"Gotcha," said Jimmy Cricket.

RINKER SPENT THE night in a motel outside Sacramento, drawing squares and triangles on a yellow legal pad. Killing wasn't hard: Any asshole could kill somebody. Doing it often, and getting away with it every time, was much harder. What had made her a good killer-besides the lack of revulsion with the job-was her ability to plan. She planned with yellow pads, not in words and paragraphs, but in triangles and spirals, a few with names above them, some with lines connecting them to other symbols. Sometimes she made maps.

Aside from the killing, Rinker hadn't been much different from other young successful businesswomen in Wichita, Kansas, until her facade broke down and she'd had to run. She'd owned a friendly country bar called the Rink, with dancing all the time and live music on weekends. She had a nice apartment that she'd decorated herself, went part-time to Wichita State, and would have liked to have had a pet, but traveled too much to feel good about it. She didn't like fuzzy stuffed animal toys or chocolate hearts, but did tarry at times in front of Victoria's Secret display windows. She had an interest in makeup, read a couple of women's magazines, liked to dance, got a massage once a month, and would drink a beer or a glass of wine.

She liked guns, and the power that grew out of them. Knew enough about semiautos to do her own trigger jobs. Wasn't much interested in cars. Like that.

Lying on the bed in Sacramento, she wrote four names on her legal pad: John Ross, Nanny Dichter, Andy Levy, Paul Dallaglio. All of them knew her face. All of them had the clout to send a gun to kill her. All of them had probably agreed to do it, since they all talked to each other, wouldn't have wanted to go against the others, and because all four must have been worried about her running around loose.

The problem was, Rinker knew way too much. She knew where the bodies were buried, and that wasn't a joke, not in the several states where the four men operated, all those good states having opted for capital punishment. If Rinker was taken alive, and if she decided to cut adeal…

Rinker lay on the bed and put together an outline. She could fill it in while she drove.

FROM SACRAMENTO TO St. Louis is three solid days, if you're driving a used Oldsmobile, don't want to attract attention, and stay with it. Rinker took four days, passing from one FM station to the next, hard rock to soft jazz to country, through two sets of mountains with a desert between them, then out on the Great Plains, I-80 to Cheyenne, I-25 into Denver, across Kansas and Missouri on I-70, into St. Louis: Red Roof Inn and Best Western, BP and Shell, McDonald's and Burger King and Taco Bell and the Colonel. She stopped at four different shopping centers. She got her hair cut, tight to her head, punky, so that a wig would fit over it. She bought wigs, good ones, in black, red, and blond shoulder-length.

She talked to a woman at a Nordstrom's makeup bar about a Mexican friend of hers who had suffered a facial burn and needed some dark cover-up makeup to conceal the burn, and she got instruction on how to use it. She played with the makeup, trying to make herself look Mexican, but it never quite worked. Instead of brown, she looked orange, and odd. She eventually decided that the black wig looked okay with just a bit of dark eyebrow pencil, as long as she wore long-sleeved blouses.

With a couple of changes of clothes-one from Nordstrom's, one from Kmart-she'd have six distinct looks. Even a good friend of the Nordstrom's perky Light Lady would never recognize the funky Kmart Red…

And she made some calls, cautiously. Had to call three times, starting with the first day in L.A., before she finally got through. Said, "This is me. You remember me?"

"Oh, my God. Where are you at?"

"Out east. Pennsylvania. How's life?"

"I've run out of time. Like we talked about."

"What are you going to do?"

"You know…"

"I've got an idea, but I haven't worked it out yet. I'll call you back. When's good?"

"Three o'clock is good. Like now."

"This line?"

"Yeah… this is as good as any. You never know, though." Never know what might be monitored.

"I'll get you a clean phone," Rinker said. "I'll call again. Three o'clock."

WHEN SHE 'D BEEN pushed out of her life, forced to go on the run, Rinker had been killing people for a long time-felt like a long time, anyway. She was not deliberately cruel in her paid assassinations. She did the shooting and went on her way, a businesswoman taking care of business. She had once been necessarily cruel to a man in Minnesota who'd betrayed her, but that had been a matter of survival. She still thought about him from time to time. She wasn't morbidly fascinated or neurotically fixated, but the image of his body tied to the bed sometimes popped into her mind's eye as she drifted off to sleep.

The fear he'd shown. She thought about the fear as she drove-and the other fears she inspired.

The people who'd directed her, who'd used her as a weapon, had no reason to fear her guns, because Rinker was entirely loyal to friends. These were people who'd helped her out of a life that had been headed straight for a white-trash ghetto. She appreciated that. If the cops had taken her, she would have gone to the gas chamber, or the death gurney, or whatever it was, without saying a word.

These former friends didn't know that. Or decided they couldn't be sure. If they'd simply tried to kill her and had failed, she might have let it go, on the rational grounds that if she hit back at them, she was putting herself at risk.

They hadn't just failed. They'd killed her lover, they'd killed her baby, and they were most likely still looking for her now, not just from fear of the consequences if she was caught, but fear of her guns. No matter where she went, there was always the possibility that some asshole from St. Louis would pick her out of a crowd, and another gun would be sent.

There was no question that her survival in Cancъn had been a matter of luck. As Rinker had once told another woman who'd been interested in her business, anyone can be killed, if the assassin is patient enough and the victim is not aware of a particular threat. She didn't exempt herself from that truism. She'd never felt a thing in Cancъn. She hadn't known she'd been spotted, hadn't known she'd been stalked. The only guarantee of survival was the elimination of the threat.

AND THERE WAS the revenge factor.

She'd had few friends as a child. She'd taken care of her younger brother, who was somehow wrong in the head: not stupid, but constantly preoccupied, even as a baby, but he was not really a friend. He was too much younger, and too psychologically distant.

There were two or three girls from school that she could recall, but only one that was close-the one she hoped was still living in St. Louis. Her stepfather and older brother had thoroughly abused her, and the sense of abuse had kept people away. In that part of the country, nobody would say much, but people would know, and stay clear. Watching Rinker grow up was like watching a slow-motion car wreck.

Her life in St. Louis hadn't been much different. The people she knew well, with three or four exceptions, mostly feared her. Then she'd been in Wichita, and in Wichita, there'd been two or three people that she might have become close to, but she hadn't quite gotten there, when the cops had broken her out.

Then she'd had to run, and almost magically, everything had changed. She'd found a friend in Mexico, in Paulo. Both a lover and a friend. The beginnings of several friendships, really, and the beginning of a family-she loved Paulo, and she also liked and laughed with and felt safe with his brothers and his parents. They seemed to like her back. She'd started taking birth control pills when things got serious with Paulo, but after a few months, when she needed to refill the prescription, she simply hadn't. Kept thinking, Gotta do it, but didn't.