John Sandford - Certain prey

Clara Rinker. Of the three unluckiest days in Barbara Allen's life, the first was the day Clara Rinker was raped behind a St. Louis nudie bar called Zanadu, which was located west of the city in a dusty checkerboard of truck terminals, warehouses and light assembly plants. Zanadu, as its chrome-yellow billboard proclaimed, was E-Z On, E-Z Off. The same was not true of Clara

Rinker, despite what Zanadu's customers thought.

Rinker was sixteen when she was raped, a small athletic girl, a dancer, an

Ozarks runaway. She had bottle-blonde hair that showed darker roots, and a body that looked wonderful in v-necked, red-polka-dotted, thin-cotton dresses from K Mart. A body that drew the attention of cowboys, truckers, and other men who dreamt of Nashville.

Rinker had taken up nude dancing because she could. It was that, fuck for money, or go hungry. The rape took place at two o'clock in the morning on an otherwise delightful April night, the kind of night when Midwestern kids are allowed to stay out late and play war, when cicadas hum down from their elm-bark hideaways. Rinker had closed the bar that night; she was the last dancer up.

Four men were still drinking when she finished. Three were hound-faced long distance truckers who had nowhere to go but the short beds in their various

Kenworths, Freightliners and Peterbilts; and a Norwegian exotic-animal dealer drowning the sorrows of a recent mishap involving a box of boa constrictors and thirty-six thousand dollars' worth of illegal tropical birds.

A fifth man, a slope-shouldered gorilla named Dale-Something, had walked out of the bar halfway through Rinker's last grind. He left behind twelve dollars in crumpled ones and two small sweat rings where his forearms had been propped on the bar. Rinker had worked down the bar-top, stopping for ten seconds in front of each man, for what the girls called a crack shot. Dale-Something had gotten the first shot, and he had stood up and walked out as soon as she moved to the next guy. When she was done, Rinker hopped off the end of the bar and headed for the back to get into her street clothes.

A few minutes later, the bartender, a University of Missouri wrestler named

Rick, knocked on the dressing-room door and said, 'Clara? Will you close up the back?'

'I'll get it,' she said, pulling a fuzzy pink tube-top over her head, shaking her ass to get it down. Rick respected the dancers' privacy, which they appreciated; it was purely a psychological thing, since he worked behind the bar, and spent half his night looking up their…

Anyway, he respected their privacy.

When she was dressed, Rinker killed the lights in the dressing room, walked down to the ladies' room, checked to make sure it was empty, which it always was, and then did the same for the men's room, which was also empty, except for the ineradicable odor of beer-flavored urine. At the back door, she snapped out the hall lights, released the bolt on the lock, and stepped outside into the soft evening air. She pulled the door shut, heard the bolt snap, rattled the door handle to make sure that it was locked, and headed for her car.

A rusted-out Dodge pickup crouched on the lot, two-thirds of the way down to her car. A battered aluminum camper slumped on the back, with curtains tangled in the windows. Every once in a while, somebody would drink too much and would wind up sleeping in his car behind the place; so the truck was not exactly unprecedented. Still, Rinker got a bad vibe from it. She almost walked back around the building to see if she could catch Rick before he went out the front.

Almost. But that was too far and she was probably being silly and Rick was probably in a hurry and the truck was dark, nothing moving…

Dale-Something was sitting on the far side of it, hunkered down in the pea gravel, his back against the driver's-side door. He'd been waiting for twenty minutes with decreasing patience, chewing breath mints, thinking about her. Somewhere, in the deep recesses of his mind, breath mints were a concession to gentility, as regarded women. He chewed them as a favor to her…

When he heard the back door closing, he levered his butt off the ground, peeked through a car window, saw her coming, alone. He waited, crouched behind the car: he was a big guy, much of his bigness in fat, but he took pride in his size anyway.

And he was quick: Rinker never had a chance.

When she stepped around the truck, keys rattling in her hand, he came out of the dark and hit her like an NFL tackle. The impact knocked her breath out; she lay beneath him, gasping, the gravel cutting her bare shoulders. He flipped her over, twisting her arms, clamping both of her skinny wrists in one hand and the back of her neck in the other.

And he said, his minty breath next to her ear, 'You fuckin' scream and I'll break your fuckin' neck.'

She didn't fuckin' scream because something like this had happened before, with her step-father. She had screamed and he almost had broken her fuckin' neck.

Instead of screaming, Rinker struggled violently, thrashing, spitting, kicking, swinging, twisting, trying to get loose. But Dale-Something's hand was like a vise on her neck, and he dragged her to the camper, pulled open the door, pushed her inside, ripped her pants off and did what he was going to do in the flickering yellow illumination of the dome light.

When he was done, he threw her out the back of the truck, spit on her, said,

'Fuckin' bitch, you tell anybody about this, and I'll fuckin' kill ya.' That was most of what she remembered about it later: lying naked on die gravel, and getting spit on; that, and all the wiry hair on Dale's fat wobbling butt.

Rinker didn't call the cops, because that would have been the end of her job.

And, knowing cops, they probably would have sent her home to her step-dad. So she told Zanadu's owners about the rape. The brothers Ernie and Ron Battaglia were concerned about both Rinker and their bar license. A nudie joint didn't need sex crimes in the parking lot.

'Jeez,' Ron said, when Rinker told him about the rape. "That's terrible, Clara.

You hurt? You oughta get yourself looked at, you know?'

Ernie took a roll of bills from his pocket, peeled off two hundreds, thought about it for a couple of seconds, peeled off a third and tucked the three hundred dollars into her back-up tube top: 'Get yourself looked at, kid.'

She nodded and said, 'You know, I don't wanna go to the cops. But this asshole should pay for what he did.'

'We'll take care of it,' Ernie offered.

'Let me take care of it,' Rinker said.

Ron put up an eyebrow. 'What do you want to do?' 'Just get him down the basement for me. He said something about being a roofer, once. He works with his hands. I'll get a goddamn baseball bat and bust one of his arms.'

Ron looked at Ernie, who looked at Rinker and said, 'That sounds about right. Next time he comes in, huh?'

They didn't do it the next time he came in, which was a week later, looking nervous and shifty-eyed, like he might not be welcomed. Rinker refused to work with Dale-Something at the bar, and when she cornered Ernie in the kitchen, he told her that, goddamnit, they were right in the middle of tax season and neither he nor Ron had the emotional energy for a major confrontation.

Rinker kept working on them, and the second time Dale-Something showed up, which was two days after Tax Day, the brothers were feeling nasty. They fed him drinks and complimentary peanuts and kept him talking until after closing. Rick the bartender hustled the second-to-the-last guy out, and left himself, not looking back; he knew something was up.

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.