the house, shingles peeling off, paint shedding into the pastel-pink hollyhocks that surrounded the brick foundation.
Rinker pulled nose-in to the gate. The dogs had been sitting near their stake, in the middle of the yard, in a dirt circle worn free of grass. When she pulled up, they stood, silently, watching. When she lifted the latch on the gate, they moved, like black-and-tan leopards, toward her, still silent, disciplined like soldiers, dragging their long chains. She walked the gate open, careful to stay out of range of the dogs, got back in her car, and drove up to the garage.
Now she was in killing range, and the dogs moved up to the driver's side of the car. They were snuffling, a sound that was almost a growl but not quite: The throaty slavering was actually more threatening than a growl. They sounded like they wanted to eat.
Rinker reached under the seat and took out the. 22. She'd bought a box of standard-velocity hollowpoints at a Wal-Mart in Kansas City. She checked it, almost unconsciously, then ran the window down. The bigger of the two dogs stood on its hind feet, its front feet lightly on the door. It was peering directly at her, and she remembered reading in a book somewhere about a killing dog that had eyes like coal. This was that dog: The black eyes peered at her, hungered after her. This dog wanted her.
No romantic when it came to dogs, she pointed the pistol at the animal's head and shot it between the coal- black eyes. No romantic itself, it dropped dead. The other dog took a step back, looking at its dead companion. Before it could do anything else, Rinker killed it.
The two shots sounded like nothing else but shots. If anyone was at the house a half mile away, the shots might have sounded like popcorn popping. Two light pops in the evening breeze, coming from Baker's house. She doubted that anyone would be curious.
On the other hand, there was no point in taking chances. She dragged the dead dogs back to the stake in the middle of the yard and rolled them upright, as though they were sleeping on duty.
Baker's back door had another sign: 'Forget the Dog, Beware of Owner.' Rinker ignored it, and used the butt of the pistol to knock a hole in the window. She reached through, flipped the bolt, and let herself in.
Baker had two gun cabinets that she knew of, both of them bolted into the concrete floor in the basement. Neither was really a safe, in the strictest sense, but they wouldn't be easy to get into, either. Rinker intended to use an ax on the doors, and if that didn't work… well, bad luck for Baker. She'd wait for him to come home.
Now she called out: 'Anybody home?'
Nothing but silence. She went to the basement door, turned on the light, and went down the stairs. The two gun safes sat at the far end of the basement; one of them was open an inch. Empty? Unlikely. More likely that Baker just started feeling safe, all these years gone by with no burglaries, the dogs in the yard, his reputation…
Fuckin' Baker, she thought. Leaving the door like that was purely laziness. She reached out to pull it open, but with her hand just an inch away, she stopped. Boy, that was convenient, the way the door just hung there. Rinker didn't believe that life was easy. Something was wrong. She stepped away, looked around, spotted a length of two-by-two propped in a corner. She got it, stood back away from the safe, and eased the door open.
The shotgun blast nearly killed her-not from the steel shot, but from the shock of it. The gun was behind her, under the stairs. The blast had gone right past her into the gun safe. She staggered back away from it, her legs stinging, her hands at her ears. She was deaf, her head aching, her eyes watering. Her legs hurt. She looked down; her jeans looked okay, but when she lifted the pant legs, she found little stripes of blood trickling down into her socks.
She left the gun safe and went back upstairs and peeled off the pants in the light of the kitchen. She'd been hit by three pellets, all ricochets, all buried just beneath her skin. She popped them out with her fingertips, found some Band-Aids and a bottle of peroxide in the bathroom, wiped the wounds and bandaged them.
Fuckin' Baker. As she worked, the ringing in her ears faded, and she could again hear her feet moving around on the bathroom floor.
When she was done, she went back downstairs and looked at the now-empty double-barreled shotgun. It had been rigged with a simple wire on a pulley. The wire ran from the safe door, through a hole in the back of the safe to a pulley on the wall, up to the ceiling joists, across another pulley to the stairs, down to the trigger on the shotgun. The trigger itself had the lightest pull she'd ever experienced in a weapon. She was tempted to rig it backward, pointing up the stairs, but hell-it was his house.
She went back up the stairs, out to the garage, got Baker's ax, carried it into the basement, and went after the second gun safe. She worked at it methodically, and it took her five minutes, cutting through the front, then using the ax handle to pry a gap in the metal. There were nine rifles in the safe, all with scopes: four bolt-action varmint rifles, two in. 22-250 and two in. 223; three bolt-actions in larger calibers, a Remington 7mm Magnum, a Steyr. 308 and a Winchester. 243; plus two semiautos, a Ruger Ranch Rifle in. 223 and a military-style AR-15, also in. 223. Three gun cases were stacked beside the safes; each could handle two rifles. She packed the three larger calibers, plus the AR-15 and the two. 223 bolt-actions, and carried them up to the car. She threw the other three rifles on top of the packed guns, and around them she stacked seventeen boxes of ammunition, two shooters' sandbags, two packs of paper targets, and a sawhorse with a clamp on the bottom, which was used to hold the targets.
She didn't need all the stuff, but couldn't afford to be selective. Gun thieves wouldn't be, and she'd prefer that nobody got the idea that Clara Rinker had long guns. As she was leaving, she thought again about the shotgun, and thought about burning the house down. Decided against it, looking at the lumps of dead dog in the front yard. Pretty even, she thought, though her ears were still ringing.
She left Tisdale an hour after dark, headed northeast, toward St. Louis. In the dark she crossed a river, stopped, and threw the three loose rifles into the dark water. She spent the night halfway up the state, in a cash motel in the town of Diffley. There was an abandoned quarry outside Diffley, where the locals sighted-in their guns. Not many people went, and in her gunning days, she'd often driven down from St. Louis to work with new pistols.
The next morning she got an egg-and-sausage McMuffin at McDonald's, then drove out to the quarry. She was alone, and spent an hour sighting the rifles, leaving the AR-15 for last. The AR-15 looked a lot like Jaime's M-16, and even had a selector switch. She fired off a couple of single rounds, landing them just where she'd expected. Then she flipped the selector switch, aimed it, and squeezed off a burst.
Whoa. It was full-auto. She looked around, a little self-consciously-if anyone had heard that, she could be in trouble.
All the guns were right on, as she expected. After the burst of automatic fire, she decided she'd better get out of town. She quickly but carefully repacked the guns, got out of the quarry, and drove the familiar, homey roads into St. Louis.
SHE 'D ALWAYS LIKED the place. Neat town, lots of things to do. Good bars, and she was a student of good bars. Rolled down along Forest Park, stopped in Central West End and got a sandwich, picked up a book, and walked around in the afternoon, getting back into the feel of the place. She did a little shopping, and then, at four o'clock, went down to the southeast corner of the city, to Soulard, along the Mississippi. She sat in the car and drew more triangles and squares on her yellow legal pad as she watched the people come and go on the sidewalk. She thought about the vision she'd had of the dark-haired girl, closed her eyes, and let the feeling come back. But now all she had was a memory. The vision was gone.
Outside the car, a woman walked by, carrying a string bag with what looked like a green glass lamp inside. She was a large woman, and Rinker sat up when she saw her coming. Then she thought, after a minute, Too old.
The woman she was looking for was three years older than Rinker. Her name-now-was Dorothy Pollock.
6
BEFORE THEY LEFT CANCЪN, LUCAS asked Malone if she could either lend him a copy of the Rinker file he'd scanned in the plane coming down, or make a copy and send it to him in Minneapolis. She shook her head: 'A lot of that stuff is speculation. We're not even supposed to show it to you the first time.'
