Wicked Prey

van, and the side door rolled back, and a ramp unfolded onto the driveway. Whitcomb rolled himself up the ramp, and the woman strapped him in, the straps anchored to the floor. When she was done, the woman yanked on the straps, testing them, then walked around the van and got into the driver’s seat, and the second man got in the passenger side.
    The van backed out of the driveway, into the street, and turned down the hill. Letty ran parallel, to Seventh Street, saw the van heading into town.
    * * *
    AS A YOUNG GIRL, she’d learned that if she decided to do something, it was best to do it immediately: otherwise, somebody would stop you from doing it, or you’d start thinking too much and chicken out. She’d taught herself to drive when she was eight, bumping around the field behind the house, and though the cops would get pissed when they caught her at it, she’d driven herself all over the county by the time she was eleven.
    An old drunk would sometimes lend her his truck in return for a late-night pickup at the town bar; and when her mom got drunk, she’d provided the same service. In her driving years, she’d never had an accident.
    Now, as the van dwindled in the distance, she looked back at the house. How quickly could they get back, anyway? With the snarl of traffic in town, with streets blocked by marches . . .
    She turned around and pulled up the hill, pedaling hard, straight up the street to Whitcomb’s place, down the side, turned the bike so it was facing out the drive.
    The handicapped ramp ended in a newer-looking door with six small panes arranged in a square looking into a mudroom off a kitchen, just like the country farmhouse where she’d grown up. She knocked, loudly, heard nothing. Looked around. She could be seen from the street, but jeez, she was a young girl on a back porch.
    Letty knew about burglary from Lucas and Del and Shrake and Jenkins and all the other cops who hung around with Lucas; and from the reporters and producers at the station. She knew you were allowed one loud noise, or two quiet ones . . .
    She took the switchblade out of her waistband, flicked the blade out, took another quick look around, and shoved the blade through the glass next to the door lock. The glass dropped inside the door and she had to punch it again to get the last of it out. Then she reached through and flicked the turn-lock.
    The house was quiet inside, smelled of rotten vegetables and dirty diapers and smoke. In fact, it was only half a house—an apartment. The front door led to the porch, but there was no way to get into the other side of the house.
    She went back to the kitchen after the first look, got a dish rag off the sink, wiped the lock where she’d touched it, then moved through the house, looking for targets of interest. She found that there was almost nothing to see—a ratty old couch, two scarred tables, a couple of chairs, a broken-down bed in a room that may once have been a dining room, a new TV set with a cable connection. She found stairs going up to what might have originally been a bedroom, but the bedroom was empty, nothing but a half-dozen Snickers candy bar wrappers on the floor, and three or four cigarette butts.
    Whitcomb had a lot of clothes, and so did the woman, most of them hung in a doorless closet, the others in a plastic-laminate chest of drawers. The woman wore cheap fashion jeans and low-cut blouses and black brassieres and thong underwear. Tucked in the rickety chest of drawers was a box of Reality female condoms. The woman, Letty understood, was a hooker.
    She stopped to listen, heard nothing. Saw a flash of amber on a windowsill, checked it, found five empty pill containers. The names of the drugs meant nothing to her.
    In the whole house, the only new thing was the high-def Sony television with an Xbox 360 game machine and a couple of controllers.
    Then she found Randy’s switch.
    She knew what it was, because she’d known a man who’d beaten his children with a switch just like it, until one day, after whipping one of his daughters for some imagined moral infraction, his two older sons had taken him out into the side yard and had beaten him so badly that he hadn’t been able to walk for the best part of a year.
    Anyway, she knew what it was, and she took it out from behind the couch, handling it with the dish rag from the kitchen, and she looked at the blood spots. He’s a pimp, she’s a hooker, and he beats her with it. Letty considered breaking it into