Certain Prey

said, “See ya.”
    On a warm, rainy day in late May, Carmel drove her second car—an anonymous blue-black Volvo station wagon registered in her mother’s second-marriage name—to a ramshackle house in St. Paul’s Frogtown, eased to the curb, and looked out the passenger-side window.
    The wooden-frame house was slowly settling into its overgrown lawn. Rainwater seeped over the edges of its leaf-clogged gutters, and peeling green paint showed patches of the previous color, a chalky blue. None of the windows or doors was quite level with the world, square with the house, or aligned with each other. Most of the windows showed glass; a few had black screens.
    Carmel got a small travel umbrella from the backseat, pushed the car door open with her feet, popped the umbrella, and hurried up the sidewalk to the house. The inner door was open: she knocked twice on the screen door, which rattled in its frame, and she heard Rolo from the back: “Come on in, Carmel. I’m in the kitchen.”
    The interior of the house was a match for the exterior. The carpets were twenty years old, with paths worn through the thin pile. The walls were a dingy yellow, the furniture a crappy collection of plastic-veneered plywood, chipped along the edges of the tabletops and down the legs. There were no pictures on the walls, no decoration of any kind. Nailheads poked from picture-hanging spots, where previous tenants had tried a little harder. Everything smelled like nicotine and tar.
    The kitchen was improbably bright. There were no shades or curtains on the two windows that flanked the kitchen table, and only two chairs, one tucked tight to the table, another pulled out. Rolo, looking smaller than he had five years before, was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt that said, enigmatically, Jesus. He had both hands in the kitchen sink.
    “Just cleaning up for the occasion,” he said.
    He wasn’t embarrassed at being caught at house-cleaning, and a thought flicked through Carmel’s lawyer-head: He should be embarrassed.
    “Sit down,” he said, nodding at the pulled-out chair. “I got some coffee going.”
    “I’m sort of in a rush,” she started.
    “You don’t have time for coffee with Rolando?” He was flicking water off his hands, and he ripped a paper towel off a roll that sat on the kitchen counter, wiped his hands dry, and tossed the balled-up towel toward a wastebasket in the corner. It hit the wall and ricocheted into the basket. “Two,” he said.
    She glanced at her watch, and reversed herself on the coffee. “Sure, I’ve got a few minutes.”
    “I’ve come a long way down, huh?”
    She glanced once around the kitchen, shrugged and said, “You’ll be back.”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I got my nose pretty deep in the shit.”
    “So take a program.”
    “Yeah, a program,” he said, and laughed. “Twelve steps to Jesus.” Then, apologetically, “I only got caffeinated.”
    “Only kind I drink,” she said. And then, “So you made the call.” Not a question.
    Rolo was pouring coffee into two yellow ceramic mugs, the kind Carmel associated with lake resorts in the North Woods. “Yes. And she’s still working, and she’ll take the job.”
    “She? It’s a woman?”
    “Yeah. I was surprised myself. I never asked, you know, I only knew who to call. But when I asked, my friend said, ‘She.’ ”
    “She’s gotta be good,” Carmel said.
    “She’s good. She has a reputation. Never misses. Very efficient, very fast. Always from very close range, so there’s no mistake.” Rolo put a mug of coffee in front of her, and she turned it with her fingertips, and picked it up.
    “That’s what I need,” she said, and took a sip. Good coffee, very hot.
    “You’re sure about this?” Rolo said. He leaned back against the kitchen counter, and gestured with his coffee mug. “Once I tell them ‘Yes,’ it’ll be hard to stop. This woman, the way she moves, nobody knows where she is, or what name she’s using. If you say, ‘Yes,’ she kills Barbara Allen.”
    Carmel frowned at the sound of Barbara Allen’s name. She hadn’t really thought of the process as murder. She had considered it more abstractly, as the solution to an otherwise intractable problem. Of course, she had known it would be murder, she just hadn’t contemplated the fact. “I’m sure,” she said.
    “You’ve got the money?” “At the house. I brought your ten.” She put the mug down, dug in her purse, pulled out a thin deck of