'When do you want me back?'
'Give me an hour. It'd be best if you just sat across the street in the doughnut place, read the papers for while. Then I could find you if I need you…'
'Okay.'
'You guys are getting a deal,' Rinker said. 'And here – you can read this while you're eatin' the doughnuts.' She handed him the deed. 'This place is worth four, if it's worth a dime. You might get four-and-a-half.'
'We're taking a risk,' he grunted. 'Covering for ya.'
'A lot less risk if you keep wiping the place after I'm gone,' Rinker said.
'When the cops show up, if they do, you don't want to have anything to do with me. I left a note for my landlord saying I was having trouble with my ex, so you might say I told you that.'
'It's weak,' Wooden Head said.
'So what? It's what I got, and it's better than nothing. Half the cops'll figure
I'm buried in a cornfield somewhere.' Wooden Head's eyes slid away from hers. He knew about the two guys at the apartment, she thought.
'All right,' he said. 'I'll be back in an hour.'
The bar was a quick rerun of the apartment: she wiped everything, Xeroxed critical papers using plastic disposable gloves, dumped everything she didn't want in plastic garbage bags, and cried for a while. When Wooden Head came back, she was ready to go.
'By the way,' she said, 'Give this note to the Guy. It's private.' She handed him the sealed envelope, picked up her briefcase, took a last look around.
'You going back to the apartment?' he asked.
'Yeah I've gotta wipe that, too,? she said. 'But who knows? Maybe the cops'll never find it.' She looked at her watch: almost ten. The pilot would wait until noon. Plenty of time.
'The money's clean,' Wooden Head said, as his good-bye. 'Enjoy yourself.'
She stopped at that, peered at him: 'You know what I do? For a living?'
'I've got an idea.'
'Then you'll take me seriously when I tell you this: if this money's not clean,
I'll come for you.'
And she was gone.
Wooden Head walked out to the main bar and watched through the windows as Rinker climbed into the beat-up van and drove away. Then he picked up a phone, called a number in Los Angeles, and was tripped through a switchboard to St. Louis.
'Yeah?'
'It's me. She's on her way to the apartment.'
'Okay. You give her the money?'
'Yeah. She says if it's not clean, she'll come for me.'
'Nothing to worry about, in five minutes,' the Guy said.
'It's clean anyway/Wooden Head said. 'By the way, she gave me an envelope to give to you.'
'What's in it?'
'I don't know.' He held it up to a kitchen light. 'It's sealed up, and it says,
Private.'
'Open the fuckin' thing.'
Wooden Head opened it, shook out the message and the two driver's licenses. The names on the licenses meant nothing to him.
'There's a note that says, 'I'll give you this one. Try again, and I'll come visit.' And there are two drivers' licenses. The names are…'
'I know the names, you don't have to say them,' the Guy said. After a long silence, Wooden Head said, 'You still there?'
'Yeah.' More silence. Then, 'Listen, you sure that money was clean?'
Wooden Head nodded at the phone. 'Yeah, it was clean. It came from the political fund.'
'Good thing,' the Guy said. He sounded a little shaky. 'Goddamn good thing.'
Chapter Twenty-One
Rinker hauled the van full of garbage bags to a trash-transfer station, dumped them, wiped the van and left it at the airport. The pilot, looking a little sleepy, was sitting in the charter lounge reading a old copy of Fortune. He spotted her, helped her carry her three oversized suitcases to the plane, and had Rinker back in Des Moines by mid-afternoon.
'Can I give you a ride anywhere?' he asked, when they were on the ground.
'Thanks, that'd be nice. I'm going to a Holiday Inn…'
He made a mild pass at her on the way; she was nice about saying no. He left her at the motel, where she checked out, picked up her car, and found a store that sold wigs.
'My mama is getting chemotherapy and her hair is starting to fall out. I need to get a wig for her,' she told the sole saleswoman. The saleswoman looked sad:
'I'm sorry about your mother,' she said in a kindly way, patting Rinker's arm.
'It would be better if she were here, though, for a fitting.'
'Well, she really can't be,' Rinker said. 'She's almost exactly like me, but her head is a little larger, maybe.
We measured and it's about a quarter-inch bigger round, and also, she's still got a lot of hair, though it's starting to come out. She'd like to get something big enough to fit over what hair she's still got. She hopes she won't lose it all.'
'Does she have a color preference?'
'We talked about that, and she wants her natural color, which is grey,' Rinker said. 'It doesn't have to be a great wig, just to get her back and forth from the house to the hospital. And then if she loses all of it, we can come back and get another one.'
'Let me show you our Autumn Sparkle series…'
Rinker took an Autumn Sparkle, thanked the kindly saleswoman, moved on to a walk-in hair salon, and walked in. An hour later, with her hair in a skull-tight punk cut, and wearing plain-glass tortoise-shell glasses, she climbed back in her car and headed up I-35 toward Minneapolis.
Mallard called Lucas that afternoon and gave him the bad news. The fingerprint search was coming up dry.
'We're gonna change some things around on the computer search, but it doesn't look good,' Mallard said. 'Tell you the truth, I'd be willing to bet she was never printed.'
'Damnit,' Lucas said. 'We never quite get her. I swear to God, we didn't miss her by more than a half-hour at the airport, maybe fifteen minutes.'
'But we're knocking on the door,' Mallard said.
'We've got more on her than we ever hoped for. Now it's just a matter of time.'
Late that evening, Hale Allen sat naked on the edge of the bed, his damp hair still tousled from the lovemaking and the shower that came afterwards. He was examining his toes in the light from the night-stand, and clipping his toenails.
He hummed as he did it, and every time the clippers snapped, Carmel flinched, and Allen would say something about the clipping, aloud, but mindlessly, to himself: 'Got that one,' he said, as a clipping fell on the magazine he was using to catch them. 'There's a good one.'
Carmel tried putting her fingers in her ears, but it was no use. She was about to roll out of bed when the magic cell phone went off in her purse. She crawled to the end of the bed, reached over the end-board for her purse, dug the phone out, lay back and punched the talk button.
'I'm back,' Rinker said.
'Where at?' Allen looked at her from his side of the bed, and she mouthed, sorry-business at him. He grinned and rolled over toward her, pushed her legs apart; she let him do it.
'Hotel down by the airport.'
'Dangerous,' Carmel said. Allen put his head down and nibbled.
'I look different. A lot different,' Rinker said. 'Not a problem. But the question is, do we do Plan B?'
'I've been thinking about that,' Carmel said. She ran her hands through Allen's hair. 'I guess it really wouldn't mean much to you, but it'd get me off the hook. For good.'
'But that's good for me,' Rinker said. 'The question is, how do I do this by myself? I don't know the details of…'
'You don't do it by yourself,' Carmel said. She pulled gently on Allen's ear, guiding him a little to the left. 'I'll help.'