'We're gonna need some chain and a couple of padlocks and some other stuff…'
South Washington County Park was twenty miles south of St. Paul, a complex of hiking and skiing trails. Only two cars were parked in the entry lot, but their drivers were nowhere to be seen.
'Park down at the end,' Rinker said, pointing. Carmel parked, and they got out.
Rinker, carrying her leather backpack, led the way down a trail along a tiny creek, then up a hillside covered with thick-trunked oaks. At the top of the hill, she took a long look around, then led the way off the trail, back into the trees. After a minute, they came to a fence separating the park from a farm field. Rinker turned down the fence, finally said, 'Here.'
She stepped away from the fence, knelt next to an oak, and probed between two of its roots. The dirt was soft, and came away easily. After a minute, she pulled two automatic pistols from the ground, the dirt still clinging to them.
At that moment, Carmel was aware that she was out of sight of everyone, in a nearly deserted park, with a killer who now had two guns. If Rinker killed her, here and now, who would know, until some hiker way off the beaten path found her body? Rinker could take the Jag and park it downtown. Or who was to say that she hadn't somehow pre-positioned one of those cars in the parking lot down below?
The whole scenario flitted through Carmel's mind in a half-second. Rinker brushed dirt off the two pistols, put them in her leather backpack, and said,
'You worry too much.'
'I anticipate,' Carmel said.
'Why didn't you anticipate that Rolo was making a movie?' Rinker asked politely.
Carmel didn't dodge the question. She grimaced and said, 'I fucked up. I knew something wasn't right. I remember thinking that he wasn't embarrassed by the fact that he was living in a shit-hole, after years of being a big-time dealer.
Wasn't embarrassed. That was wrong.'
'At least you know you messed up,' Rinker said. The guns clinked in the bag as she hung it over one shoulder. 'We need to get some oil. When we get the chains and padlocks. Oil for the guns.'
'Doesn't burying them… sort of wreck them?'
'Yeah, it would if I left them buried for more than a couple of days. In a week they'd be rusted wrecks.
Then, even if somebody found them, there'd be no way to connect them to the death of Barbara Allen.' 'So you were just going to leave them.' 'Sure. You can get them for a couple hundred bucks apiece. I just didn't have time to deal with the airlines and all that.' Rinker glanced at her watch. 'Four hours to Rolo,' she said. 'We'd better get back to town.'
The Crystal Court is the interior courtyard of the tallest glass tower in
Minneapolis, a crossroads of the Minneapolis Skyway system. Carmel met Rolo on the ground floor: she was furiously angry, which Rinker said was perfect. 'If you weren't pissed, he'd be suspicious. The madder you are, the better.'
'I can fake it if I have to, but I don't think I'll have to,' Carmel said. 'I hate this: being extorted, somebody else squeezing you like this, and you're powerless.' She ground her teeth, felt control slipping away; held on tight.
'Not powerless,' Rinker said. 'Just the appearance of it…'
'But he has to think I am. The goddamn humiliation, that cocksucker…'
There was nothing faked about her anger when Rolo showed up, carrying the videotape in a brown beer sack from a convenience store. She was carrying the money in a cloth book-bag.
'You fuck,' Carmel hissed at him. 'You piece of shit. I should have let you go down for life, you fuckin' greaseball.'
Rolo took it calmly enough: 'Just give me the money, Carmel. I got your little movie right here, and we're all done.'
'We'd better be all done,' Carmel snarled. A white-haired man in a golf shirt glanced at her face as she passed, and it occurred to her that she probably looked like a cornered wolf, her face twisted with hate, anger and maybe fear.
She took a breath, straightened up, tried to pull herself together.
'Give me the tape,' she said.
'Give me the money first.'
'For Christ's sakes, Rolo, I can hardly grab it and run, can I? If a cop gets involved, I'm dead meat.'
Rolo thought about it for a minute, then said, 'Let me see the money.'
Carmel pulled open the top of the bag, let him look in. He nodded, grudgingly, and handed her the sack. She looked inside, saw the tape, shook her head and said, 'You fuck,' and he said, 'The money, Carmel,' and she handed him the bag.
'You'd better not be back,' Carmel said. 'I couldn't handle that.'
'Check the tape,' Rolo said, stepped into a stream of traffic, followed it to an escalator, and went up. A minute later, he was gone. The Crystal Court was five minutes from her apartment. Carmel had walked, because parking would have taken as long as walking, and now she hurried back, jay-walking when she caught a red light, wondering what was happening with Rinker.
Rolando D' Aquila had parked his broken-down piece-of-shit Dodge on the third floor of the Sixth Street parking ramp, the same ramp where Barbara Allen had been shot. Rinker was pleased: the situation had a nice symmetry, and she knew the ramp well, because of her previous scouting. Carrying her big green Dayton's
Department Store bag, she'd stayed well behind Rolo in the Skyways, blending with the crowd of heading-home shoppers and white-collar office workers. When she realized where they were going, she closed up, and when they pushed through the Skyway door into the ramp, was a dozen steps behind, with two other people between them.
She followed Rolo down the ramp, making no effort to hide, but keeping a grey suited man with a briefcase between them. Then grey suit turned off toward a black Buick, and she and Rolo continued on, single file. Rolo glanced back at her once, barely seeing her, and as he did, she glanced at her watch and looked diagonally past him, as if heading for a car at the end of the floor. But when
Rolo turned off to the brown-shoe-colored Dodge, she was only two steps behind him. He didn't even notice until she was a foot away. Then he turned, key in his hand, and before he could open his mouth, Rinker took the last step and the muzzle of the pistol came up from the shopping bag she was carrying and she said, 'If you make one fuckin' noise, I will shoot you in the fuckin' heart. If you think about it, you will know who I am.
And you'll know that I'll do it.'
Rolo stood stock-still for a long beat, then said, quietly, 'You can have the money back.'
'We'll take the money back, but we've got to talk for a while, you and Carmel and I.'
'Just take the money.'
'We're gonna get in the car, Rolo, and I'm gonna slide across the seat and you're gonna stand there, by the door, and if you make a noise, or make a move to run, I'm going to shoot you.'
'I don't think so,' Rolo said, trying to recover. 'There are too many people around.'
She shot him in the left leg. The little silenced. 22 made a sound like a clapping hand, and Rolo's leg dipped and he slumped against the car, his eyes wide.
'You shot me,' he said, his voice almost a whisper. He clasped the money bag under one arm; his free hand felt down his left leg, and came away to his face, scarlet with blood; and he could feel more blood trickling down his leg.
Rinker glanced around: Two other people walking down the ramp, neither one paying attention to the two of them. The gun itself was below the level of the cars, where it couldn't be seen. 'Open the car door, Rolo,' she said quietly; but the quiet tone carried the menace of death. 'Or the next one goes right in your eye.'
The black hole on the end of the pistol came up, and D' Aquila was seized with the sudden conviction that he could see the head of the bullet that lay down its maw. He fumbled the key into the car lock, opened the door.
'Stand still,' Rinker said. She stepped close to him, so close that they might have been lovers sharing a car-side kiss before heading home, and she pushed the muzzle of the. 22 under his breastbone and said, 'I'm going to get in. If you make a noise or try to run, I'll kill you. Do you understand that?'