Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  “I’m completely confused,” Calb said. “If you told me shit was Shinola, I’d just nod my head and agree.”

  “Same with me. When can you move the car?”

  “Right now. We’re closing everything down, moving everything out. Sherm’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll be outside waiting.”

  “Listen, Loren—we’re really counting on you. You gotta keep an eye out. This is why you got the job.”

  “I understand. You can count on me.”

  THE CAR SHUFFLE took forty minutes. When it was done, Singleton went downtown, probed for information, got small pieces, and one essential fact: nobody knew anything. He called Calb, told him that. At three-thirty, he was back home. As he always did, when he first got home, he checked his money. He kept it in the basement, inside the holes in a row of concrete blocks. Maybe, he thought, he ought to move it. Get a bank box far away, maybe in Minot, or somewhere. If anybody looked at him seriously, the BCA people, they’d find the money and then the cat would be out of the bag.

  The money. He didn’t know what to do with it. He’d bought some expensive boots, another old Caddy, some good breather gear for painting his cars.

  When he got his first lump-sum payment from Calb, he’d made the mistake of showing it to his mom. She’d claimed it, most of it, and had come back every week since, demanding more. Then he’d introduced her to Jane, and they’d gotten their heads together, and when the big money came in, she’d taken most of that.

  Singleton had stood up to her—a little bit, anyway—and claimed fifty thousand. Fifty thousand would almost get him a small shop somewhere. A Morton building, maybe, with space to work on a couple of Caddys at once, and maybe even space to rig up a paint booth.

  Big dreams . . .

  WHAM!

  The back door banged open. Only one person entered like that, without warning. Singleton had a few hundred dollars in his hand, and he hastily shoved it into his pocket, pulled the string on the overhead light, and headed up the stairs.

  Margery was waiting in the kitchen. She was a small, thin, wrinkled woman; a woman who was to other women what a raisin was to a grape. Her eyes were pale blue, and her hair, once blond, looked gray at first glance, but was actually almost colorless, translucent, like ice on a window. Her lips were thin, her chin was pointed; Katina called her the Witch.

  “What the hell have you been doing?” she demanded. “Why’n the hell didn’t you call me about Deon and Jane?” She turned her nose up, sniffed, stepped close to him. “You’ve had that whore in here, haven’t you? I can smell her juice.”

  “Not a whore, Mom . . .”

  She slapped him, hard, a full-handed slap. “She’s a whore if I say she’s a whore,” she shouted. “She’s a whore.”

  Singleton stepped away from her, a hand to his face, furiously angry. His mom had a thin neck, and sometimes he thought about snapping it. Take that goddamn little cornstalk neck and snap it off. He bared his teeth at her, ground them, felt his heart pumping.

  Margery hadn’t forgotten about the bathtub. She stepped farther away, took the tone down. “Whoever did this, they might be coming for us,” she said. “That fuckin’ nigger would sell us for a quarter, and you know it.”

  “Mom, what can I do?” He heard the plaintive whine in his voice. He didn’t hate the whine, only because it had always been there when he was dealing with Mom and he didn’t recognize it.

  “You coulda called me,” she shouted. “But you were up here with your whore when you coulda been callin’ me. I gotta think about this.” She looked around, eyes narrowing. “What’re you doing here, anyway? You oughta be downtown, seeing what you can see.”

  “I was already down there for a while, and I didn’t hear hardly anything. The cops found Deon’s money. It was stuffed away in his house, somewhere. They got it all.”

  “Goddamnit,” Margery said. “They got it all? Goddamnit.”

  “That’s what I heard. There’re state cops in town, and they’re supposed to be really good. I think we better lie low.”

  “Nothing they can connect to us.”

  “Not unless . . . I mean, what if they’ve got Joe?”

  “Joe’s dead,” Margery said. “We all agree.”

  “But what if he’s not?”

  “Then we are,” she said. She pointed a trembling finger at him. “You get back down there, you find out what’s going on. And you call me. Dumb shit.”

  They both turned to the sound of a car in the driveway. Singleton looked. “Katina,” he said.

  “I’m getting out of here,” Margery said. “I’m not talking to that whore.”

  Margery and Katina met at the door, and Margery went on by with a sideways glance and not a single word. Katina, on the other hand, smiled and said, “Hi, Mom.”

  When she was inside, with the door closed, she asked, “What’d the Witch want?”

  “Borrow money,” Singleton said. That was always good for an excuse, because his mother genuinely did love money.

  Katina bustled around, getting some coffee together. “What’s the word on Deon and Jane?” she asked.

  “Nobody knows what happened, but the BCA guys found a big pile of money and a bunch of dope up in Deon’s bedroom,” Singleton said. “They’re gonna be all over the dope angle.”

  “Sheriff Anderson’s out? Completely out?”

  Singleton dipped his head. “He’s out. He’s smart enough to know that he was over his head—and if he wasn’t smart enough, half the county commission went over to his office to tell him. Harvey Benschneider stood right over him while he made the call to St. Paul.”

  “Ah, boy,” Katina said. She pulled off her gloves, parka, and ski hat, shook her hair out. “I can’t believe they’re dead. Gene’s going crazy. You talk to him?”

  “Yeah. He thinks maybe Jane was dealing cocaine at the casino,” Singleton said. “Could they be that stupid?”

  “Deon was a stupid man, and Jane wasn’t much smarter,” Katina said. She took cups out of a dish rack in the sink. “My question is, what do we tell the police?”

  “You don’t tell them anything,” Singleton said. “Let Gene do the talking. No reason for any of us to get involved. Deon worked for Gene, not for us. If Gene’s smart, he’ll point the state cops at the casino. There’s so much shit going on up there, they could investigate the place for the rest of their lives and not get to the bottom of it.”

  “Only one problem with that idea,” Katina said.

  “What?”

  “Joe. Where’s Joe? Jane told me that all of his stuff was still in the house. If Joe’s dead, then it wasn’t the casino.”

  “Could be. Could be if it’s coke they were dealing. Can’t tell with dopers. The other thing is—what if Joe came back and did this? What if he was looking for that money?”

  “Hmm.” They sat silently for a moment as Katina struggled with all the conflicting possibilities. Finally, she looked up at him and said, “Whatever happened to all three, we’ve really got to worry about our own positions.”

  “That’s right. We all ought to stay away. If the state guys find one string, and pull it hard enough, the whole sweater’s gonna unravel.”

  They talked for a while over their coffee, a middle-aged couple who got along. Singleton wasn’t like the men she’d met in the Cities, Katina thought. He had some steel in him, some flint. Some Ugly.

  She liked it—a man who’d stand up.

  She just didn’t know.

  THE PARTY AT the West house started when two newspaper reporters, accompanied by two photographers, showed up at the front door and asked for interviews. Letty was pleased to do it, though Martha was a bit embarrassed by the mess the house was in. That didn’t seem to bother the photographers, who got a couple of shots of Letty sitting in her mother’s old rocker. Then the first TV truck showed up. The newspaper people were okay, but compared to the TV people, they were mongrels at a dog show. The TV people were stars—Letty’d e
ven seen some of them on her own TV.

  The TV people agreed on one set of lights, and set them up around the living room, while Martha scurried around moving all of her best furniture into place, moving the worst of it into the kitchen. A guy came in with a couple of sacks of black-corn chips, cheese dip, and Coke, and then somebody else brought in a twelve-pack of Bud Light. They asked Letty to get some traps, and she did, and they put them on the floor by her feet, and some of the cameramen crawled in close to get a shot of the traps, using the lights on top of their cameras. Somebody else challenged the cameramen to snap their fingers in the traps, and being cameramen, they did, although none of the on-air talent would do it. Then somebody else asked Martha about her singing career, and she got out her guitar and sang an old Pete Seeger song called “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” and then the main lights came up, and were adjusted, and the first interviewer, a blonde with a foxy face and feathery crimson scarf, said, “Letty, tell me about yesterday.”

  “I was up in my bedroom . . .” she began. Letty told them about the traps and the ’rats and the .22 and the bodies hanging in the dark. Then she told a dark-haired Italian-looking guy from Fox, and did it again for CNN, and as many times as they wanted, she stayed on top of it, fresh.

  The TV liked her: the kid had this face, a face that looked like it ought to have a smear of dirt on it, though it had been scrubbed clean—a wild face with just a hint of feral, preteen sexuality.

  They made her demonstrate the traps, her gun, explain the machete. She cradled the rifle in the notch of her left arm as she talked, and the reporters fluttered around her like sparrows over a spilled patch of Quaker oats. They could smell the connection between the kid and the tube . . .

  “You’re gonna be a star, honey,” the foxy blonde said. She was a beautiful, smart woman whose socks cost more than Letty’s wardrobe, and Letty believed her.

  THE BCA GUY, Dickerson, finally chased the TV reporters away. Several asked if they could come back the next morning. Martha said, “Of course.” And Martha, as animated as Letty had ever seen her, began to plan for the next day.

  “I look like a troll,” she said, looking in the kitchen mirror. The house, suddenly silent, seemed cold and lonely and isolated from the world. “I’ve got to get a different coat, and my hair—ah, baby, I wonder if I can get into Harriet’s. What time is it?”

  While her mother called Harriet’s Mane Line, Letty went up the stairs and threw herself on her bed and closed her eyes. Closing her eyes was almost as good as television.

  When she’d been on TV she’d felt normal. She was surprised by that. She could feel what the TV people wanted, and reflected it back at them: chin up, a little grim, a little tight, the .22 in the crook of her arm. But a smile now and then, too.

  She felt she could move them. She’d grown up with TV and knew how it worked.

  Letty got up and closed the door. On the back of the door, she’d mounted a mirror that she’d found at the Goodwill store. She looked pretty tough, she thought, trying to turn so she could catch her own profile. She was weather-smudged from the wind and the ice, but she couldn’t help that. But maybe . . .

  She lay down again and closed her eyes. Maybe some lipstick. Just a little teeny hint of lipstick. She should definitely clean up her shoes. She’d seen a girl in a John Wayne movie, a spunky kid just a little older than herself, maybe, and that was the look she wanted. That was the attitude.

  Martha West ran up the stairs. “Dick’s here, he’s gonna take me,” she said. Dick was her on-and-off boyfriend; he’d heard about the press conference. “Are you okay? Harriet’s gonna give me a quick wash and set, and then Dick and me might go out after. You know, just for a while.”

  “I’ll be okay. I gotta get some traps out, for when the reporters come back tomorrow. And maybe clean up my room—one lady said they might want to look out my window, if they decide to do a reenactment.”

  “Okay. Maybe catch the kitchen, too, okay? And just run the vacuum around the living room. Spray some of the lemon Pledge around, okay?”

  “Okay. Don’t be too late. We gotta get up early tomorrow,” Letty said.

  “We’re just gonna go out for a few minutes, see what people are saying.”

  Martha ran back down the stairs, and Letty sat on the bed and pulled on her knee-high gum boots and got her coat and gloves: going to set some traps. Her mom yelled back up, “Don’t miss the six o’clock news. They said maybe five o’clock and for sure at six.”

  “Okay.”

  This was like paradise.

  Ten minutes later, visions of MTV still dancing in her head, she was out the door with her trap sack. She carried the .22, though she didn’t need it, and the machete in the green jungle sheath, which she did need. But who knew? Maybe the TV would come back, and the TV people liked the gun. She looked over her shoulder, and she trudged across the road and then into the frozen marsh on the north side, wishing them back.

  She spent an hour with the traps, the sun dropping out of sight as she worked. Back at the house, in the light of the single bulb in her room, she looked at herself in the mirror, again, and thought about the men who’d come in from St. Paul, Davenport and Del, and how they carried an air of the city with them. She’d told Davenport she might like to be a surgeon, or a hairdresser, or even a cop. Maybe she could do those jobs, but she no longer thought that was what she wanted.

  She liked the lights. She was going to be a reporter. A star.

  She went downstairs, got one of the two remaining Cokes, and saw the keys to the Jeep on the kitchen table. She had a hundred and twenty-seven dollars hidden in an old metal Thermos jug under her bed. Maybe just a piece of pie down at Wolf’s. After a day like this, she deserved it.

  THE HOLY ROLLER church in Broderick had been converted into a rough-and-ready dormitory. Wooden screens divided the former prayer space into nine rooms, to provide privacy. Each cubicle contained a folding bed, a bureau, a night table, a fire extinguisher, and a curtain across the doorway, in the long tradition of the flophouse.

  A Christian electrician from Bemidji had laid some cable between the rooms, so each room had one electric outlet to power a lamp. Personal radios and televisions were forbidden, not for religious reasons but because the noise might annoy others. Most of the women had Walkman radios or CD players, for personal use, and most had small bookcases jammed with mystery novels and spiritual how-to’s.

  The women who lived at the church usually ate communally, cooking out of the church kitchen, although there was no rule about that. A side room had a pile of bean-bag chairs, a television connected to a satellite dish, a DVD player and sixty or seventy slowly accumulated chick flicks. A balcony in the back, once an organ loft, had been set aside as a quiet place, for someone who needed a moment’s peace and separation.

  Two of the women at the church were nuns. None, or maybe just one—nobody was certain—was a lesbian. Absolutely none of them cared what the people in town said.

  Ruth Lewis was the leader. She worked out schedules and tactics with Calb, for the dope operation, and coordinated through Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services for the food and clothing distribution work. The food and clothing distribution might have helped a few people, but Minnesota was a socialist state, and much of that was done more efficiently by the local state agencies. The women didn’t care about that, either; a decent cover was worth maintaining.

  After briefing the other women on the murders of Jane Warr and Deon Cash, Ruth listened to worries and arguments for an hour, but most of them were self-reliant, not given to panic. After an hour of talk, they agreed there was nothing to do but wait—to work the drug transport as well as they could, to work the rural food program, and to keep their heads down.

  Afterward, Katina Lewis took her sister aside and said, “Loren will keep us posted about the police. There’s a good chance that if something happens . . . if they find out about the drug runs, we’ll have some warning before they do anything.”
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  “If they know about you guys, about your relationship, we might pull Loren down with us,” Ruth said. She smiled her cool smile. She didn’t like Loren Singleton, and Katina knew it.

  “He’s willing to take the chance,” Katina said. “The only problem might be, he’s always been under his mother’s thumb. If she knew what was happening out here, she’d sell us to the highest bidder. The old witch.”

  “Warn him.”

  “I am, sorta. What I’m really doing is . . .” She smiled; her older sister was always so solemn that she made Katina giggle.

  “What?” Ruth asked solemnly.

  “We’re sorta changing thumbs,” Katina said. “The old witch’s for mine.”

  LATER, RUTH WALKED up the highway in the afternoon darkness to get a salty fried-egg-and-onion sandwich at Wolf’s Cafe. Ruth always felt guilty about the egg sandwiches—they were greasy, probably put an extra millimeter of cholesterol in her veins every time she ate one, the salt probably pushed her blood pressure, and the raw onion gave her bad breath that lasted for hours. On the other hand, she had no heart problems, her blood pressure was perfect, and the sandwiches tasted wonderful, a break from the gloom of winter and the glum healthy food of the communal kitchen.

  The cafe had a double door, and always smelled of grease, and was fifteen degrees too warm, and Sandy Wolf called out, “Hey, baby Ruth.”

  “Hi.” Ruth nodded shyly. She wasn’t a hail-fellow, like Wolf, but she enjoyed the other woman’s heartiness. Another woman sat halfway down the counter . . . not a woman, though, Ruth thought, but a girl, eating a piece of pie. Letty West.

  “Letty?” Ruth stepped down the bar, smiling. She’d liked the girl the first time they met, and had talked to her a dozen times since. “How are you?”

  Letty returned the smile, waved her fork. “I’m fine. Had a press conference this afternoon.”

  “Oh, I heard.” Ruth went solemn, looked for the right words. “Heard that you found the . . . people.”