Free Certain Prey by John Sandford

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 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 sake, Rolo, I can’t 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 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, jaywalking when she caught a red light, wondering what was happening with Rinker. R OLANDO D’A QUILA 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 gray-suited man with a briefcase between them. Then gray 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