gathered what she needed in order to move. She also wiped the place: There'd be no fingerprints if anyone came looking for her. Then one Wednesday, after she'd been on the ranch for a month, Dominic came out and said, 'We've got word about a man who some people say might have been the driver for the shooting. We don't know where he is, but we know where his family is, so we should be able to find him. Then we might learn something.'
'When?' she asked.
'By the weekend, I hope,' Dominic said. 'We have to know where this came from, so we can get back to business. And for Paulo, of course.'
THAT WAS ON a Wednesday. She was still not one hundred percent, but she was good enough to run. She'd handled everything she could by phone, she had documents she could get to, she'd moved the money that had to be moved. She would leave on Thursday afternoon.
She'd already worked it out: She had two doctor's appointments each week, on Monday and Thursday. The driver always waited in the lobby of the clinic. When she came out of the doctor's office, if she turned left instead of right, she would be at least momentarily free on the streets of Cancъn, 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 could.
Listening to all the commotion, he thought, All right. Two guys on the roof, an electrician on the porch, at least two nail guns inside and a table saw. That was a minimum of six guys, and if there were six guys working on the house, then he wouldn't have to scream at the contractor. Seven or eight guys would have been better. Ten would have been perfect. But the house was only a week behind schedule now, so six was acceptable. Barely.
As he climbed the porch steps, he noticed that somebody had pinned a four-by-four beam in the open ceiling, down at the far end. It would, someday soon, support an oak swing big enough for two adults and a kid. The electrician saw him coming, ducked his head to look down at him from the ladder, and said, 'Hey, Lucas.'
'Jim. How's it going?'
The electrician was screwing canary-yellow splicing nuts onto pairs of bared wires that would feed the porch light. 'Okay, I'm getting close. But somebody's got to put in that telephone and cable wiring or we're gonna get hung up on the inspection. The inspector's coming Tuesday, and if we have to reschedule, it could hold things up for a week and they won't be able to close the overheads.'
'I'll talk to Jack about it,' Lucas said. 'He was supposed to get that guy from Epp's.'
'I heard the guy fell off a stepladder and broke his foot-that's what I heard,' the electrician said, pitching his voice down. 'Don't tell Jack I mentioned it.'
'I won't. I'll get somebody out here,' Lucas said.
Goddamnit. Now he was back in yelling mode again. Much of the problem of building a new house was in the sequencing-sequencing the construction steps and all the required inspections in a smooth flow. One screwup, of even a minor thing like phone and cable-television wiring, which should take no more than a day, could stall progress for a week, and they didn't have a lot of time to spare.
Besides which, living in Weather Karkinnen's house was driving him crazy. He didn't have any of his stuff. Everything was in storage. Weather had even lost her TV remote, and never noticed because she watched TV only when presidents were assassinated. For the past two months, he'd had to get up and down every time he wanted to change channels, and he wanted to change channels about forty times a minute. He'd taken to crouching next to the TV to push the channel button. Weather said he was pathetic, and he believed her.
INSIDE THE SHELL of the new house, everything smelled of damp wood and sawdust-smelled pretty good, he thought. Building new houses could become addictive. Everybody was working on the second story, and he made a quick tour of the bottom floor-four new boxes were piled on the back porch; toilet stools-and then took the central
