Invisible Prey

behind, when she heard the key in the back door lock and the door popped open and the light went on and a woman stepped into the kitchen and there they were.
    The woman froze and blurted, “What?” and then a light of recognition flared in her eyes.
    Jane recognized her from the meeting at Bucher’s. The woman shrank back and looked as though she were about to scream or run, or scream and run, and Jane knew that a running fight in a crowded neighborhood just wouldn’t work, not with the dog bites in Leslie’s legs, and Leslie was still too far away, so she dropped the basket and launched herself at Coombs, windmilling at her, fingernails flying, mouth open, smothering a war shriek.
    Coombs put up a hand and tried to backpedal and Jane hit her in the face and the two women bounced off the doorjamb and went down and rolled across the floor, Coombs pounding at Jane’s midriff and legs, then Leslie was there, trying to get behind Coombs, and they rolled over into the kitchen table, and then back, and then Leslie plumped down on both of them and got an arm around Coombs and pulled her off of Jane like a mouse being pulled off flypaper.
    Coombs tried to scream, her mouth open, her eyes bulging as Leslie choked her, and she was looking right in Jane’s eyes when her spine cracked, and her eyes rolled up and her body went limp.
    Jane pushed the body away and Leslie said, “Motherfucker,” and backed up to the door, then turned around and closed it.
    Jane was on her hands and knees, used the table to push herself up. “Is she dead?”
    “Yeah.” Leslie’s voice was hoarse. He’d been angry with the world ever since the dog. His arms, ass, and legs burned like fire, and his heart was pounding from the surprise and murder of Coombs.
    Coombs lay like a crumpled rag in the nearly nonexistent light on the kitchen floor; a shadow, a shape in a black-and-white photograph. “We can’t leave her,” Leslie said. “She’s got to disappear. She’s one too many dead people.”
    “They’ll know,” Jane said, near panic. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
    “We’ve got to take her with us. We’ll go back to the house, get the van, we’ve got to move the van anyway. We’ll take her down to the farm, like we were gonna do with the kid,” Leslie said.
    “Then what? Then what?”
    “Then tomorrow, we go to see John Smith at Bucher’s, give him some papers of some kind, tell him we forgot something,” Leslie said “We let him see us: see that I’m not all bitten up. I can fake that. We tell him we’re thinking of a scouting trip…and then we take off.”
    “Oh, God, Leslie, I’m frightened. I think…” Jane looked at the shadow on the floor. What she thought was, This won’t work. But better not to tell Les. Not in the mood he was in. “Maybe. Maybe that’s the best plan. I don’t know if we should go away, though. Going away won’t help us if they decide to start looking for us…”
    “We can talk about that later. Get your flashlight, see if there’re some garbage bags here. We gotta bag this bitch up and get rid of her. And we’ve gotta pick up this sewing shit…What’d you do, you dumbshit, throw it at her?”
    “Don’t be vulgar. Not now. Please.”
     
    T HEY SCRABBLED AROUND in the dark, afraid to let the light of the flash play against the walls or windows. They got the sewing basket back together, hurriedly, and found garbage bags in a cleaning closet next to the refrigerator. They stuffed the lower half of Coombs’s limp body into a garbage bag, then pulled another over the top of her body.
    Leslie squatted on the floor and sprayed around some Scrubbing Bubbles cleaner, then wiped it up with paper towels and put the towels in the bags with the body. He did most of the kitchen floor that way, waddling backward away from the wet parts until he’d done most of the kitchen floor.
    “Should be good,” he muttered. Then: “Get the car. Pull it through the alley. I’ll meet you by the fence.”
    She didn’t say a word, but went out the back door, carrying the wicker sewing basket. And she thought, Won’t work. Won’t work. She moved slowly around the house, in the dark, then down the front lawn and up the street to the car. She got in, thinking, Won’t work . Some kind of dark, disturbing mantra. She had to break out of it, had to think. Leslie didn’t see it yet, but he would.
    Had to think.
     
    T HE ALLEY WAS a line of battered garages, with one or two new ones, and a