Naked Prey

of a wall of garbage.
    Lucas got out of the truck at the same time Letty did, and looked over the locked gate. The dump was bigger than he’d expected, covering a half of a square mile. Much of the garbage appeared to be pizza boxes, though it smelled more like old diapers. Letty walked around to the back of the truck to get her gear.
    “Six miles,” Lucas said, as he walked back around the truck and popped the lid for her. “How’re you gonna get back home?”
    “Walk, or hitch a ride,” she said. She dragged the sack of traps out, stuck the rifle under her arm. “I won’t have my traps. Do it all the time.”
    “Aw, Jesus.” Lucas looked around at the weird, cold landscape, the spitting snow, the circling crows, and the piles of trash.
    “I’m not asking for a ride back,” Letty said. He could feel the manipulation.
    “How long will it take to set out the traps? Minimum?” Lucas asked.
    “Hour, hour and a half, do it right,” she said.
    “You got a watch?”
    “No.”
    “Goddamnit. You need a watch.” Lucas took his watch off and handed it to her. “If you lose the watch, I’ll poison you. My wife gave it to me. We’ll be back in an hour and a half.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Be careful.”
    A car pulled into the entryway, stopped, and they both looked at it. The man inside put up a hand, a hello, thenturned and backed away. He got straight on the road, and headed back toward the highway. An old Cadillac.
    Letty said, “See you,” and walked away.
    Lucas slammed the lid, got back in the truck. “She’s more goddamn trouble than women ten years older than she is,” he said.
    “What’re we doing?” Del asked.
    “Let’s start tearing Broderick down.”
    “Starting with . . .  ?”
    “Gene Calb. Go back and hit him again. Nail him down. And maybe those church women, if we can find them. Letty said they worked for Calb, sometimes, delivering cars. They’re church women, so maybe they’ll tell us the truth.”
    “Fat fuckin’ chance,” Del said. And a while later, as they headed back toward Broderick, “That was a nice Caddy, you know? I’ve thought about buying an old one myself. You see them in the Sunday paper: you can get a good one for six or seven thousand, ten years old, some old guy drove it until he died, put thirty thousand miles on it, or something. You can drive it for another ten years.”
    “Of course, you’d have spent ten years driving a pig,” Lucas said.
    “Go ahead, tarnish my dream.”
    C ALB’S SHOP WAS locked, and Del said, “It is Sunday. Not everybody works.”
    “Yeah. There’re a couple of cars over at the church, though,” Lucas said. They both looked across the highway, where two ’90s Toyota Corollas, both red, sat in the driveway next to the church. Electric cords ran out to both of them, firing the block heaters. “Let’s check them out.”
    “Nuns make me nervous,” Del said.
    “Except for Elle,” Lucas said.
    “Elle makes me nervous,” Del said. “I’m always afraid she’s gonna start shaking and moaning and screaming about Jesus.”
    “Wrong religion,” Lucas said dryly, as they trudged across the empty highway toward the church. “She screams about the archbishop. Jesus, she doesn’t scream about.”
    “It could happen, though,” Del said. “She’s one of those skinny women with big eyes. They can start shaking anytime. That’s my experience.”
    Elle Kruger was Lucas’s oldest friend, a nun and professor of psychology at a St. Paul women’s college. He’d known her before kindergarten—they had walked together with their two mothers, carrying their tin lunch boxes, on the first day they’d ever gone to school. Later, when he was with Minneapolis homicide, she’d consulted on a number of his cases; and when Lucas began writing role-playing games as a way to make extra money, she’d created a group at her college to test-play the games.
    W HICH MADE THE coincidence seem even stranger—that they should be talking about Elle Kruger as they crossed the highway, and then . . .
    They climbed the stoop and knocked on the door of the old church. Lucas’s ears were burning from the cold, and Del said, “Fucking Minnesota” and shuffled his feet in the keeping-warm dance. Lucas reached out to knock again when the door opened, and a woman looked out. She was an older woman, in her sixties, white-haired, round-faced with little pink dots at her cheeks, wearing bifocals, and holding what looked like a dustcloth.