Naked Prey

you’re with the Patrol, you learn not to be a pussy, like a homicide cop or something,” Zahn said.
    “All right, pussy,” Del drawled from the back seat.
    Zahn glanced over the seat and said, “Every time I go out to an accident and there are a couple of high school kids bleeding to death right in front of my face, and screaming for their dad or their mom, I know them. They’re kids from down the street. You do that for a few years and a couple strangers up in a tree won’t bother you much. Unlike some homicide pussies.”

4
    K ATINA L EWIS GOT out of bed at one minute to ten o’clock in the morning, the goose bumps like oranges in the chilly morning air. She padded barefoot across the cold wooden floor, into the bathroom. She was a round woman who no longer fought the roundness, thirty-six years old, five years divorced. With her dark brown hair, she was a rarity in this corner of the country, where it seemed everybody was blond or towheaded. She had good English skin from her father, a short nose and a bow lip from her German mother, and she had her hopes and her religion.
    She desperately hoped for children, though she felt the time running out. She prayed to the Lord to help her, and had faith. More than faith: she had fine discriminating morals—she could run drugs for God, knowing that she was on a mission of love, knowing that God was love.
    Katina Lewis wasn’t silly about love, didn’t walk around with a moony glow on her face, and she could getas cranky as the next woman. She simply thought of love as something real and tangible and everyday, like crackers or soap, that she simply hadn’t been able to acquire. But if you looked for love long enough, she believed, if you kept the idea in your heart, if you had faith, you would surely find it. God would not keep it from you.
    Now she’d found it in this unlikely place—this bleak, gray, flat prairie. As she headed for the bathroom, she glanced back at the bed and the top of Loren Singleton’s towhead.
    She loved him, she thought.
    He’d make a good father, if he let himself go. If he loosened up. But she wouldn’t want him to loosen up too much. She loved that cowboy thing, that sandpaper jaw in the morning, those bitten-off words, the stoicism that rode on his face. She loved the look of him, lounging with a shoulder against a wall, feet crossed, showing his boots, a Marlboro hanging from the corner of his mouth.
    She’d begun to talk to him about it. She’d talk more, maybe today, or someday soon. Time passed—that was one thing she’d learned in her twenties, and in her first marriage. Time passed and was gone and you couldn’t get it back.
    L EWIS HAD SET her alarm clock for ten. In her urgency to make it to the bathroom, she’d forgotten about it. At ten o’clock exactly, the hourly livestock report trickled out of the two-inch speaker, five feet from Loren Singleton’s ear.
    Quietly.
    As though a strange man had stolen into his house, to whisper in his ear, “ . . . slaughter steers, choice two to three, 1,125 to 1,637 pounds, sixty-one dollars to sixty-two seventy-five. Select and choice two to three, 1,213 to 1,340 pounds, sixty-one to sixty-one ten . . . ”
    The voice took a minute to penetrate, and thenSingleton stirred, squeezed his pillow around and cocked an eye at the clock, and the man said, “That’s the South St. Paul stockyard report. Ed Wein will have updates through the day, right here on your feeder-cattle central. Now, from our news bureau, we have a report here from Broderick, Minnesota, where two people have been found hanged in a grove of trees just north of Broderick. The first reports said that two people, a black man and a white woman, were found hanging . . . ”
    The words were so flat and so unbelievable that they took a few seconds to connect. When they did, Singleton’s head popped up: “What?”
    Lewis called from the bathroom, “Did you say something?”
    “Shut up,” he shouted back.
    The man on the radio said, “ . . . Anderson confirmed that two people were dead, but deferred further comment until the medical examiner could reach the scene. We will follow this story during the day, so keep your dial set here to North Dakota’s All-News Central . . . ”
    The voice was both tinny and tiny. Singleton rolled across the bed, grabbed the clock, tried to find the volume control, heard the weatherman come up and say, “You never know what life’s gonna bring, Dick . . .