Naked Prey

Ruth, at the church, with the older woman. Thearrangement, they agreed, was temporary, until they figured something out. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna try to find my dad,” Letty said. “There’s no way I’d live with that sonofabitch.”
    A S THEY DROVE away from the church, Del said, “What a wonderful fuckin’ day. If there was a four-story building in town, I’d jump off it.”
    “There’s the smokestack. There’s the grain elevators.”
    “Fuck you.”
    Lucas: “Got to think of something, man.”
    “I have thought of something,” Del said. He suddenly seemed comfortable, Lucas thought, which was odd, given the circumstances.
    “What?”
    “I’ll tell you in a while. I gotta make sure I can pull it off, first.”
    “What?”
    “Drop me off at the drugstore. I got things to buy.”
    “What’re you doing?”
    “Figured out how we’re going to end this thing.”
    “Tell me.”
    “I will—in about an hour.”

21
    D EL KNOCKED ON Lucas’s motel door an hour later. Lucas had been watching TV news, and he got up in his bare feet to answer the door. Del had his duffel bag slung over one shoulder, and a package wrapped in brown paper under the opposite arm. He handed the package to Lucas.
    “See ya,” he said.
    “Where’re you going?” Lucas was mystified.
    “Back to the Cities. Got a plane out of Fargo in two hours. Figure to get home by seven-thirty. Cheryl’s gonna pick me up at the airport, and I’m gonna take her out to LeMieux’s for a little French food, maybe a little wine, tell her on the way home how cute she looks with her hair that way, whichever way it is today.”
    “What the fuck are you talking about?”
    “Gettin’ laid,” Del said. He ticked an index finger at Lucas. “I’ve got a round-trip ticket, I’ll be back tomorrow by noon. Now. In that package you will find five different-colored fine-line Magic Markers and a large spiral art pad.So you get a couple beers down here, lock yourself in, and think. Draw your pictures on the pad, all those arrows and squares and shit. I’ll come back tomorrow and you can tell me who did it.”
    “Jesus, Del . . . ”
    “We don’t need to be chasing people,” Del said. “We need to figure out what the fuck happened. I think there’s enough information—you just haven’t thought about it enough. So. See you tomorrow.”
    He reached forward, took the doorknob, and pulled the door shut. Lucas looked at the package, hefted it, looked at the closed door, and thought, This is ridiculous. He opened the door just in time to see Del slip inside the Mustang, which he’d had waiting in the drive. Del looked over at him, lifted a hand, and drove away.
    “Hey!”
    Del kept going.
    L UCAS WENT BACK inside with the package, tossed it on the second bed, went back to the television. The woman newscaster had the most amazing lips. They couldn’t be real, he thought—they must keep a bee in the studio, trained to sting them. Must hurt . . .
    He fell asleep for a while, got up with a bad taste in his mouth. Del didn’t understand about the arrows and boxes, he thought as he brushed his teeth. His seances with the drawing table and the arrows and boxes only worked when his head was right, when something down in the lizard part of his brain said that a solution was available . . .
    He wasn’t getting that message yet. He stopped brushing for a moment and looked at himself in the mirror. On the other hand, there was something. Not something he missed, just something about the killings that he hadn’t digested yet.
    Maybe he could figure something out, draw a box and a couple of arrows. Couldn’t hurt.
    First, get a few beers . . .
    H E WASHED HIS face, bundled up, and walked down to the Duck Inn. The bartender had been at the funeral that afternoon, and they nodded at each other as Lucas came in. “Bad day at Black Rock,” the barkeep said. “What can I do you for?”
    “Six-pack of Leinies, if you got it . . . Yeah. That poor kid is the one I think about,” Lucas said. “Bad goddamn thing to happen to a kid.”
    “She just went by—with one of them nuns,” the barkeep said. He lifted the six-pack of Leinenkugel’s onto the bar.
    “Just now? She went by?” Lucas asked, pushing a ten across the bar.
    “One minute ago. Heading over to Larson’s, the way they were going. She’s limping pretty good. She’s gonna need some clothes, I guess.”
    Lucas took the change from the ten, but pushed the