Naked Prey

rattlesnake eyes slid away. “What’re you talking about? Let’s get to work. Dumb shit.”
    Singleton looked at Calb and suddenly began bawling again. His mother muttered something and went into the living room, and Singleton wiped his eyes on his sleeves and got a bag out and bagged Gene Calb’s head. Then he got a paper towel and the 409, cleaned a smear of blood off the floor, put the paper towel in the bag, and called his mother, and together they dragged Calb into the hall and left him next to his wife.
    Back in the kitchen. “Goddamn, something smells good,” Margery said, turning toward the stove where the casserole was still cooking, smacking her lips.
    M ARGERY MADE HIM clean the floor again; he was doing that, and she was back in the living room, “keeping an eye out,” she said, when the doorbell rang. He was on his hands and knees and heard the door open, and his mother say, “Come in,” and then, “Where’s Loren and Gene?” and he recognized the voice and his eyes got wide and he lurched to his feet and called, “Katina?”
    And at that very second, he heard the door close and remembered giving Margery the .380, and he stepped to the doorway with the towel in his hand and saw Katina looking at him, a question on her face, and Margery standing behind her, her arm pointed at Katina’s head, and he shouted, “No . . . ”
    Bang!
    Katina went down. Her eyes rolled and she went down on her face and she never twitched, and Singleton screamed something at his mother and started toward her,and she leveled the .380 at him and screamed back, “Get the fuck away from me, get away . . . ”
    E VERYTHING LOCKED UP. Then Margery said, quietly, “It’s gonna take two of us to finish this. She had to go, because there was no way for you to break it off that wouldn’t be suspicious. Now, you want to help, or you want me to finish you off, too?”
    The gun never wavered.
    “G ODDAMN, THAT SMELLS good,” Margery said. It had taken a while, but Singleton wasn’t going to hurt her. Not now—or not yet. He’d started thinking.
    She went to the stove, opened the oven, took a couple of hotpad mitts off hooks beside the stove, and pulled the casserole out. She turned the top burner back on, found a pan in the bottom of the stove, and dropped in the porkchops. She found plates and bowls and silverware, dumped some macaroni and cheese from the casserole dish into the bowls, fried up the porkchops and slid them onto the dish.
    “Damn, that’s good.” Margery said. They sat in the semidark kitchen, and talked about what to do next.
    Chest hurt.
    They finished eating, cleaned up the dishes and put them away, threw the cooking trash in the garbage, and began ransacking the house. Two suitcases, clothes, shoes, jewelry, Gloria Calb’s purse, cosmetics, some photographs—they took two photographs out of their frames, and left the frames. Threw it all into the suitcases and carried the suitcases out to Calb’s Suburban. As they went through the house, collecting things that the Calbs would take with them to Hell, they searched it, looking for money.
    If Calb had left money in the house, Margery said, and the cops found it, that could queer everything. They found nothing except two safe deposit keys for a bank in Fargo. Margery took them, put them in her purse.
    T HEN THE BODIES .
    Gene and Gloria Calb went out to the Suburban. He humped them out as fast as he could, but Calb was heavy, and he wound up dragging him. Still, the effort nearly killed him, and Margery was no help at all. Singleton’s chest felt as though it were tearing apart, and he hadn’t yet gotten to the hard part of the evening.
    Katina, in dying, had leaked onto the carpet. They left the blood spot and carried her upstairs, got a chair from the bedroom, pushed open the access hatch to the insulation space under the roof, and pushed her body up through the hole. She was wearing a sweater, and Singleton carefully dragged the sweater across a rough spot in the framing around the hatch, so that a few strands of wool were pulled out.
    Back downstairs.
    Forgetting something, he thought. Hurting. He needed another pill, is what he needed. Christ, this might be too much . . .
    What was he forgetting? He walked through the whole scene, and remembered the shell from the .380.
    Found it in the kitchen, carried it outside, rolled it through Gene Calb’s fingers, and made sure he got one good right thumbprint on the cartridge, as it