Hidden Prey

a strange trip: strange from the time she’d been old enough to understand the concept. The last years of high school, all of college, the crack years, the traveling time, all strange. She seemed at times to be standing outside of her body, watching herself doing something crazy. A rational, coldly realistic Annabelle standing to one side, watching a mindless, pleasure-hungryTrey fire up a crack pipe. An intelligent, skeptical, upper-middle-class lawyer watching an out-of-control freak eating discarded pizza from a garbage can on the Santa Monica Mall.
    Life had always been strange, but nothing, she thought, had ever matched the strangeness of the past few days.
     
    S QUATTING THERE in the shack, stuffing money into her backpack, scrubbing all the wooden surfaces with a rag—get rid of the fingerprints, her only thought—she’d been aware that the world had shifted. There’d been an earthquake. She was no longer a bum; she was back in the middle class, a woman of substance. A woman with liquidity.
    When the cops came, their sirens seemed aimed at her hideout—but then they turned away, bumping across the rough road down to the TDX terminal. When God gave her the few minutes she needed to finish cleaning the shack, she slid beneath the floorboards, pulling her pack behind her. The pack was stuffed with money and her clothes.
    The shack was on Garfield Avenue, one of the gritty working streets found on the outskirts of all industrial towns: heavy-equipment repair shops, lumberyards, warehouses, like that, all dressed in gray and grime and broken glass. Dirt roads and railroad tracks crisscrossed the area, with weeds and brush growing up between them.
    Trey stayed in the weeds, like a wild animal, stuck to the shadows, heading toward town by a long, looping route. To the north, near the terminal, a dozen cop cars were scattered around the concrete ramp, roof racks flashing, and she could see men with flashlights, and she could hear people calling to one another.
    When she’d gone far enough that she felt she could risk it, she crossed Garfield to the south, toward the highway overpasses coming in from Wisconsin, a wilderness of train tracks, mud, weeds. In the green army coat, with the dark blue backpack, she was invisible.
    An hour after she set out, she’d crossed an I-35 overpass into Duluth proper and started up the hill above the lake. At two o’clock in the morning, she arrived at the garage where she’d once spent a few nights. The place was full of junk piled around a wrecked car, and the floor was oily, and there were rats . . . but it was out of sight and dry.
    She tried to sleep: got three hours, at best, interspersed with long fantasies of having the bag taken from her. She’d never been afraid of bogeymen in the dark, not after living with the candy man. Now she had something to lose, and the fear crept around her.
    At sunrise, she started out again, now with a plan. She crawled up to the top of the city, to an all-night laundromat, sat inside and washed the best clothes she had—jeans, a black Rolling Stones T-shirt, underpants, and bra. She threw in her towel and washcloth. Her shoes were okay, a pair of cheap boating sneaks she could wear without socks.
    When it was all washed and dried, she repacked and started out again, downtown this time, to the ladies’ room in the skyway. It was still early, and she had the place to herself. She washed in patches, at the sink, then got impatient, soaked the whole towel, retreated to one of the bathroom stalls, stripped, washed herself clean, and put on the clean clothes. The old clothes, the dirty clothes, she stuffed in the pack on top of the money. Everything went in the bag except the army coat, which was too big.
    Still nobody in the rest room.
    Taking a chance—if the cops caught you, they’d toss you back out on the street—she washed her hair in the rest-room sink, using hand soap from the dispenser. She patted her hair dry with paper towels and looked at herself in the mirror. She was presentable, but just barely. She looked, she thought, like a woman just back from three weeks in the wilderness. Or maybe six weeks. Or ten. But when she left the skyway restroom, she was mostly clean, and barely resembled the woman who’d gone in.
    On the way down the street, she took the dirty clothes out of her pack and dropped them in a trash basket. She carried the army coat, still unwilling to give it up.
    Her first stop was at a drugstore. Under