Naked Prey

by John Sandford

  Still: if they knew he’d been involved, they’d find a way to get him. Christ, they might hit the house. In fact, that’s the first thing they’d do. If they found the money, he’d be gone.

  And what else did Letty know? Had she seen his Caddy at Deon’s? He’d parked it in the back, but he’d seen her walking down the creek behind the place. Had she seen it there? He’d been there often enough. Did she know he’d gone to Vegas with James Ramone and later with Deon and Jane?

  He better get a story. He needed a story, and a good one. And he needed to think about Letty West.

  Goddamnit. He looked at himself, caught his own eyes in the rearview mirror. He’d never been like this. Could this be fear?

  KATINA WAS AT his house, sitting on the back stoop in the cold, a brown grocery sack next to her leg. He pulled into his driveway and she stood up, hugging herself across the chest, jiggling up and down, trying to keep warm.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Had to go in for a couple of hours,” he said. “Got guys running all over the place with this Deon thing.” He got his keys out, unlocked the house, and she picked up the sack and followed him inside. He walked on through to the front hall, took off his coat, hung it, leaned back against the wall, and pulled off his boots.

  “Something wrong?” she asked.

  He didn’t exactly jump, but felt himself twitch. “Huh?”

  “You look a little stressed.”

  “Just, uh, wish I didn’t have to work tonight,” he said. “Anything new with the Deon thing? From Gene?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. The state police have been going around town, talking to people. Talked to Ruth for quite a while. She didn’t have much to tell them.”

  “Good. Be dumb.”

  “The Lord looks over the innocent,” she said. “I brought a couple of rib-eyes and some veggies. I thought we could eat here.”

  “That’d be good,” he said.

  THEY HAD A quiet afternoon, Katina cooking, Singleton looking through car trader magazines. Calb had a computer on his desk, and he’d shown Singleton how to get online and browse car-rehab sites. Singleton did it, from time to time, but preferred paper. He trusted the magazines—he liked the color and he liked to lie on his couch and look at a photo for a long time, thinking what he might have done with the same car. He had a hard time doing it this afternoon: he kept thinking about the scene at the dump, with the two cops and Letty West.

  He finally got up and went into the hall to call Mom; he got no answer. Probably at the casino, he thought—she usually was on Sunday nights. She liked her slots. Since she’d come into the money, she’d moved up to the dollar machines.

  He went back to the couch and dozed fitfully, the odors from the kitchen getting better and better, almost driving the Letty West demon out of his head. Then Katina called him into the kitchen and he found a tablecloth on the kitchen table, and a couple of white candles, in fancy glass candleholders. He said, “Whoa.”

  “I thought you’d like it,” Katina said. She blushed a little, as though she were shy about it, or maybe it was the heat from the stove. She’d made a salad with white seeds that looked like sunflower seeds, but weren’t, and mashed potatoes to go with the steak.

  Singleton sat down and said, “Pretty okay,” then popped up and said, “You forgot the ketchup.”

  She said grace, as she always did, and then was quiet, until they were halfway through dinner, when she asked, “Have you ever thought about having a child?”

  He said, “What?”

  SINGLETON DIDN’T KNOW exactly what had happened, there, during dinner and afterward. They’d watched television and then wound up in bed, again, which was fine with him—but he’d gotten up to watch the ten o’clock news, and to get into his uniform, and she’d left, light-footed and apparently light-hearted, singing to herself.

  He watched the news: they were still talking about Sorrell, and they had a quick piece of tape with Letty West, but it was old tape that he’d been seeing for a couple of days. He dozed for a while, sitting in front of the tube in the La-Z-Boy. When he woke up, he groped around for his cigarettes, found them, found the matchbox, and ripped the match down the igniter strip.

  In the flare of the match, it occurred to him that the Sorrell killings had been no problem at all. He’d just gone and done it. Nothing pointed at him and a threat had been eliminated.

  Truth be told, he realized as he stared into the flame, he’d enjoyed knocking down the Sorrells. Nothing to do with his mother—he’d enjoyed it for himself. Here was that king-shit Sorrell guy, all the money in the world, all big and smart and walking around in his house in silk pajamas, and here was Singleton, with his little ole mother . . .

  But who had the gun, king shit? Who acted fast?

  He knocked them down in his mind, knocked them down again, then swore as the flame bit down to his fingers.

  “Goddamnit,” he said, aloud. He lit another match, lit the cigarette.

  Letty West, he thought, waving the match out. Up there in the night, with nobody but her mama.

  AFTER LUCAS AND Del dropped her at her house, Letty changed clothes and then went out to the highway and hitched a ride into Armstrong. She wasn’t stupid about it. She always waited until she recognized the truck before she put her thumb out. In that part of the county, she recognized one in twenty, and they always stopped for her.

  At the library, she got a computer and went online, called up the Google search engine, entered how to with TV reporter and got some strange websites.

  Three boys from her class came in, two of them wearing Vikings sweatshirts and the third wearing a sweatshirt that said Scouts, which was the high school nickname. One of the Vikings boys was named Don, and Letty considered him somewhat desirable. She felt a pressure from them, almost like a pressure on her face. They got on computers, two of them facing her, and they all clicked along through the net.

  Two hours later, disturbed by what she’d read on the websites, and carrying fifty pages of printout, she hitched back home with an eighty-three-year-old drunk who’d spent the evening with a lady friend, and couldn’t keep his truck straight on the street. She flagged him down, and he let her drive. She dropped him at his house, halfway up to Broderick, and told him she’d come over in the morning with the truck, when he was sober.

  As she went through Broderick, she stopped at the store and bought a bottle of milk and a box of cereal. The house was dark when she got back. She lit it up, turned down the heat, ate a quick bowl of cereal, and then went back into her mother’s bedroom, to look at herself in the mirror.

  She wasn’t bad-looking, she decided. Actually, she was quite attractive. But she would need to soften up her face. She looked good now, but if she kept making grim lines, she could wind up looking like a crocodile. She had no makeup skills at all, but the women at the hair salon could fix that. They had a whole library of books and magazines, and an ocean of experience. Letty had never spent a dime on makeup. She’d start now.

  The web sites had stressed that journalism wasn’t very important, but skills were. That was her next assignment: print out everything she could find on TV schools.

  Then she thought: School. Homework. Social studies. She climbed the stairs, found her textbook, and looked up the questions she was supposed to answer. Then she thought, They can’t hold it against me if I’m helping Lucas and Del . . .

  She dumped the book, went back downstairs, turned on the TV, watched for a while, reading the printouts, and every half hour or so went to look at herself in the mirror some more. She hardly ever did that—this was not a matter of vanity, but a matter of technique. Of skills. She found that if she used her mother’s compact, she could hold it next to her eye and get a good right-angle profile in the dresser mirror.

  One of the web sites had said that you had to look like TV. The site said that every female host of the Today show had been chosen because she looked like she’d be good at fellatio.

  She’d car
efully written fellatio on a piece of paper and carried it over to the library’s New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and looked the word up: “Sucking or licking of a sexual partner’s penis.”

  She thought, Huh, and, a second later, Every one of them? Then she’d ripped the piece of paper into a hundred bits, in case one of the boys from her class might see it, thrown the tiny bits of paper into the waste-basket, and changed pages in the dictionary.

  SHE WAS WATCHING Letterman, and critiquing technique, when headlights swept through the yard. After a moment, they died, and she walked out to the front door. Boots clunked across the porch, the door rattled, and her mother stepped inside.

  Martha West was moderately loaded—bars weren’t open on Sunday so, like the old man, she’d also done her drinking privately. “Hi, honey. Whose truck is that?”

  “Reese Culver. He was drinking and asked me to drive him. I’m gonna take it back in the morning.”

  “Okay. You got traps out?”

  “Yeah, down at the dump.”

  “You better get upstairs, then, get to bed. It’s after eleven o’clock,” Martha said. Letty would have to get up at five o’clock to make it out to the dump. “You had something to eat?”

  “Had some Honey Bunches of Oats,” Letty said. She stood up and stretched. “There’s some left, and I got a bottle of milk.”

  Martha yawned. “Okay. Get to bed.”

  Letty took the social studies book up the stairs with her, closed her bedroom door, dug a notebook out of her school pack, sprawled on the bed, and started working through the questions. If Lucas and Del didn’t come through, she’d need the answers. Besides, with Reese’s truck outside, she could sleep an extra forty-five minutes in the morning, and take the truck up to the dump before she returned it.

  THE PROBLEM WITH Broderick, Singleton thought, was that there weren’t any back roads to the place. If you wanted to go there, you went on Highway 36, or you didn’t go. He took the .380. He’d have to get rid of it, he thought, and the thought pained him. He’d paid $350 for it at a gun show in Fargo, and he hated to lose it. It’d worked just fine with the Sorrells. Couldn’t ask for more, not for $350, not in this world.

  At eleven o’clock, with the sky black with the daily overcast, he went on the air to tell the sleepy dispatcher that he’d take a quick run down south, to show the flag—the sheriff emphasized that when nothing was going on, he wanted his deputies out to be seen. The dispatcher said okay and went away. He turned north.

  Broderick showed scattered speckles of light when he crept into the south side of town. He pulled in behind Calb’s shop and got out, let the wind bite at him for a moment, listening. Then, satisfied that he was alone, he pulled his parka up around his head, hunched his shoulders, and started off. He’d brought a penlight, and used it in quick flicks to guide himself along the back of the building, then past the old power transfer station, through an empty lot behind the darkened convenience store, and finally out on the open highway.

  The West house was maybe six hundred yards down the road, a quarter-mile to a half-mile. Not far. Once or twice around the track at Custer High. He might have been walking into a coal pit, for as much as he could see. Not a single vehicle passed in either direction. The only sound was the wind, the scuffle of his feet on the road, and his own breathing.

  When he reached the West house, he found that it was not entirely dark. Light glowed through a shade on a north-facing window on the second floor, and a variety of small lights—a TV power light, a bathroom night light, a green light that might have been on a telephone, a small row of red lights that looked like a power supply—actually gave his dilated eyes enough light to navigate.

  Moving slowly, he felt with his feet for the track that crossed the culvert into the driveway. When he got close, he sensed a bulk to his right. Martha’s Jeep? Too big. Pickup. Goddammit. Who was here? He moved around behind it, looked for any movement in the house, then squirted the penlight at the back of the truck.

  He recognized it, all right. The dented corner panels, where old Reese Culver tended to back into solid objects, like phone poles. What was the old man doing here, with virtually all the lights out? There’d been rumors, off-and-on, that Martha West might fuck for money, but nobody paid them much attention. It was generally taken as wishful thinking in a town that needed somebody who fucked for money. But Reese Culver? If he was staying the night, the old fart, he had to be paying.

  He thought about it for a minute, two minutes. Shit. He put his hand in the pocket, gripped the revolver, took it out once to make sure he wouldn’t snag the pocket, put it back in, and walked up to the porch.

  MARTHA WEST HAD just crawled into bed when she heard the knock at the door. She thought the knock was Letty, upstairs, until it came a second time. She looked at a clock. Almost midnight. Who was it, at this time of night?—and a sudden chill went through her shoulders and she thought: Deon Cash and Jane Warr. Just at midnight. The knock came a third time, and she picked up a ratty old terrycloth robe and threw it on, and walked through the darkened front room to the front door.

  The porch light was burned out, so she turned on the interior light and looked out through the glass cut-out on the front door. The first thing she saw was the embroidered star on the parka, and then Loren Singleton’s face. No ghosts, anyway. Had something happened?

  Puzzled, she opened the door. “Hi . . .”

  “Martha, sorry to bother you,” Singleton said. “I know it’s late, but Loretta Grupe called in and said she was worried about Reese—he’d been drinking some and she was worried about whether he got home. I happened to see his truck out here.”

  “He, uh, was drinking, and, uh, well—Letty drove him home, and he told her to go ahead and bring the truck up here, so she’d have a ride. You know how she is.” Singleton kept looking past her, looking for something else. She didn’t care for him, and pushed the door closed an inch or so, ready to go back to bed. “Anything else?”

  “Okay. So he’s home. And Letty’s home, everything’s all right.”

  “Yeah, she’s asleep, everything’s okay.” She smiled, not her best smile. “Okay?”

  NO POINT IN messing around. Singleton put his left arm out and straight-armed the door, and it flew open, bouncing Martha West straight back. She was startled, just beginning to get scared, and he pulled the revolver out of his pocket and pointed it at her eyes and said, “Tell Letty to come down here. She’s under arrest.”

  Martha hesitated just a second, looking down the barrel of the gun, and knew in her heart that Letty wasn’t under arrest, that something terrible was happening here and she thought she knew what. She mimed a turn, as if to shout up the stairs, and then instead, she threw herself at Singleton, avoiding the gun barrel, grabbing his arm, going right straight into his body, screaming and spitting at him, clawing at him; the sleeve of his coat jerked up and she got some skin, saw some blood. He fought back and she realized that she was going to lose him, and she screamed, “LETTY RUN LETTY RUN LETTY RUN . . .” and Singleton hit her and she went over a loveseat and crashed through a glass-topped coffee table, still screaming and saw Singleton coming, reaching out to her, and then she realized, just in a tiny fragment of time that she had left that he was pointing, not reaching, and she screamed “RUN LETTY . . .”

  THE BOOM OF the gun was deafening in the small room, but the noise stopped instantly. Singleton had never liked that kind of noise, that high-emotion squealing that women did, and when he shot Martha West in the forehead and the squealing stopped, his first feeling was that of sudden relief—and he thought, Letty, and looked at the open door to the second floor. Martha West had been screaming at the stairway . . . He went that way, taking the stairs two at a time.

  LETTY HAD FINISHED the last of the social studies problems and was packing her bag when she heard the knock on the front door. She couldn’t see the front yard from her room, so she paused, listening. Was it her mother? Then she heard the knock again, and stepped toward
the door, heard her mother’s footsteps leaving the downstairs bedroom.

  She listened, heard her mother’s voice and a male rumbling—maybe it was Lucas and Del, with something important?—and then the voices went up, and her mother began screaming RUN LETTY and Letty turned and stepped across the room and picked up her rifle, which was unloaded because her mother made her swear to keep it unloaded except when she was using it, and she fumbled in the pocket of her trapping parka for a box of shells and then heard a crash of breaking glass and a RUN LETTY and she broke the gun open and there was a sudden tremendous boom and the sounds of fighting stopped . . .

  Too late.

  She looked wildly around the room, flipped the old turn-lock on the door, grabbed the steel-legged kitchen chair at the foot of her bed, and without thinking about it, hurled it through the east window. There were two layers of glass, the regular window and the storm, but the chair was heavy and went through. Running footsteps on the stairs, like some kind of Halloween movie—and Letty threw her parka over the windowsill to protect herself from the broken glass, and still hanging on to the rifle, went out the window.

  She hung on to the coat with her left hand and she dropped, pulling it after her; the coat snagged on glass and maybe a nail, held her up for just a second, then everything fell. She landed awkwardly, in a clump of prairie grass, felt her ankle twist, and hobbled two steps sideways, her ankle on fire, clutching the parka in the cold, and saw a silhouette at the window and she ran, and there was a crack of light and noise like a close-in lightning strike, and something plucked at her hair and she kept hobbling away and there was another boom and her side was on fire, and then she was around the corner of the house and into the dark.

  Hurt, she thought. She touched her side and realized that she was bleeding under the arm, and her ankle screamed in pain and something was wrong with her left hand. She kept going, half-hopping, half-hobbling. Cold, she thought. She pinned the rifle between her legs and pulled the parka on. She had no hat or mittens, but she pulled the hood up and began to run as best she could, and her left hand wasn’t working right . . .