Hidden Prey

to the bone and she never gets anywhere. If you analyze what she does, you can see that she’s forced herself into a servant job. They don’t call them that, but that’s what they are.
    “Look around your city. You can be a cook, a waiter, a miner, a truck driver, a salesman, but do you really have a chance against the capitalist? Against the people who own the companies, who hire the cooks, the waiters, the miners? Open your eyes, look around.”
    Carl had looked, and he had seen what Grandpa saw. Later, when he was older, he got the hard stuff: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin. People he could never name in school. All of it secret.
     
    A T THE HOSPITAL , Carl had been sewn up, and the wound had healed cleanly. Three days after Moshalov was removed, Carl began patrolling Duluth, one night in his own beat-up Chevy, the next in Grandpa’s Taurus, concentrating on the harbor areas, making nightly passes on the downtown saloons.
    He and Grandpa agreed: he couldn’t become a Duluth regular,somebody seen driving by every night. He had to make his runs at odd times, when he was less likely to be seen by the same person twice, less likely to be remarked upon. Good training.
    The care had paid off. He’d finally spotted the woman, tracked her, guessed where she was going. He felt the same excitement he felt during hunting season, when he saw a deer threading its way through the woods, toward his stand.
    He parked on a side street, and when the woman walked by, at the bottom of the street, he fell in behind her. She never noticed, never looked, just rattled along with her shopping cart banging down curbs, occasionally talking to herself.
    When she turned the corner, she triggered Carl. He stepped out, camoed and ready, the wire strung between his fingers, the big nails in his palms as handles on the garrote; the garrote had been built by Grandpa.
     
    “N OTHING SPECIAL , all the parts can be thrown away, and be perfectly innocent. But it’s deadly effective,” Grandpa had said, snapping the wire under the bare bulb in the basement workshop. They’d had gourds growing on the fence behind the house. Grandpa got one, and Carl practiced slipping the wire over the gourd, and then snapping the noose tight. The wire slashed through the yellow gourd like a straight razor.
    “Works the same way with a neck,” Grandpa said. His eyes came to life as they worked with the wire. The idea of killing with the garrote was interesting—it was a traditional tool used by resistance groups and revolutionaries, Grandpa said, and that was what they now were: a resistance cell, living underground.
     
    C ARL TURNED THE corner and almost stumbled over the tramp.
    She saw him at the last minute, seemed to snarl, then to start away. “Run,” she called, as though instructing her legs. “Runnn . . .”
    He was moving fast and he threw the wire over her neck, put his knee in her back and pushed. He could smell her now, the same stink he’d smelled the first time they met. He bent her, felt the wire cut in, felt it tremble and sing. She didn’t attack him as she had the first time. She flailed her arms, like a bird trying to fly, and they turned once or twice on the street, bumped into her shopping cart.
    The cart jerked away and then began rolling slowly down the hill toward the intersection, bumping along, rattling, right through the intersection and on down the hill, picking up speed . . .
    She was dead.
     
    C ARL FELT HER GO and for the first time this night, felt something, a cold little thrill, unrelated to the people’s cause. He lowered her to the pavement, unwrapped the wire, had to pull it out of her flesh, like pulling a piece of sticky tape off a wall. He could smell the blood in the damp night air; and in the light of the single visible streetlamp, saw a reflection from the whites of her eyes. They were unmoving.
    He stood still for a moment, listening, trying to see into the dark; heard cars at the bottom of the hill, and the cart still rattling down the blacktop toward the street below. Time to move. He walked fifteen feet to the corner, turned toward his car, glanced back once at the lump on the sidewalk.
    Stuffed the garrote in his pocket, felt a wetness. When he took his hands out to look, found them covered with blood. An imperfect weapon still, he wiped the blood on his pants. The woman had been a fountain . . .
    He moved on, quickly. Had to clean up. Had to get rid of the garrote and the clothes.
    Had to