Naked Prey

the deputies’ meeting, asked everybody to nose around. If everybody did talk to everybody else, they might finally figure out that Loren Singleton had been closer to the Kansas City people than anybody had really appreciated. If somebody had seen them here, and somebody else had seen them there, and if they put it with what Katina knew, and what Gene Calb knew . . .
    That was the trouble with a small town: too many people knew your business, knew your life.
    In the end he called Mom.
    M ARGERY SAT AT the kitchen table with her head in her hands. “You dumb shit. You dumb shit. What were you thinking about? Now they’ve got to look up here. When the Sorrells were killed, it could have come from anywhere. From Kansas City. Now . . . you’re sure the kid didn’t recognize you?”
    “I’m still here,” Singleton said. He added, after a moment, “So are you.”
    “What is that supposed to mean?” She didn’t yell it at him—she growled it.
    “It means, we need a way out.”
    She looked at him for a few seconds, then said, “There’s only one way out. We’ve got to give them somebody else who did it.”
    “What?”
    “If they look at you, with that hole in you . . . if they even suspect, all they have to say is, ‘Take off your shirt.’ That’s it. Then you’re done.”
    “I know it,” he said, miserably. He touched his chest and tears came to his eyes. “Jeez, I hurt.”
    “I don’t know why I help you,” she said. “I just oughta go to work and forget about it.”
    “They’d find out what happened. You’d go to jail right along with me.”
    “Who’s gonna tell them?”
    Silence. Then: “I would. You got me into this, you . . . witch. You’re the one who thought Jane was so fuckin’ wonderful, you’re the one who thought Deon was so fuckin’ smart, you’re the one who thought of stealin’ the little girls, for Christ’s sake. I ain’t hanging for that. I ain’t hanging for the little girls. I’ll take them out where the bodies are, they’ll dig them up, and you know what they’ll find? They’ll find all that shit from the nursing home that you pumped into them, that’s what they’ll find.”
    More silence. A full minute of it, the locks closing down again, just like when they lived together years ago, locks on all the doors.
    “You gotta do what I tell you.”
    “If it makes any goddamn sense.” More tears. “Goddamn, I hurt.”
    S HE TOLD HIM what to do, and Singleton staggered off to bed, pulling at the hair on the sides of his head. His head was burning, not from the wound, but from what his mother had said. Once facedown, he blacked out. He woke from time to time, to find Margery in the living room, watching TV, watching him.
    Mom.
    Finally, late in the afternoon, he pushed himself to his feet, brushed his teeth, washed his hands, went to the bedroom, opened the bottom drawer, and found the little .380semi-auto. He checked it, put the gun in his pocket. And now a pipe.
    His basement was small, dark, damp; a hole, really, for the water heater and the furnace and for a few thousand spiders and crickets and ants and mice. Singleton walked carefully down the wooden steps, pulled the string on the bare overhead bulb, dug around in an old trash rack, and eventually came up with what he’d been looking for.
    A lead pipe. Lead pipes were hard to find. They’d been outlawed for decades and when a guy really needed a lead pipe, you could hardly find one. If you wanted to hit somebody over the head, you were usually stuck with a copper or iron pipe, which were really too hard to do the job right. With copper or iron, you’d break the skin, while, with a properly deployed lead pipe, you got a nice deadly rap, and no blood.
    He was just lucky, Singleton thought, to have one. He carried it upstairs, walked around the kitchen a few times, whacking the palm of his hand with the pipe, then stepped down the hall to the living room. “Let’s go,” he said.
    Margery pushed herself out of the La-Z-Boy. “You better do this right, dumb shit. This is it. If this ain’t right, we’re gonna die.”
    “I know.”
    “So get some different shit on. You’re supposed to know how all this works—but you gotta get some different shit on.”
    Singleton pulled out his oldest parka, a dark blue nylon job that he hadn’t worn in years. He got his heaviest gloves and a pair of boots. When he bent forward to tie his shoes, the pain in his chest suddenly flared and he