Mortal Prey

squeezing the brother. Not getting much.”
    “He probably doesn’t know much, if that file was right.”
    “It’s a little more than that…. He’s borderline mentally impaired. Not dumb, exactly, but not quite right. The public defender is giving us a hard time about holding him, but we’re gonna hang on anyway. We figure we can keep him for a couple of months before we have to go to trial.”
    “How about Clara?”
    “Nothing. She’s gone,” Mallard said.
    “You still think…?”
    “Doesn’t matter what I think. St. Louis is what I’ve got, and that’s what I’m sticking with.”

7
    DOROTHY POLLOCK WAS A HEAVYSET , hard-faced woman, pale from a life under fluorescent lights, a duck waddler with bad feet from standing on concrete floors, a victim of Ballard-McClain Avionics, where she worked at a drill-press station.
    Her job came to this: She would take a nickel-sized aluminum disk from a Tupperware pan full of disks, and an extruded aluminum shaft, about the length and thickness of a pencil, from a pan full of shafts.
    Each disk had a collar at the center, with a hole through the collar, so it looked like a small wheel. Pollock would fit the end of a shaft through the hole, make a 1/32 inch freshly drilled hole through the collar and shaft, and then tap an aluminum rivet into the hole. Finally, she’d use a pair of hand pinchers to crush the ends of the rivet, fixing the disk to the shaft. She’d drop the finished shaft, which would become a tuning knob on a radio, into another plastic bin. Then she’d make another one.
    Every hour or so the foreman would come by and take away the finished shafts. Pollock was expected to finish a hundred shafts every shift. She got two fifteen-minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and a half hour for lunch, which she could stretch to forty minutes if she didn’t do it too often. She made $9.48 an hour, and the year before had gotten a 28-cent-an-hour raise, which worked out to a little more than three percent, or $11.20 a week.
    She’d taken the raise, but hadn’t been doing any handsprings about it. If she saved all the extra money for a month, she’d have just enough, after deductions for Social Security, state and federal income taxes, and union dues, to pay for a bad haircut. She wasn’t all that unhappy when Clara Rinker came along and offered to pay her a thousand dollars a week for her spare room.
    Not that she had much choice, if she’d thought about it. Twelve years earlier, in Memphis, Pollock had killed her husband, Roger, in his sleep, by hitting him six times on the head with a hammer. While she was hiding out in Alabama, she’d read a smart-ass newspaper column in the Commercial-Appeal that quoted a prosecutor as saying the first four whacks could have been emotional, but the last two indicated intent: They were looking for her on a first-degree murder warrant.
    The cops never caught up with her. Rinker had, in fact, taken her in, had hidden her, had used her special skills to get Pollock a new name, an apartment and a job.
     
    POLLOCK HAD BEEN walking home from work, sweating from the humid evening heat, through the bread-smelling yeasty air outside the Anheuser-Busch brewery, carrying a plastic grocery sack containing a loaf of white bread, a vacuum-sealed variety pack of sliced salami, and a six-pack of low-cal custard puddings, when she saw Rinker cutting across the street toward her.
    She hadn’t seen Rinker for three years, except in the newspapers. She stopped and said, delighted, smiling, “Clara! My Lord! Where you been, girl?”
    “Been a while, Patsy,” Clara said, smiling back, and calling Pollock by her real name.
    “My Lord, you look good, ” Pollock said. And thought: She does. She and Rinker went back to childhood, growing up in similar trashy small towns. Both had changed, Pollock for the worse, Rinker for the better.
    Pollock had always been too tall, too skinny, with hands and feet too big for her bones. Over the years, she’d put on sixty pounds, and limped with the weight and weariness, like a woman fifteen years older. Rinker, on the other hand, was wearing jeans and a white blouse that looked fitted to her, with a haircut that cost a hell of a lot more than thirty dollars; and she held herself as rich ladies did, straight up, easy-walking, casual-eyed. Small hoop earrings that looked like gold.
    “You still drink beer?” Clara asked.
    “’Course I do. You got some?”
    “A sackful