Naked Prey

22

The older woman came to the door of the church and said, "If you're looking for Letty and Ruth, they went up to the dump to shoot that gun you bought." Her tight lips suggested that she didn't approve.

"Another fan," Del said, as they got back in the car. "Dump?"

Ruth Lewis's Toyota Corolla was parked at the dump gate, and they could hear the little.22 banging away. "You don't think they'd shoot back this way, do you?" Del asked.

"Jesus, I hope not." He hadn't thought of that. "Where are they?"

"Sounds like they're over to the left."

They walked carefully toward the sound of the shooting. A.22 long-rifle slug makes a distinctive whip sound as it goes by, and they didn't hear anything like that. Eventually, they crossed the high point of the dump and spotted Letty and Ruth at the far left edge of the raw dirt, shooting into a mound of clay. Ruth had the gun.

"May have been a conversion here," Lucas said. "Lewis wasn't that happy about buying the gun."

"Oughta get her an NRA membership," Del said. "My cold dead hands… "

"From what I've seen of her, she'd probably take the damn thing over," Lucas said.

Letty and Ruth saw them coming and stopped firing. Letty's crutch was lying on the ground, so her ankle must have been feeling better. When they got close, Lucas saw that they were shooting at Campbell's soup cans, which made good reactive targets. He called, "How you doing?"

As they came up, Letty said, "The gun's not as bad as I thought."

"She hit the can every time, right from the start, even with the cast. Now she's trying to hit the gold medal thing every time," Ruth said. "I haven't hit the can once."

"I can't even see the gold medal thing from here," Del said. The cans were twenty-five yards away.

"It's sure a lot quicker than that old piece of shit," Letty said. "Even one-handed."

"Letty… " Ruth said.

"I know; watch my mouth." She took the gun from Ruth with her good hand, braced it over the cast on the other, and sighted down the barrel at one of the cans. She pulled the trigger and the can hopped across the ground. She turned the gun upside down with her good hand, got the pump under the upper part of her bad arm, trapped it, pumped, aimed and fired again, hit the can. She looked nonchalantly at Lucas. "So what's going on?"

"We stopped at the church, they said you were out here." He looked around. "Whatever happened to those traps you put out before the fire? Are they still out here?"

Letty shook her head. "Naw. I had Weather call Bud, from down at the hospital. He came and picked them up the next morning. We already checked, and they're all gone. I gotta get them from him."

Lucas nodded. "Okay. Listen. We need to talk to both of you about… mmm… whoever might have done all this. We were wondering specifically-do you know anything about any police officers who might have been connected with Gene Calb or with Deon Cash and Jane Warr?"

Letty looked at Ruth, and then Ruth asked, "Do you think this… person… might be a police officer?"

"There are some things," Lucas said. To Letty: "Who would your mom let in the door after midnight? We know it wasn't her boyfriend, because he was still down at the Duck Inn. Who else?"

Letty thought. "A guy? There might be a couple of guys, but I don't know. It never happened."

"How about a cop that she knew?"

"You'd always let a cop in," Letty said. "Especially since all the trouble."

"Ray Zahn? Or how about that boyfriend of Katina's?" Lucas looked at Ruth.

"Loren Singleton," she said, slowly. She pinched her bottom lip, thinking. Then, to Lucas: "I… oh, God."

"Look, we're interested in one thing: finding the killer," Del said to her. "We don't care about all this other happy horseshit, the cars and the drugs and all that. If you know something about a cop… "

"Loren kept an eye out for us at the sheriff's office," Ruth said.

Letty said, "Really?"

"Was that because of his relationship with your sister?" Lucas asked.

"No. They met at Calb's. Loren was being paid by Gene before Katina got here. I don't think he'd… " She stopped, they waited, and then she said, "I was going to say that I don't think that Loren would hurt Katina, but when I think about it now, I'm not sure. But I can tell you one thing: I've talked to Loren since the fire at Letty's, and he certainly wasn't shot."

Lucas said, "Huh." Then, "I talked to him, too, and I didn't see any holes in him. He seemed pretty freaked out by what happened to your sister."

"He was-I talked to him that night. He was really shaky."

"Do you see him as a kidnapper?" Del asked.

"I don't… You know, I'm not sure he's creative enough, if that's the word. If he's ambitious enough. I didn't know Deon very well, but Deon was this ocean of want. He wanted money and he wanted dope and he wanted cars and he wanted clothes and he wanted to go to Vegas and LA and he wanted season tickets for basketball… I don't think, I mean, Loren didn't seem to want anything. He didn't seem to care about anything, or even do anything, other than sleep with Katina."

"He had his Caddys," Letty chipped in. "He was always driving one old Caddy while he worked on another one. I heard he made some good money selling them."

"A Caddy," Lucas said. He looked at Del. "Where'd we see that Caddy? You said something about it… "

"Right here," Del said, jabbing a thumb back at the gate. "When Letty brought her traps up here."

"Day of the fire," Lucas said. He looked around at all the raw black dirt of the dump. "If you were gonna bury somebody in the wintertime, with snow around, and you didn't want a hole that looked like a grave… "

Del asked Letty, "You ever see him out here? Singleton?"

"No, not that I remember."

"But you used to come out here all the time. Couple times a week, you said."

"Yeah."

Lucas to Del: "Jesus, what if he was afraid that Letty saw him? Then he sees us out here with her."

"Let's go take his shirt off," Del said.

Lucas shook his head. "Not yet. If he was wearing a vest, and that's what stopped the slug, then we'd tip him off and we wouldn't have anything. I'll tell you what: Why don't we get the California crew up here? They aren't finding anything around Cash's house. They could come up, pick a good spot, and start sweeping it. We'd know in a few hours."

Ruth said, "Loren did it?"

Lucas shook his head. "It's a possibility. Maybe one chance in three. We're really at the end of a long string here, but nobody can figure out why Letty and her mom were attacked, and why he came after Letty especially. It had to be something that she either knows, or that he was afraid she knew. And he saw us here, together, that afternoon, and then he hauled ass without a word. Turned around and took off."

Ruth looked at Letty in wonder, and Letty said, "Loren Singleton?"