Naked Prey

11

SATURDAY AFTERNOON, JUST after dark, Loren Singleton rolled along Highway 36, listening to the radio. He was tired, despite a long nap, from the overnight round trip to the Sorrells' and back. A snow squall bothered his windshield, little pecks and flecks of ice whirling down from the north.

He'd been horrified by the shooting, as he hadn't been by the killing of the little girls. The little girls just seemed to go to sleep-and he hadn't really done that. He'd just been there.

At the same time, there was something about the Sorrell killings that left him feeling… larger. Tougher. He tried to find the exact word: studlier? That embarrassed him, but it might be close.

The lights of Broderick came up through the blowing snow, the cafe, and the gas station, two dimly lit windows at the church, a beer sign in the bar-and then he noticed the light in the back of Calb's. The office was lit up, as though there were a meeting going on.

He pulled the Caddy into the parking lot, watched for shadows on the window-somebody looking to see who'd pulled in-and when he got none, climbed out of the car and walked over to the shop and tried the door. The door was locked, as it should be after dark on Saturday.

Still, the lights. He walked around the side of the building and peeked through a window, and found a meeting: Gene Calb, Ruth and Katina Lewis, and a black man that Singleton had never seen before. Both women had taken their coats off, as if they'd been there a while. The black man was leaning back in an office chair, idly swiveling a few inches from left to right.

Singleton watched for a while, but couldn't hear anything. Why had they left him out? Were they suspicious?

He eventually crunched back around to the Caddy, climbed inside, rolled back to get square with the overhead door, and punched the garage-door opener. As the door went up, he eased the Caddy inside, punched the remote again, and as the door started back down, got out of the car.

Calb and Katina were standing by the corner of the bay, Calb with a cup of coffee in his hand. "Hey, come on back. We're having an argument."

"Who's we?" Singleton asked.

"Me and Shawn Davis and Ruth and Katina," Calb said. "Shawn came up from KC. You heard about the Sorrell thing?"

"On the radio, a while ago," Singleton said. "What do you think?"

"That's what we're arguing about," Katina said. "I tried calling you but didn't get an answer."

"Been running around," Singleton said. He looked at the bridge of her nose, rather than in her eyes, so she wouldn't see the lie in his eyes. And he thought: Okay. They tried to call him, so they weren't cutting him out.

He started past her, but she caught his arm and stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek and asked, "You busy tonight?"

"I sure got some time if you do," he said. She stepped ahead of him and he touched her on the butt.

Inside the office, Calb introduced him to Davis: Davis was a tough-looking forty-five, not impressed by much. He lifted a hand and nodded, and Singleton gave him his best grim cowboy look. "You got any special insight into this mess?" Davis asked him in a twangy Missouri drawl. "Gene said you knew Deon and Jane and Joe as well as anyone up here."

Singleton hurried to deflect that idea. "I have no idea what's going on. I used to stop by and talk to Deon, but that was just part of my deal, you know. Keep an eye out. I keep thinking it's Joe, that maybe they had a fight or something."

"Joe's dead," Davis said bluntly. "He never went more than five miles from his mama in his life, until he come up here. Called her every day, then he talked to her one night and the next day he was gone. She hasn't heard a word since. He's dead."

"Goddamn," Calb said. He stood up and wandered in a tight circle, his hands jammed in the back pockets of his jeans. "This kidnapping… if they think it's outa here, they could be all over me. You too, Shawn. If they really started pounding my books, looking at how many people I employ and how much commercial rehab we do… they could give me some trouble."

"Might be time for a fire," Singleton said.

They all looked at him for a moment, and then Calb said, "You're not serious."

"Take care of the book problem," Singleton said.

Calb's eyes rolled heavenward, as in prayer, and he said, "It wouldn't take care of shit, Loren. You've never been a businessman-there're records all over the goddamn place. Payroll tax receipts, workman's comp, insurance, income tax. The only thing that would happen if I burned down the shop is that I'd have a burned-down shop. Then they'd really get interested. If they get really interested, they're gonna get to all of us, including you, Loren, and the women too."

"Which gets us away from the question I want answered, and I want to know that I'm being told the truth," Ruth said, squaring off against Calb and Davis. She had her wintery fighting smile fixed on her face. "This kidnapping thing. This Sorrell girl. You didn't know about it, you didn't have any part of it, either of you. This wasn't some kind of money-making deal that went wrong."

"My God, Ruth. No. Never. I'm not nuts," Calb said. The way he said it made her believe him.

Davis was quieter, but just as convincing: "The thing is, Ruth, if these news stories are right, the kidnappers wanted a million bucks for this kid. They were gonna cut it three ways that we know of, and probably had to be four, since it seems like there's a fourth one on the loose. That'd be a quarter-million apiece, for risking the death sentence. Gene and I make that much, every year, just running our quiet little car business. There wouldn't be no sense in it."

"Some sense for somebody like Deon," Singleton said. "He was getting nothing but chump change."

"Just like you, Loren, and both of you happy to get it," Calb snapped.

"Hey-shut up," Ruth said. She looked at the two men, poked a finger at them. "We don't need a quarrel. So… what does Gene say to the police?"

"He plays dumb," Davis said. "That'll work, if you let it work. If you don't get smart. You go ahead and sweat, and wiggle around, and apologize-the man always likes to see that. But just be dumb. Yeah, you hired him, because I asked you to, to get him out of the neighborhood. They come to me, and I say, 'Hell, yes, it was a big favor, gettin' Deon off my back, and his old lady, too.' "We tell them that his pay probably wasn't enough for some city boy who wants to put cocaine up his nose, and so he went off on his own," Davis continued. "I mean, this thing they did with this little girl-Deon's crazy enough, but no cop down in KC who knows me would say that I'd do it. Nobody up here would think that Gene would, either."

HE PAUSED, AND in the absence of words, a full-color motion picture popped up behind Singleton's eyes: a picture of Mom getting the little bottle of drugs out of her bag, and the syringe, and sucking the fluid out, and holding the needle up, and squirting a little bit of it, then putting the smile on her face before she went in with the girl.

The older girl might have known what was going on. She'd taken the shot with a dark-eyed passivity, her eyes locked on Singleton's. She'd had a blue ribbon in her hair, with a knot in the middle.

The younger one had a stuffed toy that Jane had gotten her, a hand-sized white-mouse puppet with a pink tail. She'd said, "Okay," and had lain back on the folding bed and rolled her arm around to take the shot. Brave little kid: went to sleep with the mouse on her chest.

He'd dug her down through the clay cap and placed her in a pile of old Yellow Pages phone books, and that was that.

Wasn't hard. Didn't seem crazy; just was.

DAVIS STARTED TALKING again, and popped Singleton out of the mental movie. "So we play it dumb: what you see is what you got. Three dumb assholes decide to kidnap a girl because they want more money and they get killed for their trouble."

"Four dumb assholes," Calb said distractedly. "Maybe the other guy was like down on the other end of the thing, set up the girl, or something." He looked at Singleton. "They never mentioned a friend or anything?"

"No. They kept talking about all their friends down in KC."

"Whatever," Ruth said. "The thing is, I need something to tell the women who work with me. Some of them are afraid that somehow, everything is linked-the cars, the drugs, and the kidnapping. If somebody put pressure on them, came at them the right way, they'd probably give up the whole story. Feel morally obligated to."

"Shit," Davis said.

"Well, I agree with them," Ruth said, showing the cold smile again. "The only difference is, I know Gene." She lifted a hand toward Calb. "If I thought we had anything to do with all of this, I'd go to the police myself. But I think it was Deon Cash and Jane Warr and Joe, trying to make some money. And the fact is, even though we don't know anything about it, it could drag us all down."

"So tell them the truth," Calb said. "Tell them that we're just as scared and confused as they are. We don't know what the hell's happening, and we're desperate to find out."

"Dumb is best," Davis said again. "Believe me on that-you don't know nothin' about nothin'. If you don't know nothin', nobody can trip you up-not your friends, not the cops."

THEY TALKED FOR another half-hour, and then broke up. Davis said he was heading back to KC that night, after eating dinner at the Calbs'. Katina walked out with Singleton and Ruth. Ruth kept going, across the highway and down toward the church. Katina held back and said, "I'd like to come over."

"You're the goddamned horniest little thing," Singleton said. He touched her face and said, "Don't worry. You worry too much."

"I just want everything to be right," she said. "You never talked to Deon about anything, did you?"

By anything, she meant the kidnappings, Singleton realized.

"Jeez, Katina… " He was insulted.

"I'm sorry, I'm just so upset."

"It'll be okay, honey."

"Not just that. I sorta need to… get close to somebody. After all this." She stood close to him and fumbled for his hand.

"So come over. We'll just, you know… hang out."

"I'll see you there," Lewis said. "I'll take my car so I can get back. Maybe we could go down to the Bird for dinner."

"Love you," Singleton said, talking down to her. First time he'd said that; no place romantic, just standing in a snow-swept parking lot in the middle of nowhere. "Love you," he said.