Chosen Prey

fuckin’—”
    She said, “Hit me, James. In the face. Hard. C’mon, hit me.”
    He said, “You’re nuts.”
    “I’m a seeker, James.” Her face was placid, lit from within. “Hit me.”
    He slapped her.
    “Harder, James.”
    The second time, he hit her hard. He’d counted on killing her, but that was now an impossibility—impossible, at least, until he had time to better figure out what she’d told the other woman. He hit her with an open hand, hard enough to knock her flat. She looked up at him, blood on her lips, her eyes glittering. “Rape me.”
    He shook his head: “Listen . . . I . . .” He looked down at himself: He was shaking like a Jell-O mold.
    “James. C’mon, James, please . . .”
     
    H E WAS AT home that evening, eating a bowl of Froot Loops, reading the back of the box, when his mother called. She sounded ill: “James, I need to see you.”
    “Something wrong? You sound . . . afflicted.”
    “I am afflicted,” she said. “Sorely. I need to talk to you immediately.”
    “All right, then,” he said, “Let me finish my cereal and I’ll be over.”
    She rang off and he sat down again, but rather than go back to the text on the box, he began considering the tone of her voice. She had definitely sounded ill—and there was an unaccustomed urgency in her tone. Maybe she really was ill. Her mother had died of pancreatic cancer at a younger age than she was now. . . .
    His mother, he thought, all those years with a good salary; a woman born at the end of the Great Depression, of parents who’d suffered through chronic unemployment and the loss of a house, who had inflicted her with the fear that she’d wind up alone and penniless and too old to help herself. That fear had kept her working beyond the normal retirement age.
    And kept her piling money into her Fidelity account and into her 201K plan. She had a half-million in Fidelity, God-only-knew-what in the 201K, and the college provided excellent medical, so the estate wouldn’t be soaked up by medical costs or nursing care.
    A half-million. His mother, gone. He put his head in his hands and wept, the tears streaming down his face, his chest heaving, a catch in his voice box. After a minute, he gathered himself.
    A half-million. A Porsche Boxster S could be had for fifty thousand.
    The image of himself in a Boxster, a tan leather jacket—not suede, he thought, suede was passé, but something reflective of the suede idea, with light driving gloves of a darker brown—lifting a hand to a small, blond, admiring coed on a street corner: The image was so real that he nearly experienced the reality itself, sitting in his kitchen chair. A cool clear fall afternoon, leaves scuttling along the street, the smell of yard smoke in the air, a day perfectly fitting for the not-suede jacket, the girl in a plaid skirt and white long-sleeve blouse, a cardigan over her shoulders. . . .
    His mother had said she was afflicted. He hurried out to his car.
     
    H E PARKED IN the driveway, climbed the stoop at the side door, and stopped for a second to look at the house—he hadn’t even considered the house, but in this neighborhood, in this condition, the house itself had to be worth a quarter-million. And they had done no estate planning: none. The thought of losing it, even a piece of it, to taxes, again brought the welling tears. He squared his shoulders and rang the doorbell.
    Helen came to the door, pushed open the storm door, said curtly, “Come in.” She didn’t sound ill, he thought.
    “Are you okay?” he asked.
    “No.” She led the way back to an L-corner where she had her television, and sat in her rocker. Qatar trailed along, and when she sat down, perched on the couch. She took a remote control from her reading table, pointed it at the television, and a moment later Qatar found himself looking, with some puzzlement, at an old movie. The movie ran for two or three seconds, and she paused it. A nice-looking actor was caught full-face.
    “The police have come to see me three times,” she said. “It has to do with this man who buried all those girls on that hill. They have learned that this man had some training in art; that he spent time at Stout, in Wisconsin; that he has some connection with St. Patrick’s and myself; that he probably murdered Charlotte Neumann . . .”
    Qatar had tightened the grip on himself as she began to speak. He was an exceptional liar, always had been, his face loose and