Invisible Prey

broken up, rolling street surface. She moved through it slowly and carefully, around an old battered car, maybe Coombs’s, paused by the back gate to Coombs’s house, popped the trunk: felt the weight when the body went in the trunk. Then Leslie was in the car and said, “Move it.”
    She had to think. “We need supplies. We need to get the coveralls. If we’re going to dig…we need some boots we can leave behind. In the ground. We need gloves. We need a shovel.”
    Leslie looked out the window, at the houses passing on Lexington Avenue, staring, sullen: he got like that after he’d killed someone. “We’ve got to go away,” he said, finally. “Someplace…far away. For a couple of months. Even then…these goddamn holes in me, they’re pinning us down. We don’t dare get in a situation where somebody wants to look at my legs. They don’t even have to suspect us—if they start looking at antique dealers, looking in general, asking about dog bites, want to look at my legs…We’re fucked.”
    Maybe you, Jane thought. “We can’t just go rushing off. There’s no sign that they’ll be looking at you right away, so we’ll tell Mary Belle and Kathy that we’re going on a driving loop, that we’ll be gone at least three weeks. Then, we can stretch it, once we’re out there. Talk to the girls tomorrow, get it going…and then leave. End of the week.”
    “Just fuckin’ itch like crazy,” Leslie said. “Just want to pull the bandages off and scratch myself.”
    “Leslie, could you please…watch the language? Please? I know this is upsetting, but you know how upset I get…”
     
    L ESLIE LOOKED OUT the window and thought, We’re fucked . It was getting away from them, and he knew it. And with the bites on his legs, he was a sitting duck. He could run. They had a good bit of cash stashed, and if he loaded the van with all the highest-value stuff, drove out to L.A., and was very, very careful, he could walk off with a million and a half in cash.
    It’d take some time; but he could buy an ID, grow a beard, lose some weight. Move to Mexico, or Costa Rica.
    Jane was a problem, he thought. She required certain living standards. She’d run with him, all right, but then she’d get them caught. She’d talk about art, she’d talk about antiques, she’d show off…and she’d fuck them. Leslie, on the other hand, had grown up on a dairy farm and had shoveled his share of shit. He wouldn’t want to do that again, but he’d be perfectly content with a little beach cantina, selling cocktails with umbrellas, maybe killing the occasional tourist…
    He sighed and glanced at Jane. She had such a thin, delicate neck…
     
    A T THE HOUSE, Jane went around and rounded up the equipment and they both changed into coveralls. She was being calm. “Should we move the girl into the van?”
    Leslie shook his head: “No point. The police might be looking for a van, after the thing with the kid. Better just to go like we are. You follow in the car, I take the van, if I get stopped…keep going.”
     
    B UT THERE was no problem. There were a million white vans. The cops weren’t even trying. They rolled down south through the countryside and never saw a patrol car of any kind. Saw a lot of white vans, though.
     
    T HE FARM WAS a patch of forty scraggly acres beside the Cannon River, with a falling-down house and a steel building in back. When they inherited it, they’d had some idea of cleaning it up, someday, tearing down the house, putting in a cabin, idling away summer days waving at canoeists going down the river. They’d have a vegetable garden, eat natural food…Andwaterfront was always good, right?
    Nothing ever came of it. The house continued to rot, everything inside was damp and smelled like mice; it was little better than a place to use the bathroom and take a shower, and even the shower smelled funny, like sulfur. Something wrong with the well.
    But the farm was well off the main highways, down a dirt road, tucked away in a hollow. Invisible. The steel building had a good concrete floor, a powerful lock on the only door, and was absolutely dry.
    The contractor who put in the building said, “Quite the hideout.”
    “Got that right,” Leslie had said.
     
    T HEY PUT the van in the building, then got a flashlight, and Jane carried the shovel and Leslie put the girl in a garden cart and they dragged her up the hill away from the river; got fifty yards with Leslie cursing the cart and unseen