Night Prey

truck in a litter of crumbling blacktop, locked it, and gone inside.
    To the right, one of the Two Guys sat behind the front desk, reading an old Heavy Metal magazine. To the left, a woman and two men were working around a variety of free-weight racks. The Guy looked up when Koop came in, grunted, and went back to the magazine. Koop walked past him, down a hallway where fifty musclemen stared down from curling Polaroids thumb-tacked to the paneling, into the men’s locker room. He changed into a jock, cutoff sweatpants, and a sleeveless T-shirt, strapped on a lifting belt, pulled on goatskin gloves stiff with dried sweat, and went back out into the main room.
    Koop had a system: He divided his body into thirds, and worked a different third each day for three days. Then he took a day off, and the day after that, started over.
    Shoulders and arms, first day; chest and back, second day; and then lower body. This was shoulders and arms: he worked the delts, triceps, biceps. Unlike a lot of people, he worked his forearms hard, squeezing rubber rings until the muscles screamed with acid.
    And he worked his neck, both on the neck machine and with bridges. He’d never seen anyone else at Two Guy’s doing bridges, but that didn’t bother Koop. He’d once gone to a University of Minnesota-University of Iowa wrestling meet, and the Hawks were doing bridges. They’d kicked ass.
    Koop liked bench presses. Hell, everybody liked bench presses. He did pyramids, ten reps at 350, two or three at 370, one or two at 390. He did seated behind-the-neck presses; he did curls, topping out at eighty pounds on the dumbbells, working his biceps.
    At the very end, soaked with sweat, he got on a stair climber and ran up a hundred stories, then, breathing hard, he went back to the posing room.
    A woman in a sweat-stained orange bikini was working in the mirrors on the west wall, moving from a frontal pose, arms over head, to a side pose, biceps flexed against her stomach. Koop dropped the dumbbells on a pad and stripped down to his jock. He picked up the dumbbells, did ten quick pumps, tossed them back on the pad, and began his routine. In the back of his mind, he could hear the woman grunting as she posed, could hear the exhaust fan overhead, but all he could see was himself . . . And sometimes, through the mist of sweat, the gossamer-wrapped body of Sara Jensen, spread-eagled on the bed, the dark pubic mound and . . .
    Slam it, slam it, slam it, go, go. . . .
    The woman stopped, picked up her towel. He was vaguely aware that she was standing in a corner, watching.
    When he finally quit, she tossed him his towel. “Gettin’ the pecs,” she said.
    “Need more work,” he mumbled, wiping himself down. “Need more work.” He carried his workout clothes back to the locker room, soaked them under a shower, wrung them by hand, threw them into a dryer, and turned the dryer on. Then he showered, toweled off, dressed, went out to the main room, bought a Coke, drank it, went back and took his clothes out of the dryer, hung them in his locker, and left.
    He hadn’t said a word to anyone except, “Need more work. . . .”
     
     
     
    JOHN CARLSON WAS already in summer mode, black Raiders jacket over knee-length rapper shorts and black Nikes with red laces.
    “What’s happening, dude?” John was black and far too heavy. Koop handed him a small roll. John didn’t check it, just stuffed it in his pocket.
    “Gotta date,” Koop said.
    “Far out, man . . .” John rapped the car with his knuckles, as if for luck. “Get you some latex, man, you don’t want to get no fuckin’ AIDS.”
    “Do that,” Koop said.
    John backed away, took off his cap, and scratched his head. Koop started down the block, turned the corner. Another black kid was walking down the sidewalk. He swerved across the dirt parking strip to the curb, and when Koop slowed next to him, tossed a plastic twist through the passenger window and turned away. Koop kept going. Three blocks later, with nothing in his rearview, Koop stopped for a taste. Just a taste to wake him up.

    KOOP DIDN’T UNDERSTAND his fascination with Jensen. Didn’t understand why he was compelled to watch her, to get close to her. To hurry his daily rounds to meet her after work . . .
    He finished liquidating the jewelry he’d taken from Jensen’s apartment in a bar on the I-494 strip in Bloomington, selling the engagement ring and the wedding band to a guy who dressed and talked like an actor