Naked Prey

bucks for this kid. They were gonna cut it three ways that we know of, and probably had to be four, since it seems like there’s a fourth one on the loose. That’d be a quarter-million apiece, for risking the death sentence. Gene and I make that much, every year, just running our quiet little car business. There wouldn’t be no sense in it.”
    “Some sense for somebody like Deon,” Singleton said. “He was getting nothing but chump change.”
    “Just like you, Loren, and both of you happy to get it,” Calb snapped.
    “Hey—shut up,” Ruth said. She looked at the two men, poked a finger at them. “We don’t need a quarrel. So . . . what does Gene say to the police?”
    “He plays dumb,” Davis said. “That’ll work, if you let it work. If you don’t get smart. You go ahead and sweat, andwiggle around, and apologize—the man always likes to see that. But just be dumb. Yeah, you hired him, because I asked you to, to get him out of the neighborhood. They come to me, and I say, ‘Hell, yes, it was a big favor, gettin’ Deon off my back, and his old lady, too.’
    “We tell them that his pay probably wasn’t enough for some city boy who wants to put cocaine up his nose, and so he went off on his own,” Davis continued. “I mean, this thing they did with this little girl—Deon’s crazy enough, but no cop down in KC who knows me would say that I’d do it. Nobody up here would think that Gene would, either.”
    H E PAUSED, AND in the absence of words, a full-color motion picture popped up behind Singleton’s eyes: a picture of Mom getting the little bottle of drugs out of her bag, and the syringe, and sucking the fluid out, and holding the needle up, and squirting a little bit of it, then putting the smile on her face before she went in with the girl.
    The older girl might have known what was going on. She’d taken the shot with a dark-eyed passivity, her eyes locked on Singleton’s. She’d had a blue ribbon in her hair, with a knot in the middle.
    The younger one had a stuffed toy that Jane had gotten her, a hand-sized white-mouse puppet with a pink tail. She’d said, “Okay,” and had lain back on the folding bed and rolled her arm around to take the shot. Brave little kid: went to sleep with the mouse on her chest.
    He’d dug her down through the clay cap and placed her in a pile of old Yellow Pages phone books, and that was that.
    Wasn’t hard. Didn’t seem crazy; just was.
    D AVIS STARTED TALKING again, and popped Singleton out of the mental movie. “So we play it dumb: what yousee is what you got. Three dumb assholes decide to kidnap a girl because they want more money and they get killed for their trouble.”
    “Four dumb assholes,” Calb said distractedly. “Maybe the other guy was like down on the other end of the thing, set up the girl, or something.” He looked at Singleton. “They never mentioned a friend or anything?”
    “No. They kept talking about all their friends down in KC.”
    “Whatever,” Ruth said. “The thing is, I need something to tell the women who work with me. Some of them are afraid that somehow, everything is linked—the cars, the drugs, and the kidnapping. If somebody put pressure on them, came at them the right way, they’d probably give up the whole story. Feel morally obligated to.”
    “Shit,” Davis said.
    “Well, I agree with them,” Ruth said, showing the cold smile again. “The only difference is, I know Gene.” She lifted a hand toward Calb. “If I thought we had anything to do with all of this, I’d go to the police myself. But I think it was Deon Cash and Jane Warr and Joe, trying to make some money. And the fact is, even though we don’t know anything about it, it could drag us all down.”
    “So tell them the truth,” Calb said. “Tell them that we’re just as scared and confused as they are. We don’t know what the hell’s happening, and we’re desperate to find out.”
    “Dumb is best,” Davis said again. “Believe me on that—you don’t know nothin’ about nothin’. If you don’t know nothin’, nobody can trip you up—not your friends, not the cops.”
    T HEY TALKED FOR another half-hour, and then broke up. Davis said he was heading back to KC that night, after eating dinner at the Calbs’. Katina walked out with Singletonand Ruth. Ruth kept going, across the highway and down toward the church. Katina held back and said, “I’d like to come over.”
    “You’re the goddamned horniest little