Naked Prey

getting better and better, almost driving the Letty West demon out of his head. Then Katina called him into the kitchen and he found a tablecloth on the kitchen table, and a couple of white candles, in fancy glass candleholders. He said, “Whoa.”
    “I thought you’d like it,” Katina said. She blushed a little, as though she were shy about it, or maybe it was the heat from the stove. She’d made a salad with white seeds that looked like sunflower seeds, but weren’t, and mashed potatoes to go with the steak.
    Singleton sat down and said, “Pretty okay,” then popped up and said, “You forgot the ketchup.”
    She said grace, as she always did, and then was quiet, until they were halfway through dinner, when she asked, “Have you ever thought about having a child?”
    He said, “What?”
    S INGLETON DIDN’T KNOW exactly what had happened, there, during dinner and afterward. They’d watched television and then wound up in bed, again, which was fine with him—but he’d gotten up to watch the ten o’clock news, and to get into his uniform, and she’d left, light-footed and apparently lighthearted, singing to herself.
    He watched the news: they were still talking about Sorrell, and they had a quick piece of tape with Letty West, but it was old tape that he’d been seeing for a couple of days. He dozed for a while, sitting in front of the tube in the La-Z-Boy. When he woke up, he groped around for his cigarettes, found them, found the matchbox, and ripped the match down the igniter strip.
    In the flare of the match, it occurred to him that the Sorrell killings had been no problem at all. He’d just gone and done it. Nothing pointed at him and a threat had been eliminated.
    Truth be told, he realized as he stared into the flame, he’d enjoyed knocking down the Sorrells. Nothing to do with his mother—he’d enjoyed it for himself. Here was that king-shit Sorrell guy, all the money in the world, all big and smart and walking around in his house in silk pajamas, and here was Singleton, with his little ole mother . . .
    But who had the gun, king shit? Who acted fast?
    He knocked them down in his mind, knocked them down again, then swore as the flame bit down to his fingers.
    “Goddamnit,” he said, aloud. He lit another match, lit the cigarette.
    Letty West, he thought, waving the match out. Up there in the night, with nobody but her mama.
    A FTER L UCAS AND Del dropped her at her house, Letty changed clothes and then went out to the highway and hitched a ride into Armstrong. She wasn’t stupid about it. She always waited until she recognized the truck before she put her thumb out. In that part of the county, she recognized one in twenty, and they always stopped for her.
    At the library, she got a computer and went online, called up the Google search engine, entered how to with TV reporter and got some strange websites.
    Three boys from her class came in, two of them wearing Vikings sweatshirts and the third wearing a sweatshirt that said Scouts, which was the high school nickname. One of the Vikings boys was named Don, and Letty considered him somewhat desirable. She felt a pressure from them, almost like a pressure on her face. They got on computers,two of them facing her, and they all clicked along through the net.
    Two hours later, disturbed by what she’d read on the websites, and carrying fifty pages of printout, she hitched back home with an eighty-three-year-old drunk who’d spent the evening with a lady friend, and couldn’t keep his truck straight on the street. She flagged him down, and he let her drive. She dropped him at his house, halfway up to Broderick, and told him she’d come over in the morning with the truck, when he was sober.
    As she went through Broderick, she stopped at the store and bought a bottle of milk and a box of cereal. The house was dark when she got back. She lit it up, turned down the heat, ate a quick bowl of cereal, and then went back into her mother’s bedroom, to look at herself in the mirror.
    She wasn’t bad-looking, she decided. Actually, she was quite attractive. But she would need to soften up her face. She looked good now, but if she kept making grim lines, she could wind up looking like a crocodile. She had no makeup skills at all, but the women at the hair salon could fix that. They had a whole library of books and magazines, and an ocean of experience. Letty had never spent a dime on makeup. She’d start now.
    The web sites had stressed that