Wicked Prey

flicked out her phone and called Lois: “Are you guys still down by the park?”
    “No. We’re up at the Capitol, cruisin’ for a bruisin’. Did you ever find your hooker?”
    “Yes. Is there any possibility you could come down Wabasha? I’m at Fifth and Wabasha. She sorta doesn’t believe me about TV and I need her to,” Letty said.
    “I thought you were schoolmates,” Lois said.
    “We’re not close,” Letty said, smiling into the phone. Whew.
    “The cops have Wabasha blocked off, but we could come down Cedar,” Lois said. “Meet you at Cedar and Fifth? Five minutes?”
    “See you there,” Letty said. She clicked the phone shut and said, “C’mon, ride around for a couple of minutes.”
    Briar, nervous: “If Randy finds out . . .”
    “He won’t find out,” Letty said. “He can’t get around, we’re walking away from him. C’mon, girl, have some fun.”
    Briar bobbed her head, and Letty took her arm and started her across the street toward the hill down to Cedar. “So, how’d you get the name Tiara?”
    “Randy gave it to me. He said, you know, I need a better show-business name than Juliet. He said Juliet was old-fashioned.”
    “Oh!” Letty put on some outrage. “Juliet is a great name. You know that song ‘Romeo and Juliet’? My dad has it on his iPod, it’s an old-timey band. Dire Straits, I think. You don’t know it? Maybe I can get a copy for you . . .”
    * * *
    AS A CHILD in her time and place, with the mother she’d had, Letty had learned a number of things that would never leave her. She was exquisitely sensitive to social differences: who was rich and who was poor, who was smart and who was dumb, who was succeeding, who was failing. And she’d always kept an emotional distance from people that she’d had to deal with, an observational distance. Jennifer Carey carried the same space—and had told Letty, “You could be a hell of a reporter if you wanted to be. You’re really smart, and I can see you watching.”
    Letty knew what she looked like, and what she looked like was a rich, popular, high school kid. She didn’t have to look like that: she chose to, when she was doing her TV thing. She could also look like a smart kid, which was different, a little less put-together; she could look like a shlump, and sometimes, at home, she did that look, watching, watching, watching.
    Today she was wearing jeans, but they were designer jeans, and her blouse came from a boutique, not from Macy’s. Her sneakers were sleek and cool and olive green, with rust-colored laces; and her sunglasses were small and oval and glittery. She was slender with good cheekbones; she was put together, and she knew it. She could see the weight of it in Briar’s face—the weight of being arm in arm with a rich popular kid.
    * * *
     
    SHE GOT BRIAR talking about stage names, and then about clothes, and then about Randy—Briar didn’t want to talk about Randy—and then the other girl, slowing, but not disentangling her arm from Letty’s, asked, “Do you know what I do?”
    Letty gave her another TV grin, one she’d practiced two thousand times. “Yup.”
    Now Briar disentangled herself and slowed. “Is that why you want to put me on TV?”
    “Nope. I’m not going to put you on TV, because that would really mess you up,” Letty said. “I just want to prove to you that I am on TV.”
    “Why?”
    Letty went serious: “Because I’m worried about you. How old are you?”
    “Sixteen. Almost seventeen.”
    Letty was surprised. Briar looked at least a couple of years older. “How long have you been doing this?”
    “Four months.”
    “Ah, jeez.” Letty let the sympathy out. “I’m so worried about you. I’m so worried about what Randy is up to. You know, if he hurt me . . . my father would kill him, maybe. And he’d find out. Randy is dumb, dumb, dumb.”
    “He’s not that dumb,” Briar said.
    Letty shook her finger in Briar’s face. “Yes, he is. If he was a smart guy, you think he’d be living in a shack? You think he’d have gone to jail four or five different times, and he’s not hardly thirty yet?”
    “He’s twenty-four,” Briar said.
    Letty’s eyebrows went up. “Juliet—he’s not twenty-four. Look at his ID sometime, when he’s not around. He’s almost thirty. He lies about everything.”
    Briar glanced back up the hill, afraid again. She looked like a denizen of 1984 , caught talking about Big Brother. “He doesn’t always lie . . .”
    Letty said,