Naked Prey

Kelly, a friend of Cash’s.
    As Cash or Kelly was driving north, one of a group of religious women—as a group they were called the “nuns” by the Custer County people, and some of them were—would pick up a late-model, but high-mileage, last-legs Toyota in Canada, usually from a dealer auction. The nun would nurse the wreck across the border into Minnesota, and deliver it to the body shop.
    In the shop, the stolen car would be repainted to match the beater. Some of the parts and trim—the dashboard graphics indicating kilometers per hour, instead of miles—the ID numbers, and papers of the high-mileage Toyota would be transferred to the low-mileage machine.
    A nun would then drive the truck back across the border, where it would be resold. The remnants of the beater would be shipped to a junkyard, where it would be crushed into a cube and sent to a smelter.
    The money was great: a battered, busted-up two- or three-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser, often owned by the kind of long-distance salesman who’d put fifty thousand rough miles a year on his car, would be purchased at a used-car auction for a few thousand dollars Canadian. Three weeks later, it would turn up on a working ranch in Saskatchewan or Alberta, in near-new condition, with allthe right papers. The buyer would pay the equivalent of $20,000 for a $50,000 machine.
    After all the work was done, and the employees paid, and the investment in the vanishing truck was accounted for, Calb and Shawn Davis would split $5,000 on each Toyota sale, give or take. Two trucks a week added up to a quarter-million tax-free dollars a year, each. Hiding the cash was almost as much trouble as making it, but they found ways.
    T HERE WERE A few flies in the ointment.
    The nuns made everybody nervous. They weren’t paid anything, which meant that Davis and Calb didn’t have a good hold on them. The women were using the trucks and the body shop’s expertise to smuggle drugs south across the border. Although they had no economic hold on the women, Calb believed that they were safe. The women were, he thought, the next thing to fanatics. Nice fanatics, like Ruth Lewis, but they would go to prison before they talked about the deal.
    Another fly was Deon Cash, and his old lady, Jane Warr. Cash wasn’t quite right. Shawn Davis had given him a job reluctantly, paid him $432 per delivery, because he was a cousin, and because he had shown in jail that he could keep his mouth shut. But Cash was a bad man; and worse, he was stupid.
    A third fly, and lately a big juicy one, was Cash’s friend, Joe Kelly. Kelly stayed with Cash and Warr between runs. Then, a month earlier, he’d disappeared. Nobody knew where. Everybody wanted to know. Calb had begun to suspect that Kelly had made a move on Jane Warr, and that Cash had buried him out in the woods.
    Now this.
    C ALB WASN’T LISTENING to Ruth Lewis’s appeal. He was staring past her, out into the shop, thinking about the whole mess, and calculating. He had to have something going out there when the cops arrived. Maybe he could haul one of his own trucks in, tear it down, start repainting it. The place couldn’t be empty, with a bunch of guys sitting around staring at the walls . . .
    “Gene! Gene!”
    Calb looked back at Ruth: “Sorry—I was thinking about . . . getting something going out in the shop. Before the cops get here. It looks weird, being empty.”
    “Give us the cash to buy a truck,” Ruth said. “One truck.”
    “Listen. Guys. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on here. You have to figure it out, too—I mean, you’re doing the driving. I thought maybe Joe Kelly just took off, but there was no sign he was going and Deon said all his clothes are still hanging in his closet . . . ”
    “You think Joe’s dead, too?” Katina asked.
    “Well, where is he?” Calb asked. “Nobody in Kansas City has heard from him.”
    “There’s an auction Saturday morning in Edmundston that’s got the perfect truck,” Ruth said. “Three years old, two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers, runs good enough to get across.”
    “I gotta talk to my Kansas City guy . . . ”
    “Gene, we’ve got to do this,” Ruth said urgently. “We’ve got a load waiting. We’re desperate.”
    “Let me talk to my guy.” He looked around the office. “You know, if this doesn’t get settled quick, we might have to start worrying about where we talk. What we say.”
    “You could always come over to the church to