Hidden Prey

slipped out the back door, stood in the shadows under the eaves. The rain wasn’t as heavy as it had been, but the night was misty, with fog coming up from the street. He walked straight back to the garage, through the back door, pushed the button on the garage-door opener. If they were watching from the back of the house, then he was done. If they were on the other side of the street, he’d be okay. He didn’t think they were there at all, but . . .
    There was a figure coming up the alley, tall and thin, in a rain jacket. Carl. He gestured at the car, and Carl edged between the car and the garage wall, careful in the dark, and got in the driver’s seat. “Where to? What’s going on?”
    “We need to talk to your father,” Grandpa said. “He’s up in Virginia.”
    “Dad? Do I have to talk to that asshole? What are we talking to him for?”
    “Because he knows. And he’s a drunk. The police have ways to put pressure on people, and he has to be warned. I can’t call him—they may already be watching him . . . They asked about him this morning.”
    “What if they’re watching him now?”
    “They might be. But I think this whole investigation is small. They had a van watching me for two days, different vans, and now there’s nobody. The police who came today seemed confused about what was going on . . .” He told Carl about the interview with Nadya and Lucas.
    “So they know everybody,” Carl said, when Grandpa finished.
    “They know everybody, but not everything,” Grandpa said.
    “What are we going to do?”
    “I’m working on that,” Grandpa said. “I’m working on a story. A story they can believe.”
    “Dad’s part of it? He’s a drunk, he might say anything.”
    “I think he’ll be able to handle it. I’ve figured out a role for him,” Grandpa said.
     
    C ARL WATCHED THEIR back trail. Every time a car turned a corner behind them, he reported it. They took back roads, miles through the dark, rarely had anything in the rearview mirror.
    “What did you tell your mom?” Grandpa asked.
    “I told her I was going to stay over with you, that Grandma had been trying to get up at night.”
    “Good. As long as she doesn’t call.”
    “She was already going to bed when I left.”
    Grandpa turned in his seat, looked at the long dark road behind them and said, “Enough. Let’s go.”
    “I don’t know where he is. Dad.”
    “I do,” Grandpa said. “I had Bob Spivak find him.”
     
    R OGER W ALTHER WAS living in a shack off Old 169 between Hibbing and Parkville; a shack in every sense of the word—old weathered-board siding showing streaks of moss and rot in their headlights, a tumbledown plank stoop, junk in the front and side yards—old washing machines, a junked car, a battered fourteen-foot Lund fishing boat with a thirty-year-old outboard on the back, sitting on a trailer with no wheels.
    A small porch had holes where the screens should have been; there were lights in the windows behind the porch, and when Carl got out of the car, he could smell the smoke from a wood fire, the smoke being pushed down to the yard by the thin drizzle. Grandpa got out of the car and said, “Come on.”
    “You sure he lives here?”
    “That’s what Bob said.”
    “I don’t want to talk to the sonofabitch,” Carl said. “I would’ve kicked his ass the last time we met up, except Mom stopped me.”
    “I’m not asking you to come in, I’m telling you,” Grandpa snarled in the dark. “This is not an option; this is an operation. We are going to try to figure out a way to put an end to this investigation.”
    “How’re we gonna do that?” Carl asked. The windows in the front had curtains, and now a silhouetted figure parted the curtains and looked out. The silhouette looked to Carl like a woman’s.
    “Watch,” Grandpa said.
     
    T HEY WALKED UP to the porch and as they were about to knock on the front door, it opened. A woman was there in a terry-cloth dressing gown, yellow with age; she was forty, overweight, with dark, oily skin; she smelled of bourbon and cigarettes.
    “Who’re you?”
    “I’m Roger’s grandfather and this is his son. We need to talk to him for a moment,” Grandpa said.
    The woman looked them over, then turned and called, “They say it’s your kid and your grandpa.”
    “I’m coming . . .”
    She stepped back from the door, and they stepped inside. The place smelled like cheap burning wood and newspaper, and baked beans. Roger came out