Mortal Prey

not be able to run as fast or climb as quickly as you once did. And of course there is cosmetic damage, there will be a scar…but you are in no danger. Now.”
    “Thank you very much,” Rinker said. The woman nodded but said nothing more, and after a minute Rinker asked, “So what do I do? Just lie here with my butt in the air until it heals?”
    “You’ll have to, uh, lie there for a while, certainly. We have been told to purchase a television set and some video games if you wish to have them.”
    “A TV would be good,” Rinker said. “I don’t need the games. Can I prop myself up?”
    “You can, but I promise you, it’s better to lie flat,” the woman said. Then she said, “My name is Rayla. My husband is Geoffrey. He will be back soon, and we’ll go to Best Buy for the television.”
    “Could I get water?”
    “Oh, my goodness, yes, I forgot,” Rayla said, jumping up. “Would you like juice? We have papaya, mango…Would you like a fish sandwich?”
    “Do you have an Internet connection?”
    “Yes, we do.”
     
    GEOFFREY WAS A charming man, but she could never quite figure out how old he was: something between twenty-five and forty-five, she thought. He had a smooth brown oval face and a soft manner that fit well with a doctor, but not so well as an accomplice to major crime. They never talked about crime, though he knew who she was, and called her “Clara” rather than Cassie. He said that the costs of her care had been “fully funded.”
    He brought in a television with a DVD player, and for three days she watched TV and thought about things. On the fourth day, she made her first trip away from the bedpan, to the toilet, where she learned how hard it was for a woman to pee while sitting on one buttock and holding the other one carefully clear. Everything got squished together.
    On the sixth day, she started a rehab program that featured five colors of rubber tubing that Geoffrey brought home from the hospital. She had to stretch against the rubber tubes, and could barely move the thinnest size. After a week, when she was feeling stronger and the thinnest tube wasn’t stiff enough, he moved her to the next size, and again, he could barely move her leg….
    As she waited to heal, and practiced walking, she watched TV and roamed the Internet and thought about things some more.
    She thought about Paulo and the baby. The recovery process was quicker, easier than the recovery in Mexico, but the smells and the pain brought Paulo back, and the baby…
    She thought about those bad years, the years she’d always tried to blank out, when her brother and her stepfather were abusing her. Abusing her and comparing notes on how well she’d done.
    She’d run away, and she’d tried dancing nude, and she’d been raped by a fat man and she’d killed that man with a T-ball bat, and then she’d been picked up by John Ross, who’d taught her to kill for money, and she’d saved her money and had bought a bar and had been successful and had gone to college to try to understand herself….
    She’d learned about herself in school. She might have avoided all this, if the killing hadn’t been so easy and profitable. She never thought about the dead people, she only thought about the money. It had seemed like her right to kill, after all that had happened to her.
    Then Davenport.
    She’d feared the federal people, in a theoretical way, like you fear dying in a plane accident. Ross and his friends had heard rumors that there was a file on her, but that the file was almost empty.
    Then Davenport had come along, and somehow had screwed everything. She’d lost her bar, lost a friend, almost lost her life. She’d been driven to Mexico and the disaster that followed. Nothing theoretical about Davenport.
    She didn’t cry about it. She might have, but she didn’t.
    She set her jaw, and she thought about Davenport.
    She knew something about him. One solid fact.
    She’d have to heal before she did anything. But she had time—five and a half weeks, to be exact. A Saturday in October.
    Davenport was the devil, and had to be dealt with.

26
    THE BRIDE WAS BLUSHING IN WHITE AND big as a house, and finally said she had to go off to the bathroom to get the goddamn leg strap right. Sloan, Lucas’s oldest friend on the police force, leered at her and said, “So you show a little leg. You’re among friends.”
    She said, “Don’t hold your breath, pervert-boy,” and went off into the back, shouting over her