Naked Prey

back every week since, demanding more. Then he’d introduced her to Jane, and they’d gotten their heads together, and when the big money came in, she’d taken most of that.
    Singleton had stood up to her—a little bit, anyway—and claimed fifty thousand. Fifty thousand would almost get him a small shop somewhere. A Morton building, maybe, with space to work on a couple of Caddys at once, and maybe even space to rig up a paint booth.
    Big dreams . . .
    WHAM!
    The back door banged open. Only one person entered like that, without warning. Singleton had a few hundred dollars in his hand, and he hastily shoved it into his pocket, pulled the string on the overhead light, and headed up the stairs.
    Margery was waiting in the kitchen. She was a small, thin, wrinkled woman; a woman who was to other women what a raisin was to a grape. Her eyes were pale blue, and her hair, once blond, looked gray at first glance, but was actually almost colorless, translucent, like ice on a window. Her lips were thin, her chin was pointed; Katina called her the Witch.
    “What the hell have you been doing?” she demanded. “Why’n the hell didn’t you call me about Deon and Jane?” She turned her nose up, sniffed, stepped close to him. “You’ve had that whore in here, haven’t you? I can smell her juice.”
    “Not a whore, Mom . . . ”
    She slapped him, hard, a full-handed slap. “She’s a whore if I say she’s a whore,” she shouted. “She’s a whore.”
    Singleton stepped away from her, a hand to his face, furiously angry. His mom had a thin neck, and sometimes he thought about snapping it. Take that goddamn little cornstalk neck and snap it off. He bared his teeth at her, ground them, felt his heart pumping.
    Margery hadn’t forgotten about the bathtub. She stepped farther away, took the tone down. “Whoever did this, they might be coming for us,” she said. “That fuckin’ nigger would sell us for a quarter, and you know it.”
    “Mom, what can I do?” He heard the plaintive whine in his voice. He didn’t hate the whine, only because it had always been there when he was dealing with Mom and he didn’t recognize it.
    “You coulda called me,” she shouted. “But you were up here with your whore when you coulda been callin’ me. I gotta think about this.” She looked around, eyes narrowing. “What’re you doing here, anyway? You oughta be downtown, seeing what you can see.”
    “I was already down there for a while, and I didn’t hear hardly anything. The cops found Deon’s money. It was stuffed away in his house, somewhere. They got it all.”
    “Goddamnit,” Margery said. “They got it all? Goddamnit.”
    “That’s what I heard. There’re state cops in town, and they’re supposed to be really good. I think we better lie low.”
    “Nothing they can connect to us.”
    “Not unless . . . I mean, what if they’ve got Joe?”
    “Joe’s dead,” Margery said. “We all agree.”
    “But what if he’s not?”
    “Then we are,” she said. She pointed a trembling finger at him. “You get back down there, you find out what’s going on. And you call me. Dumb shit.”
    They both turned to the sound of a car in the driveway. Singleton looked. “Katina,” he said.
    “I’m getting out of here,” Margery said. “I’m not talking to that whore.”
    Margery and Katina met at the door, and Margery went on by with a sideways glance and not a single word. Katina, on the other hand, smiled and said, “Hi, Mom.”
    When she was inside, with the door closed, she asked, “What’d the Witch want?”
    “Borrow money,” Singleton said. That was always good for an excuse, because his mother genuinely did love money.
    Katina bustled around, getting some coffee together. “What’s the word on Deon and Jane?” she asked.
    “Nobody knows what happened, but the BCA guys found a big pile of money and a bunch of dope up in Deon’s bedroom,” Singleton said. “They’re gonna be all over the dope angle.”
    “Sheriff Anderson’s out? Completely out?”
    Singleton dipped his head. “He’s out. He’s smart enough to know that he was over his head—and if he wasn’t smart enough, half the county commission went over to his office to tell him. Harvey Benschneider stood right over him while he made the call to St. Paul.”
    “Ah, boy,” Katina said. She pulled off her gloves, parka, and ski hat, shook her hair out. “I can’t believe they’re dead. Gene’s going crazy. You talk to