Naked Prey

him?”
    “Yeah. He thinks maybe Jane was dealing cocaine at the casino,” Singleton said. “Could they be that stupid?”
    “Deon was a stupid man, and Jane wasn’t much smarter,” Katina said. She took cups out of a dish rack in the sink. “My question is, what do we tell the police?”
    “You don’t tell them anything,” Singleton said. “LetGene do the talking. No reason for any of us to get involved. Deon worked for Gene, not for us. If Gene’s smart, he’ll point the state cops at the casino. There’s so much shit going on up there, they could investigate the place for the rest of their lives and not get to the bottom of it.”
    “Only one problem with that idea,” Katina said.
    “What?”
    “Joe. Where’s Joe? Jane told me that all of his stuff was still in the house. If Joe’s dead, then it wasn’t the casino.”
    “Could be. Could be if it’s coke they were dealing. Can’t tell with dopers. The other thing is—what if Joe came back and did this? What if he was looking for that money?”
    “Hmm.” They sat silently for a moment as Katina struggled with all the conflicting possibilities. Finally, she looked up at him and said, “Whatever happened to all three, we’ve really got to worry about our own positions.”
    “That’s right. We all ought to stay away. If the state guys find one string, and pull it hard enough, the whole sweater’s gonna unravel.”
    They talked for a while over their coffee, a middle-aged couple who got along. Singleton wasn’t like the men she’d met in the Cities, Katina thought. He had some steel in him, some flint. Some Ugly.
    She liked it—a man who’d stand up.
    She just didn’t know.
    T HE PARTY AT the West house started when two newspaper reporters, accompanied by two photographers, showed up at the front door and asked for interviews. Letty was pleased to do it, though Martha was a bit embarrassed by the mess the house was in. That didn’t seem to bother the photographers, who got a couple of shots of Letty sitting in her mother’s old rocker. Then the first TV truck showedup. The newspaper people were okay, but compared to the TV people, they were mongrels at a dog show. The TV people were stars— Letty’d even seen some of them on her own TV.
    The TV people agreed on one set of lights, and set them up around the living room, while Martha scurried around moving all of her best furniture into place, moving the worst of it into the kitchen. A guy came in with a couple of sacks of black-corn chips, cheese dip, and Coke, and then somebody else brought in a twelve-pack of Bud Light. They asked Letty to get some traps, and she did, and they put them on the floor by her feet, and some of the cameramen crawled in close to get a shot of the traps, using the lights on top of their cameras. Somebody else challenged the cameramen to snap their fingers in the traps, and being cameramen, they did, although none of the on-air talent would do it. Then somebody else asked Martha about her singing career, and she got out her guitar and sang an old Pete Seeger song called “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” and then the main lights came up, and were adjusted, and the first interviewer, a blonde with a foxy face and feathery crimson scarf, said, “Letty, tell me about yesterday.”
    “I was up in my bedroom . . . ” she began. Letty told them about the traps and the ’rats and the .22 and the bodies hanging in the dark. Then she told a dark-haired Italian-looking guy from Fox, and did it again for CNN, and as many times as they wanted, she stayed on top of it, fresh.
    The TV liked her: the kid had this face, a face that looked like it ought to have a smear of dirt on it, though it had been scrubbed clean—a wild face with just a hint of feral, preteen sexuality.
    They made her demonstrate the traps, her gun, explain the machete. She cradled the rifle in the notch of her left arm as she talked, and the reporters fluttered around her like sparrows over a spilled patch of Quaker oats. Theycould smell the connection between the kid and the tube . . .
    “You’re gonna be a star, honey,” the foxy blonde said. She was a beautiful, smart woman whose socks cost more than Letty’s wardrobe, and Letty believed her.
    T HE BCA GUY, Dickerson, finally chased the TV reporters away. Several asked if they could come back the next morning. Martha said, “Of course.” And Martha, as animated as Letty had ever seen her, began to plan for the next