Mortal Prey

doctor’s office, if she turned left instead of right, she would be at least momentarily free on the streets of Cancún, and not ten yards from a busy taxi stand.
    She should have half an hour before the driver became curious. If she got even two minutes, she’d be gone. She’d done it before.
     
    RINKER AND JAIME went for one last shooting session on Thursday morning, with the shotgun. Jaime had six solid-rubber, fourteen-inch trailer tires that he could haul around in a John Deere utility wagon. They went out to the gully and Jaime rolled the tires, one at a time, down the rocky slope. The tires ricocheted wildly off the rocks, while Rinker tried to anticipate them with the twelve-gauge pump. When she hit them, at ten yards, she’d knock them flat, but on a good day, she struggled to hit half of them with the first shot. She learned that a shotgun, even at close range, wasn’t a sure thing.
    When she’d emptied the shotgun, they’d pick up the tires and Rinker would drive them to the top of the slope and roll them down while Jaime shot at them. Taking turns. He did no better than she did, though they both pretended that he did. On this day, she made what she thought later was almost a mistake.
    Jaime pulled the Beretta from his belt clip and said, “Just one time with the handgun, eh? Make me happy.”
    “Jaime…” With asperity.
    “No, no, no…” He wagged his finger at her. “I insist. We have time before the doctor, and this you should learn.”
    “Jaime, goddamnit…”
    He ignored her. A half-dozen empty Coke cans sat in the back of the John Deere, and he threw three of them down the gully. “You can do this. You will find it much harder than the rifle or the shotgun.”
    “Give me the gun, Jaime,” she said, making the almost-mistake.
    He stopped in midsentence, looked at her, and handed her the Beretta. She’d always liked that particular gun when she was shooting nines: It seemed to fit in her hand.
    And she liked Jaime and might have wanted to impress him a bit, on this, her last afternoon. She flipped the safety and pulled down on one of the cans and shot it six times in three seconds before it managed to flip its now-raggedy ass behind a rock.
    They stood in a hot, dusty, powder-smelling silence for several seconds, then Rinker slipped the safety on and passed the piece back to Jaime.
    Jaime looked at the gun, then at her, and said after a while, “I see.”
    He didn’t really. He’d probably find out soon enough.
    That afternoon, she ran.

2
    LUCAS DAVENPORT PARKED IN THE street.
    A rusty Dumpster blocked his driveway, which had become a bog of black-and-tan mud anyway, so he parked in the street, climbed out of the Porsche, and looked up at the half-finished house. The place had been framed and closed, and the rock walls had been set, but raw plywood still showed through the second story and parts of the first, although most of it had been covered with a black weather-seal. The lawn between Lucas and the house was a wreck, the result of construction trucks maneuvering over it after an ill-timed summer rain.
    Two men in coveralls were sitting on the peak of the roof, drinking what Lucas hoped was Perrier water out of green bottles, and eating a pizza out of a flat white box. Given that they were roofers, and that when they saw him they eased the bottles down behind their legs and out of sight, he suspected that the bottles did not contain water. One of them waved with his free hand and the other lifted a slice of pizza, and Lucas waved back and started across the rutted lawn toward the front porch.
    He crossed the ruts and rain puddles gracefully enough. He was a large, athletic man in a dark blue suit and nontasseled black loafers, with a white dress shirt open at the throat. His face and neck contrasted with the easy elegance of the Italian suit—old scars marked him as a trouble-seeker, one scar in particular slicing down across an eyebrow onto the tanned cheek below. He had kindly ice-blue eyes and dark hair, old French-Canadian genes hanging on for dear life in the American ethnic Mixmaster.
    The house was his—or had been his, and would be again. Now it was a mess. An electrician stood on a stepladder on the new front porch working on overhead wiring. A couple of nail guns were banging away inside, sounding like cartoon spit balloons— pitoo, pitoo —and as he walked up to the porch, a table saw started whining. He could smell the sawdust, or imagined he