Hidden Prey

operated, and that was almost every weekday—Lucas tossed a duffel bag on the passenger seat of his Acura truck, slipped an aging Black Crowes album into the CD player, and headed up I-35 for Duluth.
    Spies, he thought.

     3 
    C ARL W ALTHER WAS HUNTING . In black jeans, a Mossy Oak camouflage shirt, and a ball cap, he moved almost invisibly through the night, closing in on the woman as she trudged down West Fourth Street, pushing her shopping cart with a rattle-bang-bang-bang over the cracked sidewalk.
    He liked the night: liked the cool air, the silence, the odors of foliage and damp soil that rose in the darkness. Liked the taste of salt in his mouth as he completed the stalk.
    He remembered the knife, remembered the slash she’d taken at him. He could feel the tightness in his arm, the wound still healing. He told himself to run cool: but the fact was, he felt almost nothing. Grandpa still worried that he might become tense, that he might panic, that he might somehow be overwhelmed by his mission. Wouldn’t happen. He listened to his heart. Seventy-two beats a minute. He might be watching the evening news; he smiled at his own cool.
    There were a couple of girls at school who would be surprised to see him like this, swift, dark, deadly. He could feel how impressed they would be, if they knew. He had a little fantasy of a girl being told, saying, Carl? Our Carl? There was always something about him, his eyes, like a tiger’s  . . .
    He pushed the fantasy away as he moved down under the row of yellow lights like a shadow on the wall, listening to the racket of the woman’s shopping cart, bang, spang, rattle and knock. He’d spotted her earlier in the day. As soon as he saw the long coat, he knew he’d found her. He remembered the wool, the strange hairy feeling of wool on a warm summer’s night.
    Had to be right. Duluth was too small for two female bums in long woolen coats. He’d been patrolling the city every couple of nights for two weeks; had to be her. The woman turned the corner. He’d been waiting for that—if she was pushing up the hill, she was less likely to get away from him. He was in shape; she was a tramp.
    He moved quickly now, took the nails out of his pocket, flicked out the wire. He was a good student, and Grandpa was a good teacher.
     
    T WO WEEKS EARLIER , the teacher had had his first real test . . .
    Grandma and Grandpa Walther lived in a gray two-bedroom shingle-sided house in Hibbing, Minnesota, an hour’s drive northwest of Duluth. The house sat squarely on a postage-stamp lawn. The lean grass was neatly mowed, but struggling for life against the bad soil and limited sunlight.
    In back, a freestanding one-car garage leaned to the southeast, away from the winter’s wind. Inside the garage was a six-year-old Taurus station wagon with seventeen thousand miles on it.
    Grandpa, at ninety-two, still drove, eyes sharp, his mind snapping up the landscape. Grandpa had a wreath of white hair around his wide head, but was pink and bald on top, with a few brown age spots. His nose was wide and short, genes from the steppe; his shoulders had been wide,but had narrowed since his mid-eighties. He had an old-man’s ass and skinny legs. Losing it, he said.
    Grandma, at ninety-one, was weaker both in mind and body. She spent her days in a wheelchair, only dimly aware of life. Her hands shook and her head trembled and the skin under her eyes had collapsed into loops that hung down into her cheeks. She’d had cataracts removed from both eyes, and though she could apparently see well enough, her eyes always had a distant look, as though she were peering into the past. Her arms were mostly skin and bone, and her she had no calves at the back of her legs.
    In the morning, Carl would come over before school, and they’d move her into the bathroom, and Grandpa would close the door and take care of her, put her in her diaper. Then Carl would help seat her in her chair, and Grandpa would feed her. The rest of the day she sat in front of the TV; occasionally, she’d look at Grandpa and smile, and say something. Usually, whatever she said was unintelligible, and sometimes seemed to be in Russian.
    While Grandma sat in her chair, waiting for death, Grandpa was almost always on the enclosed back porch, under the best lamp in the house, reading, or working problems on his chessboard.
    But not this night.
    This was the night that Moshalov—surely not his real name, but the only one that