Certain Prey (Lucas Davenport Series #10) by John Sandford

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
May 1999

Certain Prey is John Sandford's 11th novel in ten years, and the tenth to feature hard-edged, charismatic homicide detective Lucas Davenport. Once again, Sandford has managed to avoid the traps of repetition and overfamiliarity that mar so many attempts to create an extended series and given us a shrewdly plotted, furiously paced novel that is as visceral and gripping as anything he has published to date.

The opening chapters find Davenport in unusually placid circumstances. He is financially secure, having developed and sold a lucrative line of computer simulation software; he is enjoying a brief, atypical period of complete celibacy; and he is increasingly isolated from the life of the streets by the endless bureaucratic demands of his role as deputy chief of the Minneapolis Police Department. Reality, of course, soon intervenes, and Davenport is pulled down from his ivory tower by a vicious, execution-style killing and its unexpected aftermath.

The killing is initiated by Carmel Loan, a sociopathic defense attorney with a million-dollar-a-year practice and a tendency to get what she wants. When she decides that she wants the handsome but unattainable husband of a wealthy local socialite named Barbara Allen, she hires the services of an out-of-town hitwoman named Clara Rinker, who successfully eliminates the inconvenient Allen but is also forced to shoot a Minneapolis police officer who stumbles onto the scene. From that point, events take on a life and momentum of their own.

First, a blackmailer with incriminating tapes ofCarmeldiscussing the proposed murder enters the picture, and Carmel and Clara join forces to eliminate the blackmailer and track down all existing copies of the tape. The resulting flurry of murders leads to a manhunt that pits Davenport, the Minneapolis PD, and numerous FBI agents against two desperate women who are ruthless and resourceful enough to give the combined forces of the law a serious run for their money.

While it is fascinating, as always, to watch the intuitive, equally ruthless Davenport bring his gamesman's instincts to bear on yet another complex investigation, the real heart of the novel is Sandford's striking presentation of the symbiotic relationship between his two killers and his gradual revelation of their essential characters. Clara Rink, a brisk, efficient professional hitwoman with dozens of murders to her credit, reveals an aspect of her nature that is surprisingly human, even vulnerable, while Carmel Loan, a pillar of the community with impeccable credentials, reveals a previously undiscovered taste for murder, mayhem, and conspiracy. It is Carmel who initiates most of the novel's more violent interludes, Carmel whose maneuverings lead to a final, bloody confrontation with Lucas Davenport.

Sandford — pseudonym of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Camp — writes clean, clear, highly kinetic prose that moves the action along at a pace only slightly short of the speed of light. The momentum of his writing galvanizes the narrative, enabling it to surmount and survive the occasional lapse in credibility (as, for example, when one of Carmel's dying victims scratches an important clue into his skin with his fingernails, a singularly unconvincing plot device I would never have expected from Sandford). Mostly, though, Certain Prey is an intelligent and authoritative thriller, a certified page-turner that rarely takes a questionable step. It may not exactly be art, but it is polished, professional entertainment of a high order and should more than meet the expectations of its author's large, and loyal, following.

—Bill Sheehan

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. He is currently working on a book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub.

From the Publisher

The #1 New York Times Bestselling series featuring Lucas Davenport.

Of all the criminals that Lucas Davenport has hunted, none has been as frighteningly intelligent as the woman who's hunting him now.

The Mystery Reader.com - Dede Anderson

In what may be his most intriguing Prey book in years, John Sandford delivers a brutal, witty, at times even gruesomely funny, but always entertaining, chase. The vivid and complex Clara and Carmel are worthy adversaries for Lucas' hard-earned crime solving skills – skills that, at times, seem almost too magical....The action is non-stop, the pace breathless and, best of all, the great Lucas Davenport has finally met his match.

Kirkus Reviews

After ten thrillers in his series about Minneapolis cop Lucas Davenport (Secret Prey, 1998, etc.), Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist John Camp, writing under his Sandford pen name, hits a home run over the curve of the earth as the brilliantly swift Certain Prey sinks a meat hook under the reader's jaw on page one and never lets up. In the opening scene, Clara Rinker, a 16-year-old runaway and nude dancer, is raped one night behind her St. Louie nudie bar and within two pages she has her revenge, battering her fat-trucker rapist's head in with a metal baseball bat. Her coolness about the murder leads her to become a hit woman for the Mafia. By age 20, reader-friendly Clara's making so much money as an assassin-for-hire that she goes to business school to figure out how best to use the cash she's been piling up under various names. When Minneapolis defense attorney Carmel Loan decides she wants a rival removed, she has a Mafia client hire Clara for her. Clara does the hit, killing Barbara Allen, but a cop witnesses the deed and is shot as well. Which draws in Lucas. Will the spiritedly attractive villain survive her encounter with Lucas and go on, like Hannibal Lecter, to enjoy an even greater feast of crimes? Top suspense. (Book-of-the-Month main selection)

Details from Seller

• ISBN: 0425174271
• Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
• Pub. Date: February 2000
• Condition:

Comments from the Seller: 0425174271 6.9 x 4.1 x 1 inches Amazon.com In the 10th installment of his popular Prey series, John Sandford (a.k.a. John Camp) pits his popular antihero, Lucas Davenport, against a pair of cunning killers unlike any he has encountered before. Attorney Carmel Loan is preternaturally beautiful, intelligent, and ambitious. When she becomes infatuated with fellow barrister Hale Allen, she isn't going to let a little thing like his being married get in her way. A quick meeting with an ex-client sets up the hit on Hale's wife, Barbara. The professional killer, Clara Rinker, is one of the best in the business. Smart, attractive, with a gentle Southern drawl, no one would suspect her of being a top Mafia hit man... er, hit person. When she takes the Allen assignment, she figures it will be easy money for a day's work. But things go wrong from the beginning. Loan's ex-client made a tape of the meeting, and is shaking her down for money. Worse, the shooting of a witness--a cop--brings deputy inspector Lucas Davenport into ...

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

John Sandford: All right.

John Sandford: I was a newspaper reporter for more than 20 years, and the basis for most of the things that I write, I have actually seen. I take an actual event, but I don't use it in a straightforward way; rather, I blend it with other things I have seen and give it a fictional twist and change it in ways that appeal to me, and they eventually come out as the fictional product. So it is almost like engineering in that I take all these small parts that I have accumulated over 20 years of newspaper reporting, then I build them together into a new story, but most of the parts are things that I have seen or witnessed.

John Sandford: The problem of keeping the novels fresh is one of my biggest problems. I may come up with many different story ideas over a year, and most of them get rejected as I try to work slowly toward the idea that will become the next novel. Most of the differences in the novels are in character, in the person of the villain, although other characters, like Davenport, change through time. I can't completely explain how you keep something fresh, but I can tell you that it is one of the major struggles that I go through. As for the writing, I find that the only way I can do it is to get on a pretty hard schedule -- and I do it every day -- so I work from an office building in downtown St. Paul in a regular office suite, and I show up in the late evening, usually at eight o'clock, and typically work till 1 or 2am. By keeping myself on a schedule, in an office setting rather than in my home, I push myself into a work mode where I have no alternative but to work; there is no place to go and fool around. If you look at a typical newspaper column, it will have 750 words in it top to bottom; those guys are producing 750 to a thousand words a day five days a week. If you can do that, you can write a novel the length of my novel in about seven months, so that is what it comes down to. In addition to the creativity, you actually have to work very hard, and that involves four or five hours a day, six of seven days a week for six or seven months.

John Sandford: When I am trying to get into a specific voice, I have to imagine myself talking for the character or having the character talk to me, and then I just try to listen and see if he sounds like himself. Sometimes this involves reading what I have just written aloud. The problem of voice is critical because it is one of the things that distinguishes your characters from each other in the book, and you therefore must have a tight grasp of your character's personality before he starts to speak. So if you were to think of yourself as a New Yorker talking to a guy from Iowa, you would imagine the rhythms and words of his speech would be different from a man from Brooklyn. What you have to do is get close enough to your character that you can hear those things as they naturally come out. As for the Kidd book, a number of people have asked me if there will ever be another one; it is almost the most common question I get asked. My son, who is a computer guy, kept bugging me about this until I finally told him that if he would block out the story and help me with the plot twists, then I would write another Kidd novel. He is doing that and we are about 30,000 words into the novel, which is about one-third of the way. We will now have to set it aside while I work on a Prey novel, then we will pick it up next spring and finish it, and we hope to publish it in autumn of the year 2000, assuming that our computers still work...

John Sandford: Actually there is no single key, but two of the more important ones are motion and detail. The opening paragraph of the book should have substantial movement that begins to carry the reader away. You should not open, in my opinion, with static description or background. You should open with action and keep it going. The second key is detail -- in which you represent some particular aspect of the world in very sharp relief. If you go to a bar and write down the things you see in the smallest detail that you can imagine -- if you write down the kinds of liquor bottles behind the bar and what they look like and what the bar looks like and what the stools look like and what is on the floor, you will surprise yourself with the vividness of the writing. If you simply imagine a bar without looking at one, the writing will be stale. So the very best writing seems to me to come from immediate experience. I was fortunate enough to come from a newspaper background where I experienced or encountered many of the types of scenes that occur in my genre. I know that cops laugh at crime scenes and tell jokes. I know that some criminals are very personable and that some of them look like clerks. I know what the inside of a police station looks like, and during the course of writing one of my novels, I try to experience all of those things over again. Where my novels most often fall into routine or colorlessness are those places where I haven't recently seen what I am talking about -- where I am just making it up and that is it.

John Sandford: Not very much. I was on a radio show in the Twin Cities -- the host is a friend of mine who I play golf with -- and he told his listeners that when you look at me walking down the golf course, wearing a fishing hat, you would not believe the things that I think of. In a way, I am like some of my criminal characters who are just ordinary people with one large, monstrous anomaly. I am just a guy with a 16 handicap in golf who has the monstrous anomaly that he writes crime fiction.

John Sandford: I was in Chicago on Wednesday. Sorry I missed you...

John Sandford: The short answer is no. However, the newspaper business began converting to computers in the middle 1970s. My first editing job involved working with a remarkably unpleasant computer that crashed constantly and had to be rebooted with paper tape. I was given a class in working with this computer, the easy mechanical parts. Later on I was sent to a seminar in political polling methods, where I was trained to work with the SPSS stats package and computers that were programmed with punch cards. In the late 1970s I started working with the earliest Radio Shack computers for writing...and I learned some BASIC programming. So I don't have a formal knowledge of computers, but they have been in my life for 25 years, and I have some understanding of the way they work. The rest of it is faked.

John Sandford: Most of the Asian distribution, including Singapore, is done through the English publisher, Hodder-Headline. The book has been published and should reach Singapore fairly quickly. Or you could buy the book at barnesandnoble.com.

John Sandford: The thing about the Herald was it was in such an exciting city -- it was called the Casablanca of America -- that it seemed to attract writers who were caught up in the excitement of the city itself. There are all kinds of great writers in Florida now, not just at the Herald. But of course if you are trying to start a writing career, a place like the Herald is a good place to go. Carl Hiaasen still works there. Edna works there sometimes; Dave Barry is about to publish a novel. John Katzenbach has worked out of the Herald; I don't know if James Hall ever worked for the Herald, but he fits right in there. And over on the other coast, Randy Wayne White is almost the natural successor to John D. MacDonald. I should mention that Randy, one of my favorite authors, has also produced one of my favorite nonfiction titles, BATFISHING IN THE RAINFOREST. Florida has a good bunch of people -- produced, I think, by the excitements and the tensions of the state and the attractions that has for writers.

John Sandford: I think Davenport may have a few more surprises left. I have contracted for three more books, and I already have a pretty good idea of what the three are about. Whether I could do more after that, I don't yet know. I would like to end the series before he becomes stale. Although I will say, that Robert Parker has been writing the Spenser series for a lot longer than I have been writing the Davenport series, and Parker hasn't gotten stale at all. If I could emulate Parker, I may have another half a dozen in me.

John Sandford: I have always wanted to own a golf course. I even have the name for the golf course --Rattlesnake. I have this vague idea that I could perhaps end the Davenport series in some upbeat way and then come back with a novel called RATTLESNAKE that is set on a golf course, which involves a crime and in which Davenport is a major character but not the major character. I would then continue with the series of Rattlesnake novels built around a kind of repertory company of golf course characters involved in solving various crimes. It sounds goofy, but I suspect it would be a lot of fun. People at my golf course have suggested the opening scene of the first book, where a guy blasts out of the sand trap and when he looks down to where his ball was, he sees a nose sticking out of the sand. It turns out he has found the dead body of the golf pro, who had disappeared a couple of days earlier, and that is all I have on that one.

John Sandford: I had no input into it, although the movie input into my checking account. The movie was okay, but I thought it was terribly bleak -- much more bleak than I had anticipated. I think any kind of story needs some relief, and I am not sure that the movie had enough of that.

John Sandford: No. I usually try to avoid using any real businesses in a major way in a story. But if I use them almost in a news sense -- that is, as part of a scene, I just feel free to go ahead and do that.

John Sandford: Lucas -- although he seems almost like a friend that I haven't bumped into for a while -- is actually something of an engineering project. I took what I know about a lot of cops, then I blended that with my ideas that I got from fictional characters and added a little touch of a movie star or two and came up with the final character. To keep him interesting I had to give him a lot of interests so that he has an insight into a lot of different aspects to life. Because I was also interested in attracting women readers I wanted somebody who would be attractive to women, not in the usual sense of attractive, but in the sense that they would find him engaging.

John Sandford: Yes, I will. Starting Sunday and on Monday, but I don't have my schedule with me right now and can't tell you where exactly I will be. However, if you put John Sandford into a search engine like Alta Vista, you should kick up a web page that somewhere in the address has the word "Rehov" -- that is a web page put up by my son and should have the full schedule on it.

John Sandford: What Rebecca may be asking about is the main character in MIND PREY, who was played by Eriq LaSalle, who is black, while Davenport is portrayed in the novels as a white guy. One of the reasons Eriq was chosen for the part was that he combined the sense of intelligence with the capacity and perhaps even attraction for violence. That is Davenport. Eriq was just fine in the Davenport role, although I think the movie had some problems in other areas. As for the minor characters in the movie, they were not exactly as I would have seen them as I described them in my novel. But you aren't going to get that in any movie. I do think the police chief was an excellent choice, and Sloan was also right on target.

John Sandford: I don't save books. I read them right away. Robert Parker has an excellent book out. I am reading HOME TOWN by Tracy Kidder. Robert Crais has a book that I am waiting for. And Patricia Cornwell I understand is due out in the middle of July. So that is what I am reading now and looking forward to.

John Sandford: I am aging at the rate of three months per real year. That is what I have in my head. When I finish with the series, Lucas will still be in his middle to late 40s, and although I am not sure, I believe I will probably have him achieve some kind of domestic success and happiness -- diapers and all that. But that is a way to go yet.

John Sandford: I have done journalism, I have written two nonfiction books and about 13 novels, and I enjoy them all. But the one thing that I would never want to give up would be the writing of fiction, and crime fiction or thriller fiction or adventure fiction -- or whatever you want to call it -- is my genre. I read a lot of history, but I am not competent to write it. Outside of history, I am a fan of other writers in my genre, and I really enjoy writing in it and reading it. So all considerations aside and even if I weren't making money at it, I would continue writing this kind of fiction.

John Sandford: I would recommend that everybody stop buying Star Wars books and start buying this one.

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

    Clara Rinker.

    Of the three unluckiest days in Barbara Allen's life, the first was the day Clara Rinker was raped behind a St. Louis nudie bar called Zanadu, which was located west of the city in a dusty checkerboard of truck terminals, warehouses and light assembly plants. Zanadu, as its chrome-yellow I-70 billboard proclaimed, was E-Z On, E-Z Off. The same was not true of Clara Rinker, despite what Zanadu's customers thought.

    Rinker was sixteen when she was raped, a small athletic girl, a dancer, an Ozarks runaway. She had bottle-blond hair that showed darker roots, and a body that looked wonderful in V-necked, red-polka-dotted, thin cotton dresses from Kmart. A body that drew the attention of cowboys, truckers and other men who dreamt of Nashville.

    Rinker had taken up nude dancing because she could. It was that, fuck for money or go hungry. The rape took place at two o'clock in the morning on an otherwise delightful April night, the kind of night when midwestern kids are allowed to stay out late and play war, when cicadas hum down from their elm-bark hideaways. Rinker had closed the bar that night; she was the last dancer up.

    Four men were still drinking when she finished. Three were hound-faced long-distance truckers who had nowhere to go but the short beds in their various Kenworths, Freightliners and Peterbilts; and one was a Norwegian exotic-animal dealer drowning the sorrows of a recent mishap involving a box of boa constrictors and thirty-six thousand dollars' worth of illegal tropical birds.

    A fifth man, a slope-shouldered gorilla named Dale-Something, had walked out of the bar halfway through Rinker's last grind. He left behind twelve dollars in crumpled ones and two small sweat rings where his forearms had been propped on the bar. Rinker had worked down the bar-top, stopping for ten seconds in front of each man for what the girls called a crack shot. Dale-Something had gotten the first shot, and he had stood up and walked out as soon as she moved to the next guy. When she was done, Rinker hopped off the end of the bar and headed for the back to get into her street clothes.

    A few minutes later, the bartender, a University of Missouri wrestler named Rick, knocked on the dressing room door and said, "Clara? Will you close up the back?"

    "I'll get it," she said, pulling a fuzzy pink tube top over her head, shaking her ass to get it down. Rick respected the dancers' privacy, which they appreciated; it was purely a psychological thing, since he worked behind the bar, and spent half his night looking up their ...

    Anyway, he respected their privacy.

    When she was dressed, Rinker killed the lights in the dressing room, walked down to the ladies' room, checked to make sure it was empty, which it always was, and then did the same for the men's room, which was also empty, except for the ineradicable odor of beer-flavored urine. At the back door, she snapped out the hall lights, released the bolt on the lock and stepped outside into the soft evening air. She pulled the door shut, heard the bolt snap, rattled the door handle to make sure that it was locked and headed for her car.

    A rusted-out Dodge pickup crouched on the lot, two-thirds of the way down to her car. A battered aluminum camper slumped on the back, with curtains tangled in the windows. Every once in a while, somebody would drink too much and would wind up sleeping in his car behind the place; so the truck was not exactly unprecedented. Still, Rinker got a bad vibe from it. She almost walked back around the building to see if she could catch Rick before he went out the front.

    Almost. But that was too far and she was probably being silly and Rick was probably in a hurry and the truck was dark, nothing moving ...

Dale-Something was sitting on the far side of it, hunkered down in the pea gravel, his back against the driver's-side door. He'd been waiting for twenty minutes with decreasing patience, chewing breath mints, thinking about her. Somewhere, in the deep recesses of his mind, breath mints were a concession to gentility, as regarded women. He chewed them as a favor to her.

    When he heard the back door closing, he levered his butt off the ground, peeked through a car window, saw her coming, alone. He waited, crouched behind the car: he was a big guy, much of his bigness in fat, but he took pride in his size anyway.

    And he was quick: Rinker never had a chance.

    When she stepped around the truck, keys rattling in her hand, he came out of the dark and hit her like an NFL tackle. The impact knocked her breath out; she lay beneath him, gasping, the gravel cutting her bare shoulders. He flipped her over, twisting her arms, clamping both of her skinny wrists in one hand and the back of her neck in the other.

    And he said, his minty breath next to her ear, "You fuckin' scream and I'll break your fuckin' neck."

    She didn't fuckin' scream because something like this had happened before, with her stepfather. She had screamed and he almost had broken her fuckin' neck. Instead of screaming, Rinker struggled violently, thrashing, spitting, kicking, swinging, twisting, trying to get loose. But Dale-Something's hand was like a vise on her neck, and he dragged her to the camper, pulled open the door, pushed her inside, ripped her pants off and did what he was going to do in the flickering yellow illumination of the dome light.

    When he was done, he threw her out the back of the truck, spit on her, said, "Fuckin' bitch, you tell anybody about this, and I'll fuckin' kill ya." That was most of what she remembered about it later: lying naked on the gravel, and getting spit on; that, and all the wiry hair on Dale's fat wobbling butt.

Rinker didn't call the cops, because that would have been the end of her job. And, knowing cops, they probably would have sent her home to her step-dad. So she told Zanadu's owners about the rape. The brothers Ernie and Ron Battaglia were concerned about both Rinker and their bar license. A nudie joint didn't need sex crimes in the parking lot.

    "Jeez," Ron said when Rinker told him about the rape. "That's terrible, Clara. You hurt? You oughta get yourself looked at, you know?"

    Ernie took a roll of bills from his pocket, peeled off two hundreds, thought about it for a couple of seconds, peeled off a third and tucked the three hundred dollars into her backup tube top. "Get yourself looked at, kid."

    She nodded and said, "You know, I don't wanna go to the cops. But this asshole should pay for what he did."

    "We'll take care of it," Ernie offered.

    "Let me take care of it," Rinker said.

    Ron put up an eyebrow. "What do you want to do?"

    "Just get him down the basement for me. He said something about being a roofer, once. He works with his hands. I'll get a goddamn baseball bat and bust one of his arms."

    Ron looked at Ernie, who looked at Rinker and said, "That sounds about right. Next time he comes in, huh?"

They didn't do it the next time he came in, which was a week later, looking nervous and shifty-eyed, like he might not be welcomed. Rinker refused to work with Dale-Something at the bar, and when she cornered Ernie in the kitchen, he told her that, goddamnit, they were right in the middle of tax season and neither he nor Ron had the emotional energy for a major confrontation.

    Rinker kept working on them, and the second time Dale-Something showed up, which was two days after tax day, the brothers were feeling nasty. They fed him drinks and complimentary peanuts and kept him talking until after closing. Rick the bartender hustled the second-to-the-last guy out, and left himself, not looking back; he knew something was up.

    Then Ron came around the bar, and Ernie got Dale-Something looking the other way, and Ron nailed him with a wild, out-of-the-blue roundhouse right that knocked Dale off the barstool. Ron landed on him, rolled him, and Ernie raced around the bar and threw on a pro-wrestling death lock. Together, they dragged a barely resisting Dale-Something down the basement stairs.

    The brothers had him on his feet and fully conscious by the time Rinker came down, carrying her aluminum baseball bat; or rather, T-ball bat, which had a better swing-weight for a small woman.

    "I'm gonna sue you fuckers for every fuckin' dime you got," Dale-Something said, sputtering blood through his split lip. "My fuckin' lawyer is doin' the money-dance right now, you fucks ..."

    "Fuck you, you ain't doing shit," Ron said. "You raped this little girl."

    "What do you want, Clara?" Ernie asked. He was standing behind Dale with his arms under Dale's armpits, his hands locked behind Dale's neck. "You wanna arm or a leg?"

    Rinker was standing directly in front of Dale-Something, who glowered at her: "I'm gonna ..." he started.

    Rinker interrupted: "Fuck legs," she said. She whipped the bat up, and then straight back down on the crown of Dale-Something's head.

    The impact sounded like a fat man stepping on an English walnut. Ernie, startled, lost his death grip and Dale-Something slipped to the floor like a two-hundred-pound blob of Jell-O.

    "Holy shit," Ron said, and crossed himself.

    Ernie prodded Dale-Something with the toe of his desert boot, and Dale blew a bubble of blood. "He ain't dead," Ernie said.

    Rinker's bat came up, and she hit Dale again, this time in the mastoid process behind the left ear. She hit him hard; her step-dad used to make her chop wood for the furnace, and her swing had some weight and snap behind it. "That ought to do it," she said.

    Ernie nodded and said, "Yup." Then they all looked at each other in the light of the single bare bulb, and Ron said to Rinker, "Some heavy shit, Clara. How do you feel about this?"

    Clara looked at Dale-Something's body, the little ring of black blood around his fat lips, and said, "He was a piece of garbage."

    "You don't feel nothin'?" Ernie asked.

    "Nothin'." Her lips were set in a thin, grim line.

    After a minute, Ron looked up the narrow wooden stairs and said, "Gonna be a load `n' a half getting his ass outa the basement."

    "You got that right," Ernie said, adding, philosophically, "I coulda told him there ain't no free pussy."

Dale-Something went into the Mississippi and his truck was parked across the river in Granite City, from which spot it disappeared in two days. Nobody ever asked about Dale, and Rinker went back to dancing. A few weeks later, Ernie asked her to sit with an older guy who came in for a beer. Rinker cocked her head and Ernie said, "No, it's okay. You don't have to do nothin'."

    So she got a longneck Bud and went to sit with the guy, who said he was Ernie's aunt's husband's brother. He knew about Dale-Something. "You feeling bad about it yet?"

    "Nope. I'm a little pissed that Ernie told you about it, though," Rinker said, taking a hit on the Budweiser.

    The older man smiled. He had very strong, white teeth to go with his black eyes and almost-feminine long lashes. Rinker had the sudden feeling that he might show a girl a pretty good time, although he must be over forty. "You ever shoot a gun?" he asked.

That's how Rinker became a hit lady. She wasn't spectacular, like the Jackal or one of those movie killers. She just took care of business, quietly and efficiently, using a variety of silenced pistols, mostly .22s. Careful, close-range killings became a trademark.

    Rinker had never thought of herself as stupid, just as someone who hadn't yet had her chance. When the money from the killings started coming in, she knew that she didn't know how to handle it. So she went to the Intercontinental College of Business in the mornings, and took courses in bookkeeping and small business. When she was twenty, getting a little old for dancing nude, she got a job with the Mafia guy, working in a liquor warehouse. And when she was twenty-four, and knew a bit about the business, she bought a bar of her own in downtown Wichita, Kansas, and renamed it the Rink.

    The bar did well. Still, a few times a year, Rinker'd go out of town with a gun and come back with a bundle of money. Some she spent, but most she hid, under a variety of names, in a variety of places. One thing her step-dad had taught her well: sooner or later, however comfortable you might be at the moment, you were gonna have to run.

(Continues...)