With the two men outside, she hurried, quietly as she could, down to the van, backed it up to the dumpster, and dragged the two bodies into the back.

She was tired. The bigger of the two guys probably went two-ten, maybe two twenty. He was a lot of work. She sat for a moment in the van, catching her breath, and then started out. Ten minutes later, she was in the countryside.

Fifteen minutes after the dumpster, she was crawling down a one-lane track, next to a creek. She remembered the place from a country ramble earlier in the year; she remembered the unfenced cornfield that bordered on the track.

The dawn was coming as she dragged the men through a patch of weeds, ten rows back into the corn. With any luck, they wouldn't be found until October, when the corn was picked. Before she left, she took their wallets, pocketed the money

– a little over a thousand, total – and their drivers licenses. On the way back to town, she fed the miscellaneous paper in the wallets out the window, little anonymous scraps every couple hundred yards or so. In town, she stopped at trash can and dumped the two empty wallets themselves.

Done.

Back to the apartment, up the stairs. A little after six o'clock in the morning: a little less than three hours before the banks opened. She'd spend it, she decided, wiping the place again. Every coat hanger, every Coke can, every can and bottle in the cupboards and refrigerator. At the end, she wrote two notes – the first, a note to the landlord:

Sorry to do this to you, Larry, to skip out on the lease, but you've got the last month's rent, and I'm sure you can move the place in a hurry. I've got bad personal problems with my ex – if the asshole does find me he's gonna kill me – and I gotta get out of here. You can have the furniture and everything else in the place, instead of the rent. Sorry again, and have a good life. – Clara.

The landlord was greedy enough that he'd be moving the furniture out ten minutes after he got the note. If he could move somebody else in, in a hurry, she'd have that much less to worry about, involving fingerprints.

The second note she put in an envelope, which she sealed. She scrawled the St.

Louis' guy's name on it, and under that wrote, 'Private.'

The bank took five minutes, in a private booth. She spent most of the time wiping the box; much of the rest of the time putting one hundred and eighty thousand dollars in a brown paper bag. She also collected a brown cardboard folder that held her best, bottom-line, last-chance ID: credit cards, a Missouri driver's license, a passport and up-to-date plates and registration for her car.

And a deed: the deed sold The Rink to James Larimore -Wooden Head – for

8175,000, a fair price six years ago when she'd bought the place, and then two months later sold it to Wooden Head. The sale had been a technical one, though witnessed by all the proper authorities. Until Wooden Head had the deed in his hands, Rinker was the owner. Now, he would get it; and he was getting a deal.

Wooden Head was waiting at the bar, in the back. He had a head the size of a regulation NBA basketball, but squared a bit, and small, delicate features and tight, dry eyes all squeezed into the middle of his face. He brought a briefcase with him.

'What we've got to do, is this,' Rinker told him. 'You gotta take a walk, so you don't see it. Then I'm gonna get a bottle of Lysol and wipe everything in the office, and up and down the stairs. I'll take everything out of the files that you need, and we'll run it through the Xerox machine. Probably no more than fifty or sixty pieces. I don't want any prints left behind.'

'When do you want me back?'

'Give me an hour. It'd be best if you just sat across the street in the doughnut place, read the papers for while. Then I could find you if I need you…'

'Okay.'

'You guys are getting a deal,' Rinker said. 'And here – you can read this while you're eatin' the doughnuts.' She handed him the deed. 'This place is worth four, if it's worth a dime. You might get four-and-a-half.'

'We're taking a risk,' he grunted. 'Covering for ya.'

'A lot less risk if you keep wiping the place after I'm gone,' Rinker said.

'When the cops show up, if they do, you don't want to have anything to do with me. I left a note for my landlord saying I was having trouble with my ex, so you might say I told you that.'

'It's weak,' Wooden Head said.

'So what? It's what I got, and it's better than nothing. Half the cops'll figure

I'm buried in a cornfield somewhere.' Wooden Head's eyes slid away from hers. He knew about the two guys at the apartment, she thought.

'All right,' he said. 'I'll be back in an hour.'

The bar was a quick rerun of the apartment: she wiped everything, Xeroxed critical papers using plastic disposable gloves, dumped everything she didn't want in plastic garbage bags, and cried for a while. When Wooden Head came back, she was ready to go.

'By the way,' she said, 'Give this note to the Guy. It's private.' She handed him the sealed envelope, picked up her briefcase, took a last look around.

'You going back to the apartment?' he asked.

'Yeah I've gotta wipe that, too,? she said. 'But who knows? Maybe the cops'll never find it.' She looked at her watch: almost ten. The pilot would wait until noon. Plenty of time.

'The money's clean,' Wooden Head said, as his good-bye. 'Enjoy yourself.'

She stopped at that, peered at him: 'You know what I do? For a living?'

'I've got an idea.'

'Then you'll take me seriously when I tell you this: if this money's not clean,

I'll come for you.'

And she was gone.

Wooden Head walked out to the main bar and watched through the windows as Rinker climbed into the beat-up van and drove away. Then he picked up a phone, called a number in Los Angeles, and was tripped through a switchboard to St. Louis.

'Yeah?'

'It's me. She's on her way to the apartment.'

'Okay. You give her the money?'

'Yeah. She says if it's not clean, she'll come for me.'

'Nothing to worry about, in five minutes,' the Guy said.

'It's clean anyway/Wooden Head said. 'By the way, she gave me an envelope to give to you.'

'What's in it?'

'I don't know.' He held it up to a kitchen light. 'It's sealed up, and it says,

Private.'

'Open the fuckin' thing.'

Wooden Head opened it, shook out the message and the two driver's licenses. The names on the licenses meant nothing to him.

'There's a note that says, 'I'll give you this one. Try again, and I'll come visit.' And there are two drivers' licenses. The names are…'

'I know the names, you don't have to say them,' the Guy said. After a long silence, Wooden Head said, 'You still there?'

'Yeah.' More silence. Then, 'Listen, you sure that money was clean?'

Wooden Head nodded at the phone. 'Yeah, it was clean. It came from the political fund.'

'Good thing,' the Guy said. He sounded a little shaky. 'Goddamn good thing.'