into a fitful sleep.
She hadn't thought that the man in St. Louis would ever harm her; she had almost that much faith in him. But not quite that much. She'd told him she hoped to be in Wichita by the time the banks opened. If he were going to make a move against her, probably using one or the other muscle heads that always seemed to be around, the guy most likely would be waiting at her apartment, waiting for her to open the bank and then come back.
Coming from St. Louis, even by air, would put him in Wichita at least a few hours later than her. He'd have to be found, and an airplane would have to be rounded up, or he'd have to get in his car and drive… If he was coming, she really wouldn't expect him before six o'clock or so.
He was better than that. He arrived at five.
She thought she actually woke a minute before the alarm went. Whatever, she sat up with the strobe flashing in her face. She hit the o^button, and looked at the clock. Five minutes after five. She got to her feet, picked up both guns, cocked them, and headed for the kitchen, moving slowly, careful not to bump anything, to set off a vibration, absolutely silent in her bare feet. She was still wearing the thin rubber gloves, hot and tacky on her hands. The gloves were ivory-colored, and she could see them better than she could see her arms, like two disembodied fists floating though the dark.
Whoever was in the hall had hesitated at the door. She moved past it and stepped into a closet with sliding doors. The left door was half open, and she moved behind it, where she could still see through the open panel. Then the man outside knocked, and called her voice, quietly. 'Clara? Clara?' Another soft knock, then a key.
He had a key, which meant the man in St. Louis must have copied hers. Stupid.
She just left her keys laying around, the keys to everything. She worried that there were more security lapses that she'd never known about. Then she pushed the worry out of her head, and focused on the weight of her guns.
The door opened, a darkening shadow, then the man stepped inside; she was less than two feet away, and he stepped inside far enough that she could see that he was carrying something in his right hand. From the way he was carrying it, it had to be a gun. She lifted her own gun, ready to fire, when the man whispered – the softest breath – 'Easy…'
She thought he was talking to her and almost blurted something out, when she heard more soft movement – and the man she could see wasn't moving. There were two of them.
The first moved down the hall toward her bedroom, while the second moved quietly across the living room to the second bedroom, which Rinker used as a TV room and home office. After a long minute of silence, the man down the hall came back, stepped toward the second bedroom. And the second man stepped out of the second bedroom.
'Not here, yet,' he said quietly.
'Then we wait until Wooden Head calls,' said the first man.
'In the dark?'
'Yeah, in case she comes.'
'I'm dead on my ass,' the further man said. 'I get the couch, if that's a couch.'
The second man lay down on the couch, the first sat in an easy chair, lit a cigarette. Rinker never allowed cigarettes in her house. The second man said from the couch, 'What if she smells that smoke?'
The smoker said, 'Shit,' and dropped the cigarette butt on the hardwood floor and ground it out with his foot. She'd sanded the floors herself, and sealed them. The man's action almost moved Rinker, but not quite.
'You seen this chick?' one man asked.
'Once, I think. Gotta nice rack.'
'The Guy seemed kind of scared of her. You know, like he was all that, Get her quick, don't give her a shot'
'Never seen a chick who could take me,' said the second man. 'In fact, if this is the same chick I'm thinking about, I wouldn't mind fuckin' her first.'
'Don't think that way. If the Guy's nervous, we don't want to be fuckin' around.'
'Yeah, yeah.'
'Now shut up; I'm gonna get some sleep.'
'Listen for the shots,' the second man said. 'Then you'll know she got here.'
Five minutes later, Rinker heard the first tentative snore from the man on the couch; the man on the chair sat unmoving, as far as she could tell. They were like that for another five minutes, the man on the couch breathing deeper, snoring more regularly; then the man on the couch stood up, lit a cigarette and started toward her. She withdrew just an inch into the deeper darkness of the closet. When he brushed by, a shoulder width away, she stepped sideways, then out of the closet in a dance-step, her left pistol arm coming up. He never heard her, saw her or suspected her. She fired a double-tap into the back of his head and took three quick steps to the couch. The man on the couch snorted when the first man hit the floor, and may have been about to wake up. Rinker fired two more shots into his forehead.
Lights.
She got the lights on. The man on the floor was bleeding, but the blood was running out on vinyl. She could get that. The other one wasn't bleeding much, just two small bubbles of blood over his brow ridges: slugs never exited.
She'd have to hurry, she thought. The sky outside seemed brighter: the summer dawn was not far away. She ran to the kitchen, got a roll of duct tape, and taped the wounds on the mens' heads. Stop the bleeding: leave no more traces than she had to. The back window, overlooking the communal dumpster, would open wide enough, she thought, and the screen would swing free. She dragged the man on the couch to the window, opened it, laboriously shoved him into the window hole, took a last look around, and pushed him out. He hit the tarmac below with a dull sloppy whock.
The second guy, the one on the vinyl, was smaller, and she moved him more easily, over the sill, out the window; the impact, broken by the man already on the ground, was softer.
With the two men outside, she hurried, quietly as she could, down to the van, backed it up to the dumpster, and dragged the two bodies into the back.
She was tired. The bigger of the two guys probably went two-ten, maybe two twenty. He was a lot of work. She sat for a moment in the van, catching her breath, and then started out. Ten minutes later, she was in the countryside.
Fifteen minutes after the dumpster, she was crawling down a one-lane track, next to a creek. She remembered the place from a country ramble earlier in the year; she remembered the unfenced cornfield that bordered on the track.
The dawn was coming as she dragged the men through a patch of weeds, ten rows back into the corn. With any luck, they wouldn't be found until October, when the corn was picked. Before she left, she took their wallets, pocketed the money
– a little over a thousand, total – and their drivers licenses. On the way back to town, she fed the miscellaneous paper in the wallets out the window, little anonymous scraps every couple hundred yards or so. In town, she stopped at trash can and dumped the two empty wallets themselves.
Done.
Back to the apartment, up the stairs. A little after six o'clock in the morning: a little less than three hours before the banks opened. She'd spend it, she decided, wiping the place again. Every coat hanger, every Coke can, every can and bottle in the cupboards and refrigerator. At the end, she wrote two notes – the first, a note to the landlord:
Sorry to do this to you, Larry, to skip out on the lease, but you've got the last month's rent, and I'm sure you can move the place in a hurry. I've got bad personal problems with my ex – if the asshole does find me he's gonna kill me – and I gotta get out of here. You can have the furniture and everything else in the place, instead of the rent. Sorry again, and have a good life. – Clara.
The landlord was greedy enough that he'd be moving the furniture out ten minutes after he got the note. If he could move somebody else in, in a hurry, she'd have that much less to worry about, involving fingerprints.
The second note she put in an envelope, which she sealed. She scrawled the St.
Louis' guy's name on it, and under that wrote, 'Private.'
The bank took five minutes, in a private booth. She spent most of the time wiping the box; much of the rest of
