Invisible Prey

shadows, facing the huge front doors. They were wearing coveralls, of the kind worn by automotive mechanics, and hairnets, and nylon stockings over their faces. Behind them, the van’s engine ticked as it cooled. A Wisconsin license plate, stolen from a similar vehicle in a 3M parking lot, was stuck on the back of the van.
    Big said, “Let’s do it.”
    Little led the way up the porch steps. After a last quick look around, Big nodded again, and Little pushed the doorbell.
    They’d done this before. They were good at it.
     
    T HEY COULD FEEL the footsteps on the wooden floors inside the house. “Ready,” said Big.
    A moment later, one of the doors opened. A shaft of light cracked across the porch, flashing on Little’s burgundy jacket. Little said a few words—“Miz Peebles? Is this where the party is?”
    A slender black woman, sixtyish, Peebles said, “Why no…” Her jaw continued to work wordlessly, searching for a scream, as she took in the distorted faces.
    Little was looking past her at an empty hallway. The grounds-keeper and the cook were home, snug in bed. This polite inquiry at the door was a last-minute check to make sure that there were no unexpected guests. Seeing no one, Little stepped back and snapped, “Go.”
    Big went through the door, fast, one arm flashing in the interior light. Big was carrying a two-foot-long steel gas pipe, with gaffer tape wrapped around the handle-end. Peebles didn’t scream, because she didn’t have time. Her eyes widened, her mouth dropped open, one hand started up, and then Big hit her on the crown of her head, crushing her skull.
    The old woman dropped like a sack of bones. Big hit her again, as insurance, and then a third time, as insurance on the insurance: three heavy floor-shaking impacts, whack! whack! whack!
     
    T HEN A VOICE from up the stairs, tentative, shaky. “Sugar? Who was it, Sugar?”
    Big’s head turned toward the stairs and Little could hear him breathing. Big slipped out of his loafers and hurried up the stairs in his stocking feet, a man on the hunt. Little stepped up the hall, grabbed a corner of a seven-foot-long Persian carpet and dragged it back to the black woman’s body.
    And from upstairs, three more impacts: a gasping, thready scream, and whack! whack! whack!
    Little smiled. Murder—and the insurance.
    Little stooped, caught the sleeve of Peebles’s housecoat, and rolled her onto the carpet. Breathing a little harder, Little began dragging the carpet toward an interior hallway that ran down to the kitchen, where it’d be out of sight of any of the windows. A pencil-thin line of blood, like a slug’s trail, tracked the rug across the hardwood floor.
    Peebles’s face had gone slack. Her eyes were still open, the eyeballs rolled up, white against her black face. Too bad about the rug, Little thought. Chinese, the original dark blue gone pale, maybe 1890. Not a great rug, but a good one. Of course, it’d need a good cleaning now, with the blood-puddle under Peebles’s head.
     
    O UTSIDE, there’d been no sound of murder. No screams or gunshots audible on the street. A window lit up on Oak Walk’s second floor. Then another on the third floor, and yet another, on the first floor, in the back, in the butler’s pantry: Big and Little, checking out the house, making sure that they were the only living creatures inside.
     
    W HEN THEY KNEW that the house was clear, Big and Little met at the bottom of the staircase. Big’s mouth under the nylon was a bloody O. He’d chewed into his bottom lip while killing the old woman upstairs, something he did when the frenzy was on him. He was carrying a jewelry box and one hand was closed in a fist.
    “You won’t believe this,” he said. “She had it around her neck.” He opened his fist—his hands were covered with latex kitchen gloves—to show off a diamond the size of a quail’s egg.
    “Is it real?”
    “It’s real and it’s blue. We’re not talking Boxsters anymore. We’re talking SLs.” Big opened the box. “There’s more: earrings, a necklace. There could be a half million, right here.”
    “Can Fleckstein handle it?”
    Big snorted. “Fleckstein’s so dirty that he wouldn’t recognize the Mona Lisa. He’ll handle it.”
    He pushed the jewelry at Little, started to turn, caught sight of Peebles lying on the rug. “Bitch,” he said, the word grating through his teeth. “Bitch.” In a second, in three long steps, he was on her again, beating the dead