Sudden Prey

and nodded curtly. To his mother he said, “They told me about it.”
    “They was set up,” Amy said. She made a pecking motion with her nose, as if to emphasize her words. “That goddamn Duane Cale had something to do with it, ’cause he’s just fine, talking like crazy. He’ll tell them anything they want. All kinds of lies.”
    “Yeah, I know,” LaChaise said. His mother was worried because Candy had given her money from some of the robberies.
    “Well, what’cha gonna do?” Amy LaChaise demanded. “It was your sister and your wife . . .” She clutched at his arm, her fingers sharp and grasping, like buckthorn.
    “I know, Mama,” LaChaise said. “But there ain’t much I can do right now.” He lifted his hands so she could see the heavy cuffs.
    “That’s a fine thing,” Amy LaChaise moaned, still clutching at him. “You just let it go and lay around your fat happy cell.”
    “You go on into the chapel,” LaChaise said, with a harsh snap in his voice. “I want to take a look at ’em.”
    Amy LaChaise backed away a step. “Caskets are closed,” she ventured.
    “They can open them,” LaChaise said, grimly.
    Sandy Darling, still on the porch, watched the unhappy reunion, then turned and went inside.
     
     
     
    LOGAN, THE FUNERAL director, was a small, balding man, with a mustache that would have been tidy if it hadn’t appeared moth-eaten. Although he was gray-faced, he had curiously lively, pink hands, which he dry-washed as he talked. “In a case like this, Mr. LaChaise,” he said, looking nervously at LaChaise’s handcuffs, “we can’t be responsible for the results.”
    “Open the boxes,” LaChaise said.
    Logan, worried, cracked the lids and stepped back. Way back. LaChaise stepped up, raised them.
    Candy, his wife.
    She’d been shot several times through the body, out of sight under her burial dress, but one shot had gone almost straight through her nose. The nose had been rebuilt with some kind of putty. Other than that, she looked as sweet as she had the day he first saw her at the Wal-Mart. He looked at her for a full minute, and thought he might have shed a tear; but he didn’t.
    Georgie was worse. Georgie had been hit at least three times in the face. While the funeral home had sewed and patched and made up, there was no doubt that something was massively wrong with Georgie’s skull. The body in the box looked no more like the living Georgie than did a plastic baby doll.
    His sister.
    He could remember that one good Christmas when they’d had the tree, he was nine or ten, she was three or four, and somebody had given her pajamas with feet in them. “Feetsies,” she called them. “I’m gonna put on my feetsies.” Must have been twenty-five years gone by, and here she was, with a head like a football. Again he felt the impulse toward tears; again, nothing happened.
    Logan, the funeral director, his face drained of blood, cleared his throat and said, “Mr. LaChaise?”
    LaChaise nodded. “You did okay,” he said, gruffly. “Where’s the preacher?”
    “He should be here. Any minute.” Logan’s hands flittered gratefully with the compliment, like sparrows at a bird feeder.
    “I want to wait back here until the funeral starts,” LaChaise said. “I don’t wanna talk to my mama no more’n I have to.”
    “I understand,” the funeral director said. He did: he’d been dealing with old lady LaChaise since the bodies had been released by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner. “We’ll move Candy and Georgie into the chapel. When Reverend Pyle arrives, I’ll step back and notify you.”
    “That’s good,” LaChaise said. “You got a Coke machine here somewhere?”
    “Well, there is a Coke box in the staff area,” Logan said.
    “I could use a Coke. I’d buy it.”
    “No, no, that’s fine . . .”
    LaChaise looked at the escort. “How about it, Wayne? I’ll buy you one.”
    Sand drank fifteen caffeinated Diet Cokes a day and got headaches if he went without. LaChaise knew that. “Yeah,” Sand said. “A Coke would be good.”
    “Then I’ll make the arrangements,” the funeral director said. “The Coke box is back through that door.”
    He pointed back through the Peace Room, as the staging area was called, to a door that said, simply, “Staff.”
     
     
     
    ON THE OTHER side of the staff door was a storage room full of broken-down shipping cartons for coffins, eight or ten large green awnings, folded, for funerals on rainy days, a