Hidden Prey

shell popped out. He fumbled it, and Carl picked it upoff the floor and handed it to him. He looked at the primer cap, saw that it had been hit by a firing pin, but hadn’t gone off. “We should have gotten new ammunition for it. But it worked okay in the woods . . . mostly.”
    “What about the woman?” Carl asked.
    “Finish your report,” Grandpa said. “Another five minutes won’t make a difference with the cut.”
     
    C ARL TOLD HIM the story in detail and described the woman. “She smelled like wine. She smelled dirty. She called me a . . .” He glanced at Grandma; but this was a professional matter. “ . . . a motherfucker. She acted crazy.”
    “Not like she came off the boat?” Grandpa asked.
    “No. I think she was a tramp. You know, a street person, like, you remember old Mrs. Sikorsky when she’d go around all messed up and pushing that baby stroller? Like that.”
    “Huh,” Grandpa said. “If she didn’t come off the boat, was there anyplace there she might have come from? When we looked at the place, I didn’t see anything.”
    “Neither did I,” Carl said. “There’s nothing out there.”
    They all sat for a minute, then Grandpa said, “Well. We have to think about this. Let’s go over to the hospital and get that arm fixed.”
    “It’s still bleeding a little. If we go break the window now, I could drip some blood on it,” Carl said.
    “Let’s do it,” Grandpa said. Then, “You know, if we could find this woman, it might be useful to remove her.”
    “That’s what I thought,” Carl said. “If she’s dead, she couldn’t ever testify about me . . .”
    “But if we send you out again, we take another risk—and how would she find you?” Grandpa asked.
    “By chance. I might walk by her on the street someday. I can’t stay out of Duluth. I’m probably gonna go to college at UMD.”
    Grandpa nodded. “Okay. If we can find her . . . but we wouldn’t use the gun. Not the same gun. The police would match them with the slugs in Moshalov and tie them together. If she’s a tramp she’d have to die a tramp’s death. A fight, or something.”
     
    T HEY WENT DOWN to the basement, broke a storm window that already had a crack in it, and Carl squeezed some blood on the glass.
    In the car, Carl driving, Grandpa brought up the woman again. “If we remove this woman, assuming we can locate her, it would be good training. We had to throw you at Moshalov because it was an emergency, and we had no choice. You did well, but that doesn’t mean that you’re trained. Your first target should have been easier. This woman . . . would do.”
    “Assuming we can locate her,” Carl said. He could feel the want in Grandpa.
    And a minute later, Grandpa asked, “So how do you . . . feel?”
    Carl shrugged. “Fine.”
    “No, no, not so quick. How do you really feel? Think about it for a minute.”
    Carl thought about it and then said, “I was scared going in, and I was scared driving back. But I wasn’t scared when I was doing it. Not even when the woman showed up. If the gun had worked, I would have eliminated her without a problem. I think . . . not having the best equipment was an amateur mistake. The gun is fine. We need new ammo.”
    “Yes, yes, yes, the technical details. We had no time . . . But that’s not what I’m talking about. You don’t feel . . . depressed, or morose, or sick? Sick in your heart?”
    “No. No, I really feel fine, Grandpa. It was sorta a head rush, you know?”
    “I don’t know what that means,” Grandpa said. “Head rush.”
    “It means I felt like I was doing something important, you know, like, for the people. ”
    “That’s fine—but you may later feel some sorrow,” Grandpa said. “If you do, remember then what Lenin said. He said that some people are like weeds in the garden. They destroy the work of others, they make progress impossible—they make the harvest impossible. Therefore, like weeds, they must be destroyed themselves. We shouldn’t be happy with this, with this mission, but it’s a mission that must be done. You are like a fighter pilot in a war; and we are in a war.”
    “I know, Grandpa.”
     
    C ARL WAS A high school senior; he’d been fighting the war since kindergarten. Grandpa had brought him along carefully, teaching him the history, using scenes from Carl’s daily life as examples.
    “Think about what you see around you,” Grandpa had said. “Your mother works her fingers