Naked Prey

Singleton was here because of the hangings? Better get it done with.
    “It’s just . . . ” Singleton said, digging in his coat pocket. He glanced at his mother: they’d worked this out. “It’s just . . . ” The Sorrells were looking at his pocket, as though he were about to produce a paper or a photograph. Instead, Singleton produced a snubby .380 automatic, pushed it toward Sorrell’s eyes and pulled the trigger.
    At the last moment, Sorrell flinched. Even at the short distance, Singleton might have missed—but Singleton flinched the same way, and the bullet struck Sorrell between the eyes and he fell backward. After a second of stunning gun-smoked silence in the aftermath of the blast, Mary Sorrell backed a step away, and began to scream, looking at her husband’s body, and then, realizing, up at Singleton.
    The gun was pointing at her head and Singleton pulled the trigger and flinched again, just as Mary Sorrell flinched the opposite way, and, though he was four feet from her, the bullet clipped only the corner of her ear, and she staggered away and turned and tried to run.
    “Goddamn you,” Margery shrilled, and to Singleton: “Shoot her. Shoot her.”
    She was now six feet away, and Singleton, shaking badly, shot her in the back and she went down, hurt but still able to scramble, weakly, to her hands and knees. She made a coughing noise, like a lion, coughing from the blood in her lungs and crawled away from him, trailing brilliant red lung-shot blood now. Still shaking, he steppedcarefully around it and shot her in the back of the head and she went down for good.
    Then Singleton and Mom both stood there until Singleton groaned, “Oh, God.”
    “Shut up, dumb shit,” his mother said. “Just listen.”
    They listened together. For running feet, for a call, for a question. All they heard was the crinkling silence of the big house. They knew from Tammy that the Sorrells had no live-in servants, although there was a housekeeper who would be arriving after eight o’clock.
    “We ought to check around,” Margery said, looking up and down the entry hall. “There’s money in this place. I can smell it.”
    “Mom, we gotta get out of here,” Singleton said. “We can’t touch anything. I told you. They got microscopes, they got all kinds of shit. Don’t touch anything.”
    So they left, in the wan light of the predawn, locking the door behind them. They had at least a couple of hours before the housekeeper showed up. Not enough time to get back to Armstrong, but certainly enough time to arrive early in the day, to be astonished if Singleton was called upon to be astonished.
    “Left some money back there,” Margery said as they rolled out of the driveway. “Left some goddamned money on the table.”

10
    L UCAS SLEPT FOR four hours. Then the alarm buzzer went, and he groaned, and Weather kicked him and said, “The clock, the clock,” and he groaned again and swatted the clock hard enough to trigger the snooze feature for the next thirty years. Weather said, “Get up, you’ll go back to sleep, get up.”
    “No, just give me a minute.”
    “Get up, c’mon, you’re keeping me awake.”
    “Jeez . . . ” He rolled out of bed, stunned by the early hour, staggered to the window, looked at the indoor-outdoor thermometer—it was stuck at -2°F—then parted the wooden slats of the shade and peered out at a surly, pitch-dark morning. The sun wasn’t due up for a while, but a streetlight provided enough illumination that he could see the bare branches moving on a lilac bush. Not only bitterly cold, but windy. Good.
    He turned back to the bed, but Weather said, “Go in the bathroom.”
    “Miserable bitch,” he muttered, and heard her cruel laugh as he tottered off.
    Lucas didn’t care for mornings, unless he came on them from behind. He liked the dawn hours, if he could go home and go to bed after the sun came up. But getting up before the sun wasn’t natural. Science had proven that early birds weren’t as intelligent, sexually vigorous, or good-looking as night owls, although he couldn’t tell Weather—she cheerfully got up every workday morning at five-thirty, and was often cutting somebody open by seven o’clock.
    T HE GOVERNOR WAS an early bird. He was dressed in a crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled two careful turns—a concession to the fact that it was Saturday—dark gray slacks and black loafers. A pale gray jacket hung from an antique coat tree in a corner of his