Certain Prey

swear to God. I’m gonna dedicate my life to it.”
    “Gonna take a lot of dedication, if you’re out at the women’s prison for thirty years,” Lucas said.
    She flushed, and he could see her eyeteeth, bared, as she spoke: “There’s not gonna be any prison. Not for me. Could be for you, when we’re done with you. You’ve got nothing.”
    Lucas shook his head and said, “They’re arguing about that over at the courthouse. Some of the guys think we’ve got enough, some of them don’t. Gonna be close.” He drifted across the living room as he talked, poked his head into the guestroom, then continued to her bedroom, Carmel following him down the hall. “What do you want in here?” she demanded.
    “I’m just closing the place down, making sure nobody left anything behind,” he said. The shell was between two shoes in the open part of the closet. “I’ll tell you something, Carmel. Just between you and me—and I don’t care if you’re wearing a wire. I know you were involved in these killings. I know it. I know you were involved in the first one, Barbara Allen, and I think you did it because you wanted Hale. You were screwing him before the body was in the ground.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “I do know that. Hale told me that.”
    “Hale?” Her hand went to her throat.
    “Yeah. We had a long talk about you. I know all about you, about your sexual preferences, about what you like to talk about in bed. And you know what? You scared the shit out of Hale. He didn’t have the courage to stop you, but he did have the courage to come in and talk to me, and I taped it. Hale telling me about how you hated Barbara, about how she was holding him back, about how he was lucky to be rid of her.” Lucas was adding that last bit on, but he bet it was true.
    “That sonofabitch,” she said.
    “Naw. He was just a dummy. Worked hard, liked women, not too much upstairs. Not a lot of guts, either— but he was just trying to get through life. He felt guilty about Louise Clark, but a lot of guys who love their wives have affairs. And Louise was something else in bed. He couldn’t stop talking about her. He said she could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch: that’s the way he put it. He said that compared to Clark, you were like the Roman Army, just grinding him down.”
    “He never said that,” Carmel shouted. But there were tears streaking her face now, and she hated it, and screamed louder, “Hale never said that.”
    “Yeah, he did, and I think you know it, because it rings right,” Lucas said. He felt odd, standing in the cool, professionally feminine bedroom, alone with this tearstreakedwomen, hands in his pants pockets, almost abashed: he felt cruel. He pushed on. “He said you were like some kind of machine, marching all over him; but he was afraid to dump you, because he was . . . afraid. Because he thought you may have killed his wife.”
    “Louise Clark killed her . . . and him.”
    “Oh, please ,” Lucas said, sounding in his own ears like a character in a New York TV comedy. “Louise Clark had him. He was going to marry her, as soon as he could get rid of you. And Louise Clark, to tell you the truth, was a good match for him. Smart enough, but not exactly the wizard of the Western world. But a nice woman. And good in bed. And as far as we can tell from talking to all of her friends, Louise Clark had never fired a gun in her life, right up to the day when we found her in the middle of that phony suicide tableau in her bedroom.”
    “Fuck you, Davenport,” Carmel said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Get out of my house.”
    Lucas said, “Yeah, I’m going: I’ll scout the . . .” It seemed a little faked, he didn’t do it quite right, the frown, the near double take, but Carmel was tired, stretched out of shape. “What is that?”
    “What?” Carmel was confused.
    “Here,” Lucas said. He brushed past her, pushed the sliding door back so he could get a better look at the shoe. “Goddamnit.”
    He stood up, took Carmel by the arm and said, “Come out here,” tugging her toward the living room.
    “Let go of me . . .” She tried to pull away.
    “I just want you out in the living room with me.” And in the living room he shouted, “Hello? Hey, anybody here? Goddamnit . . .”
    Carmel took a step back toward the bedroom, and Lucas said, “No.” And he said it with bite, and she stopped. He looked around, stepped into the kitchen, got a roll of Saran Wrap from