Every one of the four men knew too much about each of the others, and more than enough about Rinker. While any one of the four could have authored the assassination in Cancun, it was unlikely that any one of them would have done it on his own hook. They walked carefully around each other, and none of them would want to be blamed if something had gone wrong, as it had. They'd have talked.
Rinker slept in Pollock's room for three more days, going out at night, getting a handle on the town. She knew it well from her days as a dancer, and with Ross at the liquor warehouse, but there were always changes, and she'd never really surveyed it from the perspective of an assassin.
She needed to know what was open, and when. Where she could ditch, if she ran into trouble. Where she could pick up a car in a hurry. Where the targets did their business. As she wandered around town, she refined her ideas about her approaches to the targets.
One night, she dropped Pollock at a country joint with twenty dollars and a hand-sized Sony tape recorder, and told her to sit as close to the jukebox as she could, have a couple of beers, and tape-record the bar. Pollock did all of that, and Rinker listened to the tape on the way back home. The tape sounded fine, and reminded her of the Rink.
She made the first open move on a Monday night, with a stop at the BluesNote Cafe at LaClede's Landing on the river. The BluesNote was owned by John Sellos. The club had never done well, and without a variety of minor criminal activities-the barkeeps ran a sports-betting business, and a back room became an informal office for a fence and a branch office for one of Ross's loan sharks-the place would have closed fifteen years earlier. As it was, it struggled, and Sellos worried incessantly.
Rinker wore black jeans for the job, a black blazer, and black Nike running shoes. She carried one of the nine-millimeter pistols in her jacket pocket. She parked a block from the club and sat in the car for a while, gathering herself, watching the street.
She knew she frightened people, but she knew that was only an edge. Physically, she was in good shape, but a large man was still a large man. Even an out-of-shape cigarette freak like Jackie Burke in L.A., or Jimmy Cricket in San Francisco, could pull her arms off if he was pissed, or desperate, and forgot about her reputation for a minute.
That meant that when she wanted to talk to a man, she had to get on top of him immediately. She didn't have to flash the gun, but it had to be there, in his mind's eye, right from the start. She had to be the cold-eyed killer right inside his shirt.
A blond couple, the woman a little wobbly, and a single man in cowboy boots went into the BluesNote as she watched, and one man left. The man who left stopped just outside the door and looked up and down the street: looking for action, which meant that not much was going on inside the club. When Rinker had run her bar in Wichita, she'd hated the sight of a man looking both ways on the sidewalk outside. The Rink hadn't come through for him.
After watching for ten minutes, she got out of the car, hung a purse on her shoulder, and walked down to the club. The door was surrounded with predistressed wood that was now genuinely distressed; the doorknob rattled under her hand. She stepped inside the door, paused, let her eyes adjust to the gloom. A longhaired young man sat on a dais at the end of the main room, a guitar on one knee. He was saying, "… learned this song from an old Indian guy up in Dakota. I was working the wheat harvest, this was back in '99…"
Rinker thought, Jesus.
When she could see, Rinker walked along the left wall straight back to the kitchen doors, through the doors and up the stairs. She knew the place from her years at the liquor warehouse: Nothing had changed. The door at the upper landing was closed, but there was light coming through the crack at the bottom. She put a hand on the pistol in her pocket and pushed through the door.
Sellos was sitting behind his desk. When Rinker pushed through the door, without knocking, he jumped, saw her face, and settled back into his chair.
"You scared me," he said, smiling hopefully.
"Good," she said. She kept her hand in her pocket, noticed that Sellos was watching that hand, and said, "Yeah. I got a gun."
"You gonna shoot me? I haven't done anything to you." He was a thin man, with a big nose and a yellowish tint to his skin. He looked as though somebody large had blown nicotine and tar on him; he looked like he should be wearing a brown fedora.
"I didn't come here to shoot you," Rinker said. "I need about four of your cell phones, and I need you to make a call for me."
"Whatever's good," he said.
"If you mess with me, I'll shoot you right in the heart," Rinker said. She eased her hand out of her pocket, letting him see the gun with the fat snout. "I got no patience for being messed around."
His Adam's apple bobbed once, and he said, "I don't have the phones here. I gotta make a call."
"Call." She waggled the pistol at the phone.
He picked up the telephone, punched in four numbers, and said without preface, "Have Carl bring me up four phones. And you know that poster we got under the bar? Give him that, too, I want to show it to a guy."
"Who's Carl?" Rinker asked when he hung up.
"Old guy. Works for me. Could you put the gun away?"
"You got folk music downstairs, John," Rinker said. An accusation, and it made Sellos uncomfortable. She slipped the pistol back into her jacket pocket. They listened for a minute, and heard, faintly, through the floor, the singer's scratchy voice:… the Sioux and Arikara are gone, driven by the white man's trains, across those treasured free-wind plains, where the wheat waves like dollar bills, and overflows some banker's tills…
"Gotta pay the mortgage, Clara," he said. "The guy costs me nothin'."
"How're you gonna grow your bar traffic, John, with some asshole singing about freight trains and wheat? Folk music is worse than nothing. Hiring folksingers does nothing but encourage them. It's like letting cockroaches into your house."
"I gotta have something, and I can't hire country," Sellos said defensively. "Country people won't come down here. And blues are dead, except with the corduroy university crowd, and they can make a whole night out of a beer and a dish of free peanuts." They heard footsteps in the hallway, and both turned their heads: then a knock. Sellos got up, opened the door, took the phones and a piece of paper, said, "Thanks, Carl," and shut the door again. He stepped back behind his desk, looked at the back of the telephones for a few seconds, then put them where Rinker could reach them.
"How much?" Rinker asked.
"You don't have to pay," Sellos said. "Just take the fuckin' things."
"How long are they good for?"
"Couple of weeks, anyway. Two of them are arranged, the other two are on vacation." Arranged phones were phones that the owner arranged to have stolen, for a fee. Vacation phones were lifted in burglaries of people who were out of town.
"All right. You know the numbers for these phones?" Rinker asked.
"They're on the tape on the back."
She looked at the back of one of the phones, found a piece of white adhesive tape, with a number in blue ballpoint. "Write this down," she said. She read the number off, and Sellos wrote it on his desk pad. "Soon as I leave here, I want you to call Nanny Dichter on his private line and tell him to call me at this number. I don't talk when I'm driving, so I won't turn the phone on until I'm somewhere safe. But you tell him to call me, okay?"
"Are you and Nanny, uh… are you lookin' for each other?"
"You don't want to know about this, John. You call Nanny, tell him I want to talk about John Ross. Eleven o'clock, right around there."
"Nanny'll be pissed at me. " He shook his head sadly, thinking about it.
"No, he won't. Just get in touch with him when I leave, and tell him I was pointing a gun at your head. I'll tell him the same thing."