handicap card.
The store was empty, other than Rinker, so she saw no reason to beat around the bush. 'I'd like to buy a couple of guns,' she said, her voice casual, holding his eyes. 'Semiauto nines, if you've got them. Gotta be cold. I'd take a Ruger. 22 if you got it.'
'Excuse me?' Jimmy's smile vanished. He was taken aback. This was a golf shop-there must be some mistake.
'I'm Rose-Anne, Jimmy,' Rinker said. 'You left me that gun I used to kill Gerald McKinley. You put it in a tree up in Golden Gate Park and picked up two thousand dollars in twenties. You remember that.'
'Jesus,' Jimmy said. His Adam's apple bobbed. 'McKinley.' He hadn't known what happened with the gun, what it would be used for. The McKinley killing had been in the papers for weeks, as had the somewhat (but not too) bereaved young wife and the very bereaved older ex-wife.
'It was a sad thing,' Rinker said. 'A man in his prime, cut down like that.'
'Well, jeez, Rose-Anne, I don't know.'
'Cut the crap, Jimmy. I'll give you two thousand bucks apiece for either two or three guns.'
Jimmy processed this for a minute, and she could see it all trickling down through his brain, like raindrops of thought on a windowpane. Okay, he'd been offered money, in the face of his denials. If she was a cop, it'd be entrapment. And if she was a cop, and knew about the tree in the park, he was probably fucked anyway. And if she were Rose-Anne and he didn't sell her the guns, then he might be truly and ultimately fucked. Therefore, he would sell her the guns.
'Uh… maybe you should step into the back.' The back was behind a green cloth curtain, smelled of bubble wrap and cardboard, and was full of golf-club shipping boxes and club racks. At the far end was a workbench with a vise. Jimmy pushed a couple of boxes aside and pulled out a tan gym bag, unzipped it, and said, 'This is what I got.'
Rinker, watching his eyes, decided he was okay, took the bag, stepped back, and looked inside. Three revolvers and three semiautos. All three semiautos were military-style 9mm Berettas. She took one out, popped the magazine-the magazine was empty-cycled the action a couple of times, did the same with the other two, and said, 'I'll take them.' She looked at the revolvers: One was a. 22, and she put it with the automatics. 'You got any long guns?'
'No. I know where you might be able to pick some up, if you want to run down to Bakersfield.'
She shook her head. 'Naw. I can get my own. How about ammo?'
'I can give you a couple of boxes of Federal hollowpoint for the nines, but I don't have any. 22 on hand.'
'Give me the nine,' she said. 'Silencer?'
'Um, I usually charge two thousand. Good ones are hard to get.'
'Can you get it quick?'
'Yes.'
'Another two thousand, if it's a good one.'
'It's a Coeur d'Alene.'
'I'll take it.'
He fished around in another box and came up with a purple velvet bag that had once contained a bottle of Scotch. He handed it to her and said, 'Quick enough?'
She took the bag, slipped the silencer out. It was a Coeur d'Alene, all right; the absolutely faultless blued finish was the signature. Somewhere, a master machinist was doing artwork. She screwed the silencer onto one of the nines and flipped it out to arm's length, to test the balance. 'Good. I'll take the whole bunch.'
Jimmy nodded, said, 'Okay,' moved some more boxes around, picked up a small one, reached inside, and produced two boxes of nine-millimeter ammunition. He handed them to her and asked, 'You in town for long?'
Her mouth wasn't grim, but she wasn't exactly radiating warmth. 'I was never here,' she said.
'Gotcha,' said Jimmy Cricket.
RINKER SPENT THE night in a motel outside Sacramento, drawing squares and triangles on a yellow legal pad. Killing wasn't hard: Any asshole could kill somebody. Doing it often, and getting away with it every time, was much harder. What had made her a good killer-besides the lack of revulsion with the job-was her ability to plan. She planned with yellow pads, not in words and paragraphs, but in triangles and spirals, a few with names above them, some with lines connecting them to other symbols. Sometimes she made maps.
Aside from the killing, Rinker hadn't been much different from other young successful businesswomen in Wichita, Kansas, until her facade broke down and she'd had to run. She'd owned a friendly country bar called the Rink, with dancing all the time and live music on weekends. She had a nice apartment that she'd decorated herself, went part-time to Wichita State, and would have liked to have had a pet, but traveled too much to feel good about it. She didn't like fuzzy stuffed animal toys or chocolate hearts, but did tarry at times in front of Victoria's Secret display windows. She had an interest in makeup, read a couple of women's magazines, liked to dance, got a massage once a month, and would drink a beer or a glass of wine.
She liked guns, and the power that grew out of them. Knew enough about semiautos to do her own trigger jobs. Wasn't much interested in cars. Like that.
Lying on the bed in Sacramento, she wrote four names on her legal pad: John Ross, Nanny Dichter, Andy Levy, Paul Dallaglio. All of them knew her face. All of them had the clout to send a gun to kill her. All of them had probably agreed to do it, since they all talked to each other, wouldn't have wanted to go against the others, and because all four must have been worried about her running around loose.
The problem was, Rinker knew way too much. She knew where the bodies were buried, and that wasn't a joke, not in the several states where the four men operated, all those good states having opted for capital punishment. If Rinker was taken alive, and if she decided to cut adeal…
Rinker lay on the bed and put together an outline. She could fill it in while she drove.
FROM SACRAMENTO TO St. Louis is three solid days, if you're driving a used Oldsmobile, don't want to attract attention, and stay with it. Rinker took four days, passing from one FM station to the next, hard rock to soft jazz to country, through two sets of mountains with a desert between them, then out on the Great Plains, I-80 to Cheyenne, I-25 into Denver, across Kansas and Missouri on I-70, into St. Louis: Red Roof Inn and Best Western, BP and Shell, McDonald's and Burger King and Taco Bell and the Colonel. She stopped at four different shopping centers. She got her hair cut, tight to her head, punky, so that a wig would fit over it. She bought wigs, good ones, in black, red, and blond shoulder-length.
She talked to a woman at a Nordstrom's makeup bar about a Mexican friend of hers who had suffered a facial burn and needed some dark cover-up makeup to conceal the burn, and she got instruction on how to use it. She played with the makeup, trying to make herself look Mexican, but it never quite worked. Instead of brown, she looked orange, and odd. She eventually decided that the black wig looked okay with just a bit of dark eyebrow pencil, as long as she wore long-sleeved blouses.
With a couple of changes of clothes-one from Nordstrom's, one from Kmart-she'd have six distinct looks. Even a good friend of the Nordstrom's perky Light Lady would never recognize the funky Kmart Red…
And she made some calls, cautiously. Had to call three times, starting with the first day in L.A., before she finally got through. Said, 'This is me. You remember me?'
'Oh, my God. Where are you at?'
'Out east. Pennsylvania. How's life?'
'I've run out of time. Like we talked about.'
'What are you going to do?'
'You know…'
'I've got an idea, but I haven't worked it out yet. I'll call you back. When's good?'
'Three o'clock is good. Like now.'
'This line?'
'Yeah… this is as good as any. You never know, though.' Never know what might be monitored.
'I'll get you a clean phone,' Rinker said. 'I'll call again. Three o'clock.'
WHEN SHE 'D BEEN pushed out of her life, forced to go on the run, Rinker had been killing people for a long time-felt like a long time, anyway. She was not deliberately cruel in her paid assassinations. She did the shooting and went on her way, a businesswoman taking care of business. She had once been necessarily cruel to a man in
