I get that boy home tonight, I am going to fuck him rudely. Rudely.'

'Good luck,' Rinker said. 'I sorta wish I was… involved with somebody. It's been a while.'

'Is it hard to meet guys in Wichita?' Carmel asked, screwing on an earring clasp.

'It's hard for me,' Rinker said. 'You know, a gal who runs a bar? What kind of guys am I going to attract?' She answered her own question: 'Most of them have got a bottle of Jim Beam in the trunk…'

'Too bad you couldn't hook up with Davenport,' Carmel said, jokingly.

'He'd be a possibility,' Rinker admitted. 'He could be fun, in a big-galoot way.'

'Mean big-galoot,' said Carmel.

'I could see that,' Rinker said. 'I could feel it.' After a second, 'But he sorta… handles you. Moves you around. Touches you. Not feeling you up, or anything, but he's just… I don't know. All over the place.'

'If he sees you here, we're fucked,' Carmel said.

'Unlike when I saw him in Wichita,' Rinker said. Then: 'I thought about coming on to him a little, but that would've been… too much. Anyway, I don't expect to see him again the rest of my life.'

She picked up the first of the pistols, jacked a shell into the chamber, set the safety and slipped it into her gun girdle, under the jacket. Rinker looked at

Carmel. 'You ready?'

Chapter Eighteen

Black canceled a date and climbed into the back of Sherrill's Mazda with a pepperoni pizza and a bag of hot nacho cheese crackers.

Sherrill said, 'You're a cruel fuck. If I ate any of that stuff, it'd go right straight to my thighs.'

'So don't eat it. Concentrate on other things. Flowers. Small children,' Black said.

'I'm having a hard time concentrating. With my future husband on his way up to. ..'

'… slip a little English bacon to Carmel Loan.'

'You're so crude. And whatever he's got in there, I doubt that it resembles bacon.'

'You mean, in stripes, or in flatness?'

She giggled: 'God, I love talking dirty with you. It's so jock-like, so…'

She couldn't think of a word; through the plate glass doors of Carmel Loan's building, they could see Hale Allen's back as he signed into the building. Then a short redhead came around the corner from the elevators, into the lobby, and