Mortal Prey

ladies’ room, and she might have flushed it. She had nitrites on her face, but she says that Rinker fired the pistol right past her, so they would be there. Smeared prints on the gun grip, clear ones on the barrel, and at least one of the good ones belongs to Rinker.”
    “Well-thought-out.”
    “For a long time,” Mallard agreed. “For weeks. And they pulled it off. If we take her to trial, they’ll have Rinker’s gun, they’ll have Rinker’s blood on the glass, they’ll have our whole investigation and chase with Rinker, and Ross’ll say the phone calls went to her husband. All we’ve got is that last phone call, and Rinker called her, unfortunately, and I listened to the tape. All double-talk. I mean, it sounds good to me, but it won’t be enough. It especially won’t be enough when they get Ross’s character into it, and they show that the third wife was killed in an unsolved hit-and-run.”
    Lucas was convinced. “So Treena’s out of it.”
    He nodded. “Yes. And she knows it.”
    “If she had any little thing about Rinker, maybe we could deal with her…especially since we’re not going to get her anyway.”
    Mallard shook his head. “She’s not gonna deal. The whole thing was…I feel like a moron. That’s what I feel like, Lucas. As soon as we clean up here, I’m going to Malone’s funeral, and then I’m going home for a while, and just sit and think.”
    “What about Rinker?”
    “Fuck her. I hope she dies of blood poisoning.”
     
    RINKER GOT ON I - 44 and headed southwest, drove for fifteen minutes before the pain dragged her off the highway. Feeling faint, she took an exit at random, spotted a hotel, turned into its parking lot, and parked the truck. She pressed the dead man into the footwell, found an Army blanket behind the seat, and threw it over him. Then, moving ever so slowly, she did a survey of her assets.
    She had money, ID, two passports, both good, a black wig, and a hole in her butt that continued to bleed. She also had a small toolbox, a battered leather briefcase, and a brown sack with a grease spot that might have contained a lunch. She had a day-old newspaper.
    When the dead man rolled off the passenger seat, he’d exposed a copy of the Post-Dispatch. The news section looked unread, and Rinker had heard that unread newspaper pages were virtually sterile. She pulled out the middle section, ripped then, unbuckled her slacks, touched the wound a few times, wasn’t sure she should be pleased or frightened that she couldn’t feel much other than the basic pain, then, in the light of the truck’s overhead lamp, made eight-inch-square pads of newsprint and pressed them onto the wound.
    Digging into the toolbox for a roll of duct tape, she wrapped her leg and thigh with half the roll of tape, an awkward, unprofessional mess, but it held.
    She felt sleepy, and that worried her. Even with the pain in her butt starting to come on, she felt sleepy. Struggled to stay up. Dug into the briefcase and found a cell phone. Everybody had a cell phone.
    She took the man’s wallet out and looked at his ID and the cards inside, a couple of notes, no pictures. She checked his left hand: no wedding band. Single, she thought. Maybe nobody to come looking right away.
    Fought the sleep, kept coming back to the cell phone. Finally, she decided she had no choice: one more risk to run.
    She dialed, got an interrupt, and wound up talking to an operator before she got it right. Then she dialed again, and heard it ring, and then a man’s voice said, “Sí?”
    She switched to Spanish: “This is Cassie McLain. May I speak to Papa?”
    They talked for less than a minute, and then Rinker hung up, and after a few moments, as she reconstructed it later, she passed out. She woke again later, terribly thirsty, but there was no water in the truck, and when she moved a wave of pain tore at her.
    That goddamn Davenport. He’d shot her in the back while she was running away. He’d had no call to do that, she wasn’t even looking at him….
    She passed out again, and only woke when a bright light hit her in the eyes. A man said, in Spanish, “Are you alive?”
    “Yes.”
    “I have a car.”
    He’d had to lift her out of the truck and place her in the front seat of his Cadillac. The front seat was covered with plastic garbage bags so she wouldn’t make a mess. When he’d transferred her, she’d passed out again, just for a moment, and when she came to, he was wiping his hands on paper