Naked Prey

permanent Sunday-through-Thursday night shift. If he’d take it, he could stay, the sheriff said. Otherwise, it was the highway. He took it.
    There was almost nothing to do at night in Custer. In twelve years, there’d been three house fires that started on his shift, and maybe once a month he’d get a medical emergency, which only required that he show up. He’d stop a few speeders on country roads, jail a few drunks, break up the occasional barroom fight with his casual brutality.
    Given his work hours, he didn’t have a social life. He followed no sports teams, didn’t hunt or fish or ride ATVs or snowmobiles, didn’t garden or read or pay attention to music or go to movies. Didn’t even watch much TV.
    His only real interest were the old Cadillacs. He’d get one in his garage, do the mechanical work that would bring it back to life, and then lovingly and carefully strip it down to bare metal. After months of preparation, he’d move it to Gene Calb’s auto-body shop, where he rented the equipment to do the paint. He changed cars every year or so, driving one while he rehabbed a second one. His current ride was an ’82 Eldorado Biarritz with a custom Rolls Royce grille. The finish was a hand-polished flame-orange flake over a deep mocha base.
    That was it. Other than the Caddys, it was all about taking numbers, passing the years.
    Then, four years earlier, Gene Calb had offered to expand their relationship—an expansion that would give Singleton free working space for his cars and a thousand dollars a week, with an up-front payment of ten thousand dollars.
    Ten thousand down, and a thousand dollars, cash money, no taxes, every Friday. All he had to do was keep an eye out . . .
    The money had changed everything. For one thing, his mother had begun to take an interest in him. Then, one night up at the casino, he’d introduced her to Deon Cash and Jane Warr.
    And then Katina had shown up.
    S INGLETON HEARD K ATINA coming out of the shower, heard her clumping around, getting into her pants and shoes. She came out of the bathroom like a rocket, kissed him quick, once on the mouth, once on the penis, gave him a quick suck and then said, “Wally’s gonna have to wait.”
    “C’mon, thirty seconds,” he said.
    “Fifteen seconds.” She sucked on Wally for fifteen seconds, and then hurried away, laughing, and was gone.
    S INGLETON AND K ATINA Lewis had fallen in bed a couple of months after they met, which was at Calb’s. Katina came in with her sister, Ruth, who was showing her around before Katina made her first run across the border. Ruth didn’t care for Singleton, but Katina was immediately attracted. Their daddy liked to work on old cars, she told Singleton later. Ruth didn’t care about that—she was closer to her mother, and to Jesus.
    Katina saw a relationship with Singleton. She’d already mentioned love, that she might be falling into it, with him. She’d told him over dinner at the Bird, and then peered over the little red votive candle on the table.
    Singleton had felt something blossoming within him, as he looked across the table at the woman. After all this time, a woman really cared for him? Somebody who would hang out with him, and cook and make babies? How did that happen?
    He’d reached across the table, and had taken her hand; tears rolled down his face, and she said something like, “It’s okay.”
    Later, feeling a little unmanly about the whole thing, about the tears, he’d started to apologize for himself andshe’d laughed and squeezed him and said, “Loren, you did just perfect. Just perfect.”
    Somehow, he thought, he had.
    S INGLETON HAD WORKED until seven that morning and had come home to find Katina in his bed. He’d crawled in with her, though he hadn’t been too tired. Now, at ten o’clock, he was sleepy; he closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep.
    Deon and Jane, he thought. Hanged.
    Fear tickled through his chest. He tried to shut it out, flopped this way and that, wrestling with his pillow. Maybe somebody was coming for him, he thought.
    A hangman.
    Katina didn’t know anything about that.
    R UTH AND K ATINA Lewis stepped inside the body shop’s overheated office, took off their mittens, and Ruth pulled the door shut behind her. Gene Calb was working behind his desk. He was a balding, heavyset man in his mid-forties, with a weathered face and thick, scarred mechanic’s hands. A pair of reading glasses perched on his thick nose. He looked over