Hidden Prey

it, half the time they weren’t happy with simple rape; they had to beat the shit out of you.
    Some women got so accustomed to it that they barely cared, but Trey wasn’t that far down. Scrape away the dirt and she didn’t look too bad. She still worked, sometimes, waitressing, fry-cook jobs, rent-a-maidstuff. Hadn’t ever quite gotten to the point of selling herself. Not technically, anyway.
    Here in Duluth, she had a nice routine. The morning bus driver with the route along Garfield Avenue—his name was Tony—would let her ride into town for free. There were good safe public bathrooms at the downtown mall, and after cleaning up, she’d get up to the Miller Hill Mall to do a little subtle panhandling, avoiding security, picking just the right guys: Got a dollar? Got a dollar, please? She’d perfected the waif look, the thin high cheekbones and starving green eyes. Some days she cleared fifty dollars. Try doing that in Santa Monica.
    She took another pull at the wine, leaned back, heard the sailboat woman laugh again. Then, a little later, something else.
    Somebody coming.
     
    C ARL W ALTHER SAT silently, his back against the side of the building, his senses straining into the night, the pistol cold in his hand. He could hear the elevator inside, moving grain up to the drop-pipe, and the rush of it into the ship’s hold.
    He’d waited like this before, in the dark, on an early-morning deer stand, listening for footfalls, trying to pick movement out of the gloom. As also happened in a deer stand, when he’d first found his ambush spot, he’d been all ears and eyes. As the minutes passed, other thoughts intruded: he thought he could feel bugs crawling on him; a mosquito whined past his ear. He needed a new job, something that didn’t involve food—six months in a pizza joint was enough.
    He thought about girls. Randy McAndrews, a jock-o three-letter guy, had been talking after gym class, Carl tolerated on the edge of the conversation, and he said Sally Umana had been cooling him off with blow jobs in the backroom of Cheeney’s Drive-In. The account was greeted with a half dozen groans and muttered bullshit s, but McAndrews swore it was the truth. Carl had groaned with the others butlater that day had seen blond Sally in the hallway and had instantly grown a serious hard-on, which he had to conceal awkwardly with a notebook as he hiked through the school.
    And thinking about it now, waiting in the dark, began to feel the same effect; the idea of that blond head bobbing up and down . . .
    He heard a voice on the deck of the ship; a distant voice. He shifted position and strained into the night. Where the fuck was he? He pushed up his sleeve and looked at his watch: jeez—six minutes since the last check. Seemed more like an hour. Same as on a deer stand, waiting for dawn.
    He was not exactly tense; not as tense as when he’d killed his first dog. He still thought about that, sometimes, the black-and-white pooch from the pound, out in the woods.
    “Why are you killing the dog?” Grandpa asked.
    “Because it’s necessary to condition myself against the shock,” he said. The response was a learned one, like the responses for a Boy Scout rank, or a First Communion exam.
    “Exactly. When you are working as a weapon, you must focus. No pity, no regrets, no questions, because those things will slow you down. All the questions must be resolved into trust: your committee instructs you to act, and you do. That’s your highest calling.”
    “Okay.”
    “Remember what Lenin said: ‘There are no morals in politics: there is only expedience.’ ”
    “Okay.” Enough Lenin.
    The old man said, “Now. Kill the dog.”
    He could remember licking his lips, working the slide on the pistol. The dog knew something was going on, looked up at him, small black eyes searching for compassion, not that it had gotten much in the pound. Then the dog turned away, as if it knew what was coming.
    Carl shot him in the back of the head.
    Not hard. Not hard at all; a certain satisfaction uncurled in his soul.That surprised him. The shock came a few minutes later, when they buried the dog. When he picked up the small body, it was still warm, but it was dead and there was no way to get it back. The dog was gone forever. He remembered looking back at the small grave and thinking, Really?
    There’d been more dogs after that, and Carl’s soul had hardened. He no longer dreaded the trips. He didn’t enjoy it; he just