Shadow Prey

for two days with a man he didn’t know. Her car was still out front, with maybe two gallons of gas. Neither John nor his nine-year-old sister had eaten since noon the day before—a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup.
    “I’m so hungry,” Donna cried. “I’m so hungry.”
    John made up his mind. “Get in the car,” he said.
    “You can’t drive.”
    “Sure I can. Get in the car. We’ll find something to eat.”
    “Where? We don’t got no money,” she said skeptically. But she was pulling on her jacket. She wore flip-flops for shoes.
    “In town.”
    Friday night. The lights at the football field on the edge of town were the brightest things for miles.
    “Must be about done,” John Liss said. He could barely see over the steering wheel on the old Ford Fairlane. They bumped off the road and across a dirt parking lot. The temperature was in the forties. As long as the car was running, the heater would work, but he worried about running out of gas. If they were careful, they could make it back home.
    “Watch the hot-dog stand,” John told his sister. The year before, he had gone to a game and afterward had watchedthe woman who ran the concession stand peel a half-dozen wieners off the spits of an automatic broiler and toss them into a garbage can. A partial bag of buns had gone with them. The stand was in the same place, and a garbage can still stood next to it. Even the woman was the same.
    The game ended twenty minutes later. The hometown fans spilled out of the stands, pushing and shoving in celebration of the victory. A tall blond kid stopped at the hot-dog stand, bought a dog and a Coke, and started walking away with friends. After a few steps, he spotted a girl in the crowd and yelled, “Hey, Carol.”
    “What do you want, Jimmy?” she asked teasingly. They were both wearing red wool letter jackets with white leather sleeves and yellow letters. John and his sister watched as they sidled toward each other, grinning, friends backing up each of them.
    “This remind you of anything?” Jimmy asked, sliding the wiener out of his bun.
    Her friends feigned shock while his slapped themselves on their foreheads, but Carol was ready: “Well,” she said, “I suppose it might look a teensy bit like your dick, only the weenie’s a lot bigger.”
    “Oh, right, ” he said, and flipped the wiener at her. She ducked and laughed and charged him, and they wrestled through the parking lot. Two minutes later, they were all gone.
    “Go get it,” Donna whispered.
    “Did you see where it went?”
    “Right under the stands . . .”
    John slipped out of the car and found the wiener in the dirt. He wiped it on his shirt, brought it back and offered it to his sister. “It’s still hot,” she said. “God, it’s perfect.”
    Her eyes were shining. John looked at her and the anger that washed over him almost snapped his spine. This was his sister : his fuckin’ little sister. He wanted to kill someone, but he didn’t know whom, or how. Not then. Later, when he met the Crows, he learned whom and how.
    • • •
    “Everybody’s got a story,” Sam said somberly. “Every fuckin’ one of us. If it’s not about us, it’s about somebody in the family. Jesus Christ.”
    The phone rang.
    “Shadow Love?” Sam asked.
    Aaron shrugged and picked up the phone. “ ’Lo?”
    “ The cops are coming, ” a man said. “ They’ll be there in ten minutes. ”
    “What?”
    “ The cops are coming. Get out now. ”
    Sam Crow was on his feet. “What?”
    Aaron stood with the receiver in his hand, confused. “Somebody, I don’t know. Said the cops are on their way. In ten minutes.”
    “Let’s go . . . .”
    “I gotta get . . .”
    “Fuck it, let’s go!” Sam yelled. He grabbed Aaron’s jacket, threw it at him, picked up his own.
    “The typewriter . . .” Aaron seemed dazed.
    “Fuck the typewriter!” Sam had the door open.
    “I got to get my letters. I don’t know what’s in them. Maybe something about Barbara or something . . .”
    “Ah, shit . . .” Sam grabbed a brown supermarket bag and sailed it at Aaron. “Get as much as you can in there,” he said. He jerked open a closet door, pulled a green army duffel bag out and started pushing in their clothing. “Don’t look at that shit, just stuff it in the bag,” he shouted at Aaron, who seemed to be moving in slow motion, thumbing through his personal papers.
    It took them four minutes to fill the duffel and