Naked Prey

breathing.
    When he reached the West house, he found that it was not entirely dark. Light glowed through a shade on a north-facing window on the second floor, and a variety of small lights—a TV power light, a bathroom night light, a green light that might have been on a telephone, a small row of red lights that looked like a power supply—actually gave his dilated eyes enough light to navigate.
    Moving slowly, he felt with his feet for the track that crossed the culvert into the driveway. When he got close, he sensed a bulk to his right. Martha’s Jeep? Too big. Pickup. Goddammit. Who was here? He moved around behind it, looked for any movement in the house, then squirted the penlight at the back of the truck.
    He recognized it, all right. The dented corner panels, where old Reese Culver tended to back into solid objects, like phone poles. What was the old man doing here, with virtually all the lights out? There’d been rumors, off-and-on, that Martha West might fuck for money, but nobody paid them much attention. It was generally taken as wishful thinking in a town that needed somebody who fucked for money. But Reese Culver? If he was staying the night, the old fart, he had to be paying.
    He thought about it for a minute, two minutes. Shit. He put his hand in the pocket, gripped the pistol, took it outonce to make sure he wouldn’t snag the pocket, put it back in, and walked up to the porch.
    M ARTHA W EST HAD just crawled into bed when she heard the knock at the door. She thought the knock was Letty, upstairs, until it came a second time. She looked at a clock. Almost midnight. Who was it, at this time of night?—and a sudden chill went through her shoulders and she thought: Deon Cash and Jane Warr. Just at midnight. The knock came a third time, and she picked up a ratty old terrycloth robe and threw it on, and walked through the darkened front room to the front door.
    The porch light was burned out, so she turned on the interior light and looked out through the glass cut-out on the front door. The first thing she saw was the embroidered star on the parka, and then Loren Singleton’s face. No ghosts, anyway. Had something happened?
    Puzzled, she opened the door. “Hi . . . ”
    “Martha, sorry to bother you,” Singleton said. “I know it’s late, but Loretta Grupe called in and said she was worried about Reese—he’d been drinking some and she was worried about whether he got home. I happened to see his truck out here.”
    “He, uh, was drinking, and, uh, well—Letty drove him home, and he told her to go ahead and bring the truck up here, so she’d have a ride. You know how she is.” Singleton kept looking past her, looking for something else. She didn’t care for him, and pushed the door closed an inch or so, ready to go back to bed. “Anything else?”
    “Okay. So he’s home. And Letty’s home, everything’s all right.”
    “Yeah, she’s asleep, everything’s okay.” She smiled, not her best smile. “Okay?”
    N O POINT IN messing around. Singleton put his left arm out and straight-armed the door, and it flew open, bouncing Martha West straight back. She was startled, just beginning to get scared, and he pulled the pistol out of his pocket and pointed it at her eyes and said, “Tell Letty to come down here. She’s under arrest.”
    Martha hesitated just a second, looking down the barrel of the gun, and knew in her heart that Letty wasn’t under arrest, that something terrible was happening here and she thought she knew what. She mimed a turn, as if to shout up the stairs, and then instead, she threw herself at Singleton, avoiding the gun barrel, grabbing his arm, going right straight into his body, screaming and spitting at him, clawing at him; the sleeve of his coat jerked up and she got some skin, saw some blood. He fought back and she realized that she was going to lose him, and she screamed, “LETTY RUN LETTY RUN LETTY RUN . . . ” and Singleton hit her and she went over a loveseat and crashed through a glass-topped coffee table, still screaming and saw Singleton coming, reaching out to her, and then she realized, just in a tiny fragment of time that she had left that he was pointing, not reaching, and she screamed “RUN LETTY . . . ”
    T HE BOOM OF the gun was deafening in the small room, but the noise stopped instantly. Singleton had never liked that kind of noise, that high-emotion squealing that women did, and when he shot Martha West in the forehead and the