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 round-house 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 Jello.

'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 nothing?' Ernie asked.

'Nothing.' 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 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.

Carmel Loan.

Carmel was long, sleek, and expensive, like a new Jaguar.

She had a small head, with a tidy nose, thin pale lips, a square chin and small pointed tongue. She was a Swede, way back, and blonde – one of the whippet

Swedes with small breasts, narrow hips, and a long waist in between. She had the eyes of a bird of prey, a raptor. Carmel was a defense attorney in Minneapolis, one of the top two or three. Most years, she made comfortably more than a million dollars.

Carmel lived in a fabulously cool high-rise apartment in downtown Minneapolis, all blond-wood floors and white walls with black-and-white photos by Ansel Adams and Diane Arbus and Minor White, but nobody as gauche and come-lately as Robert

Mapplethorpe. Amid all the black-and-white, there were perfect touches of bloody-murder-red in the furniture and carpets and even her car, a Jaguar XK8, had a custom bloody-murder-red paint job.

On the second of the three unluckiest days in Barbara Allen's life, Carmel Loan decided that she was truly, genuinely and forever in love with Hale Allen,

Barbara Allen's husband.

Hale Allen, a property and real-estate attorney, was the definitive heart-throb. He had near-black hair that fell naturally over his forehead in little ringlets, warm brown eyes, a square chin with a dimple, wide shoulders, big hands and narrow hips. He was a perfect size forty-two, a little over six feet tall, with one slightly chipped front tooth. The knot of his tie was always askew, and women were always fixing it. Putting their hands on him. He had an easy-jock way with the women, chatting them up, playing with them.

Hale Allen liked women; and not just for sex. He liked to talk with them, shop with them, drink with them, jog with them – all without losing some essential lupine manliness. He had given Carmel reason to believe that he found her not unattractive. Whenever Carmel saw him, something deep inside her got plucked.

Despite his looks and easy manner with women, Hale Allen was not the sharpest knife in the dishwasher. He was content with boiler-plate law, the arranging of routine contracts, and made nowhere near as much money as Carmel. That made little difference to a woman who'd found true love. Stupidity could be overlooked, Carmel thought, if a woman felt a genuine physical passion for a man. Besides, Hale would look very good standing next to the stone fireplace at her annual Christmas party, a scotch in hand, and perhaps a cheerful bloody murder-red bowtie; she'd do the talking.

Unfortunately, Hale appeared to be permanently tied to his wife, Barbara.

By her money, Cartnel thought. Barbara had a lot of it, through her family. And though Hale's cerebral filament might not burn as brightly as others, he knew fifty million bucks when he saw them. He knew where that sixteen-hundred-dollar black cashmere Giorgio Armani sportcoat came from…

Allen's tie to his wife – or to her money, anyway -left few acceptable options for a woman of Carmel's qualities.

She wouldn't hang around and yearn, or get weepy and depressed, or drunk enough to throw herself at him. She'd do something. like kill the wife.

Five years earlier, Carmel had gone to court and had shredded the evidentiary procedures followed by a young St. Paul cop after a routine traffic stop had turned into a major drug bust.