'You'll kill me if I get in the car.'
Rinker shook her head. 'No. We can't be sure about the tape – how many copies you've made. But we figure you've got at least one, and we want that one. After that, you're on warning: if a third tape ever shows up, we're gonna kill you, no questions. But we want to make that clear to you.'
'My leg's killing me.'
'No, it's not. But I might be. Follow me into the car,' Rinker said. She sat down, the end of the muzzle never leaving his breastbone. She slid across the seat, and Rolo followed. 'Drive,' she said.
'Where're we going?'
'Home,' Rinker said. 'Your place.'
Carmel found them sitting in the front room, Rolo in an easy chair with a ripped sheet wrapped tightly around his left leg. Rinker was on a couch, her pistols held carefully across her lap. Carmel noticed that the pistols now had silencers attached to their muzzles. 'I had to shoot him a little,' Rinker said, her voice flat, uninflected, as though shooting Rolo was nothing at all. 'Did you look at the tape?'
'Yeah, I looked at the tape,' Carmel said. She was carrying her handbag and a sack from a hardware store, which clanked when she dropped it by her foot. 'It starts out with him telling me that it was only a copy, that he has another, and that he needs a little more money.'
'I'll give you the tape,' Rolo said. 'Just get me to the hospital.'
Carmel pulled a chair up and sat in front of his and said, 'Look at me, Rolo.
How many tapes did you make?'
'Just two,' he said. 'Honest to God, I was gonna give you the only one, but then
I got to thinking… so I made another one. Why would I make any more? As long as I got the original, I can make as many as I want.'
'Where is it? The second one?'
'Not here,' he said. 'I put it in my safe-deposit box. I figured if anything like this happened, you couldn't kill me. You'd have to take me to the bank.'
'You put it in a safe-deposit box?' Carmel asked.
'Yeah, at US Bank.'
'Look at me, Rolo.'
He looked at her, his eyes clear and honest.
'Where are the keys to the safe-deposit box?'
'Well, I… gave them to a friend to hold, this chick I know…'
'Oh, bullshit, Rolo.' Carmel looked at Rinker. 'He's lying.'
'I'm not lying,' Rolo protested. 'Look, I can call my friend..'
She turned back to him. 'Yeah, you are. You wouldn't give the keys to anyone, you'd hide them someplace.'
'I'm not lying,' Rolo protested. 'Look, I can call my friend…'
'What's her name?' Carmel asked. 'Quick…'
Rolo's eyes went sideways and he stumbled over a couple of syllables. 'Um, m, m,
Mary,' he said.
'Would that be the Virgin Mary?' Carmel asked sarcastically. To Rinker: 'He's lying.'
'Should I shoot him again? A little more this time?'
Carmel looked at Rolo for a moment, pulled on her lower lip, then shook her head slowly. 'Nope. I think we should just chain him up…' She touched the hardware store bag with her foot. '… See about this Mary. Tear the house apart. See if we find any safe deposit keys.'
'I don't think there is one,' Rinker said. 'I think I should shoot him again.'
'Jesus Christ,' Rolo said, listening to the argument.
'Let's just get him on the bed, so we don't have to watch him every minute, and try to work this out,' Carmel said to Rinker. She touched the bag again, with her foot, and looked at Rolo. 'We're gonna chain you to your bed and tear this place apart. Either that, or Pamela's gonna shoot you again, and then we're gonna tear this place apart. Are you gonna give us a hard time?'
'You're gonna kill me,' he said.
'Not if we don't have to,' Carmel said.
'You're both fuckin' crazy.'
'Which you should keep in mind.'
'Into the bedroom,' Rinker said, gesturing with the muzzle of the gun.
'My leg is killing me,' Rolo said.
Rinker dropped the muzzle toward his other leg and Rolo lurched forward, said,
'I'm going, for Christ's sake, I'm going.'
Rinker moved with him, just behind him, the gun pointed at his spine. 'Just stretch out on the bed,' she said, when they got to the bedroom door. 'No problems…'
They'd gotten a package of lightweight chain at the hardware store, the kind used for children's swings; a roll of duct tape at a pharmacy; and four keyed padlocks and two pair of yellow plastic kitchen gloves at a K-Mart. While Rinker leaned on the end of the bed, the gun ready, Carmel took a couple of turns of chain around Rolo's neck, wrapped the chain around the end of the bed and snapped on a lock. 'And his feet,' she said. She did his feet the same way. 'His arms,' Rinker said.
'Hmm,' Carmel said, looking at him, Finally she took a tight wrap of chain around one of his wrists, snapped on a padlock, leaned over the side of the bed, threw the chain beneath it, fished it out from the opposite side, took a wrap around Rolo's other wrist, and snapped on the last padlock. 'That's it for the chain,' Carmel said. She went back to the sack for the duct tape.
'What're you going to do with that?' Rolo asked.
'Tape up your mouth,' Carmel said.
Rolo thrashed a little against the chain, but it cut into his neck and he stopped and looked up at Carmel. 'Don't hurt me,' he said, his voice suddenly quiet.
'How many copies?' Carmel asked.
'Just the one,' Rolo said.
'And it's in your safety deposit box?'
'That's right. I'll get it for you.'
'Shut up,' Carmel said. She pulled off two feet of duct tape and wrapped it around his head, taping up his mouth.
Carmel and Rinker spent an hour ripping through the little house, working in the yellow plastic gloves. They dumped cupboards, closets, and dressers, looked through the small, dank, empty basement, poking their heads up into cobwebs and bug nests; they probed the equally empty ceiling crawl-space, which was stuffed with pink fiberglass insulation that stuck to their skin and tangled their hair.
They dumped all the ice-cube trays out of the refrigerator, dumped all the boxes in the cupboard, looked in the toilet tank, ripped the covers off all the electric outlets. They found a half-dozen tapes under the television, but their labels said they were pornographic, and when they pushed them into Rolo's cheap
VCR, pornography was what they got. They found two address books; checked his billfold and found more phone numbers. The video camera was on the floor of a closet: Rinker opened it, said, 'Empty,' and tossed it on the wooden floor, where it hit hard, and rolled. They also found a few tools, a lot of clothing, and odd bits of cheap jewelry.
They checked Rolo every few minutes. The chains immobilized him, and though he grunted at them, they ignored him and went back to pulling the house apart.
After an hour, it had become obvious that they weren't going to find the tape.
'It might still be here,' Rinker said finally, after she'd torn out the under seat lining of the couch and chair. 'We can't look everyplace – we'd need a wrecking ball.'
Carmel was in the bedroom doorway, looking at Rolo.
Finally, she walked around and ripped the tape off his mouth. He sputtered, and she said, 'Last chance, Rolo; tell me where the fuck it is.'
'In the bank,' he snarled. He'd won, he thought.
'Fuck you.' Carmel got the roll of tape and reached forward to slap it over his mouth, but he turned his head away. 'Turn your head this way,' she said.
'Hey, fuck you,' he said; and there was a tone in the way he said it.
'He's just achin' to be shot a little more,' Rinker said from the doorway.
'You'll kill me if you shoot me a little more,' Rolo said. 'I'm still bleeding from my leg. And if you kill me, the cops are going to open the safety deposit box… Hey!'
He said Hey! because Carmel had crawled on top of him. She sat on his chest, grabbed his head by the hair and pulled forward, hard, until he was choking on the chain. He thrashed some more, but had started making gargling sounds when she let his head drop. 'Keep your head straight,' she said, as he took a half dozen rasping breaths. 'You fuckin'…'