Minnesota who'd betrayed her, but that had been a matter of survival. She still thought about him from time to time. She wasn't morbidly fascinated or neurotically fixated, but the image of his body tied to the bed sometimes popped into her mind's eye as she drifted off to sleep.
The fear he'd shown. She thought about the fear as she drove-and the other fears she inspired.
The people who'd directed her, who'd used her as a weapon, had no reason to fear her guns, because Rinker was entirely loyal to friends. These were people who'd helped her out of a life that had been headed straight for a white-trash ghetto. She appreciated that. If the cops had taken her, she would have gone to the gas chamber, or the death gurney, or whatever it was, without saying a word.
These former friends didn't know that. Or decided they couldn't be sure. If they'd simply tried to kill her and had failed, she might have let it go, on the rational grounds that if she hit back at them, she was putting herself at risk.
They hadn't just failed. They'd killed her lover, they'd killed her baby, and they were most likely still looking for her now, not just from fear of the consequences if she was caught, but fear of her guns. No matter where she went, there was always the possibility that some asshole from St. Louis would pick her out of a crowd, and another gun would be sent.
There was no question that her survival in Cancъn had been a matter of luck. As Rinker had once told another woman who'd been interested in her business, anyone can be killed, if the assassin is patient enough and the victim is not aware of a particular threat. She didn't exempt herself from that truism. She'd never felt a thing in Cancъn. She hadn't known she'd been spotted, hadn't known she'd been stalked. The only guarantee of survival was the elimination of the threat.
AND THERE WAS the revenge factor.
She'd had few friends as a child. She'd taken care of her younger brother, who was somehow wrong in the head: not stupid, but constantly preoccupied, even as a baby, but he was not really a friend. He was too much younger, and too psychologically distant.
There were two or three girls from school that she could recall, but only one that was close-the one she hoped was still living in St. Louis. Her stepfather and older brother had thoroughly abused her, and the sense of abuse had kept people away. In that part of the country, nobody would say much, but people would know, and stay clear. Watching Rinker grow up was like watching a slow-motion car wreck.
Her life in St. Louis hadn't been much different. The people she knew well, with three or four exceptions, mostly feared her. Then she'd been in Wichita, and in Wichita, there'd been two or three people that she might have become close to, but she hadn't quite gotten there, when the cops had broken her out.
Then she'd had to run, and almost magically, everything had changed. She'd found a friend in Mexico, in Paulo. Both a lover and a friend. The beginnings of several friendships, really, and the beginning of a family-she loved Paulo, and she also liked and laughed with and felt safe with his brothers and his parents. They seemed to like her back. She'd started taking birth control pills when things got serious with Paulo, but after a few months, when she needed to refill the prescription, she simply hadn't. Kept thinking, Gotta do it, but didn't.
The missed period could have been natural, a change in the way she lived… but she knew better than that. Felt nothing stirring yet, but felt heavier, more serious.
A child.
Then the gun. And Paulo was gone, and the child, and the family…
DRIVING ACROSS THE high plains, late at night, she had what she later thought was a vision, or wide-awake dream: She saw her child, a girl, a dark-haired kid playing on a tree swing in what must have been the Yucatбn. Paulo was there, wearing a pair of white pleated shorts, bare-chested and barefoot, pushing her. Water in the background, so it must have been near the coast; and then the little girl screamed with laughter and Paulo stopped pushing her and walked around the path of the swing and Rinker could see a hand, her hand, with a Popsicle reaching toward Paulo. Their hands touched, and there was a spark, and he was gone, with the vision.
She snapped back to the present, and far away, saw the lights of a truck approaching down the interstate. How long she'd been on mental cruise control she didn't know, but she felt that she'd been there, in a different future. She could see the little girl now-her little girl-in her mind's eye, and Paulo five years older, and her own life, and she began to weep, holding tight to the steering wheel, weaving down the highway.
IF THE PEOPLE in St. Louis feared her guns, they had good reason.
RINKER GOT OFF the interstate highway system at Kansas City, made a phone call from a mall. A man answered with an abrupt 'What?'
Rinker, leaning on a trashy south-Missouri accent, asked, 'Is this Arveeda?'
'Sound like fuckin' Arveeda?' The phone crashed down on the hook, and she smiled: T. J. Baker was still in residence and, from the sound of it, still an asshole. Out of Kansas City, she turned south on local highways, headed for the town of Tisdale, fifteen miles east of Springfield. The biggest industry in Tisdale was the poultry- processing factory, which killed and plucked six thousand chickens a day, and left the entire town smelling like wet chickenshit and burned feathers. Hell of a thing, she thought, when the thing you remembered most about your hometown was the bad smell.
At midafternoon she stopped again, made another call. A man answered: 'Sgt, McCallum, ordnance.'
She smiled and hung up. She dialed again, a different number, and a different man answered.
'Yes?'
The voice was a slap in the face, and her lingering smile vanished. The last time she'd heard the voice, she'd been threatening its owner with death. She almost hung up, but hesitated.
'Yes? Hello?'
Rinker said, 'You killed my baby. I wanted you to know that. I was pregnant, and a piece of slug hit me in the stomach and I lost the baby.'
He was as startled as she'd been a moment earlier. He got it together and said, 'Clara, I heard something about this, but I…'
'Don't lie to me. I'm coming to kill you, and I wanted to give you time to think about it, instead of just popping up and shooting you in the head. I want you to think about what you're losing: all the rest of your life.'
After a moment of silence, the man chuckled and said, 'Ah, shit, what can I tell you? Bring it on, Clara. You know where to find me. I'll tell you what, though, don't let me catch you. I'd have to make an example out of you. Now, you got anything else?'
'That's about it. You'll be hearing from me.'
The man laughed and said, 'Yeah, well-take it easy, honey.'
'You, too.'
T. J. BAKER LIVED in a weathered white house next to a creek outside the west city limit of Tisdale; the house was surrounded by a chain-link fence. Two pit bulls roamed the yard, only marginally restrained by their long chains. Baker was rough with the dogs, whipping them regularly with a wide leather belt until they screamed with anger. They'd be killing rough on anyone who crossed into the yard while they were out-though that was not likely to happen.
The fence was spotted with signs that said 'Beware of Dog,' and if an illiterate trespasser happened along, one look at the dogs themselves would be warning enough.
Rinker called Baker twice from Springfield, once at six o'clock and once after dinner, at seven, and got no answer. Baker had always preferred the second shift at the chicken factory, because it gave him daylight with the dogs, or to hunt. Or kill, anyway. His greatest joy was sniping rats at the landfill.
WHEN THE SECOND call got no answer, she called the chicken factory, asked for Baker by name, and finally was put through to a man who said, 'Hang on, I gotta find him. He was here a minute ago.'
'Ah, that's okay. If he's not right there, I'll call back.'
'Whatever.'
She got in the Olds and drove out of Springfield; thought about driving past the place she'd grown up, where her mother still lived, but decided against it. There was really nothing she wanted to see, nobody she wanted to talk to. She went instead to Tisdale, through town, past the Dairy Queen and Haber's Drive-In Root Beer, which was closed, boarded up, past the bank and the pharmacy and the bakery and out the west side.
Baker's house was on a county road, his nearest neighbor a half-mile away. His driveway ended at a ramshackle garage that looked as though it had been too long blown upon by the northwest wind; it leaned toward
