Wicked Prey

catch you,” Letty said. “I can get some more money. We’ll meet tomorrow—I’ll call you. Remember what I said?”
    “Yup.” Briar showed a little grin. “Lie like a motherfucker.”
    * * *
    CAREY HAD been watching from a distance, and when Letty walked back to her, she said, “All right—that was interesting, but there’s no story. I mean, nothing I would feel right about doing now. She’s really too young to say ‘yes’ to it.”
    “I don’t want to do a story, either,” Letty said. “I wanted you to meet her because I need to tell somebody the rest of it. I can’t tell Mom or Dad—Mom would freak out and she wouldn’t know what to do. And Dad . . . well, that’s the problem.”
    “What?” Carey asked.
    “Juliet’s pimp, this Randy. His name is Randy Whitcomb. Dad arrested him, and beat him up once—that’s why he got kicked off the Minneapolis police that one time.”
    “That guy!” Carey said. “I remember that.”
    “Yeah. Then Randy got paralyzed and he blames Dad for what happened. So now he’s trying to get back at Dad. By getting at me.”
    Carey’s mouth dropped: “ What ?”
    Letty filled in the rest of it, about Randy watching her in the park, tracking her to the McDonald’s. “You know what Dad’ll do if he finds out?”
    Carey said, “He’ll . . . oh, shit.”
    “He could get caught—they’ve had this long feud,” Letty said.
    “So what’re you doing with Juliet?”
    Letty shook her head: “First, tell me how we get rid of this mailman guy? Don.”
    * * *
    “GET A CAMERA, you know, we’ve got guys who’ll do it for me,” Carey said. “We get a camera and ambush Don and ask him about rolling around with an underage girl, talk to him about the amount of jail time he’ll get. When he denies it, we tell him that she described his physical characteristics . . . and then we tell him that we’re more worried about her than about him doing jail time, so that if he moves out, and never comes back, there’s no story. But the minute he comes back, or makes one single threat, or even a phone call, we make him into a movie star, off he goes to prison.”
    “Simple,” Letty said.
    “Not simple, but effective. There was this chick who used to work for a Lutheran social services group; she’d take underage hookers away from their pimps. I helped her out a couple of times, this way. We could do it with Whitcomb, too. Back him off Juliet, back him off Lucas, tell him he goes back to prison . . .”
    Letty was shaking her head. “I actually thought about that. He’s on parole. I figured that we could send him back, because she’s underage. Then Juliet told me about him being paralyzed, and . . . He can’t do it. They don’t have sex because he can’t. He makes her work the street, and sometimes he makes her have sex with another guy, and he watches, and gets all worked up . . . but she could walk away if she wanted to. Just leave him. He can’t drive, either. So, everything she’s been doing . . . I mean, it looks voluntary. The other thing is . . . I’m not positive she’d testify against him.”
    “Ah, man.”
    “We need to get him,” Letty said. She held Carey with an intense stare, and Carey felt almost unable to move out of it. “For sure . Randy is crazy. I’ve talked to Juliet a lot, about Randy, and he’s crazy. If we don’t get him, maybe he’ll try to shoot Dad. Or me. Or Mom, or somebody. But he’s crazy and he’s getting crazier, so we’ve got to get him.”
    “How . . . ?”
    “What I’m trying to do is . . .” Letty looked away from Carey, up into the tree branches, away from Carey’s eyes.
    “What?”
    “I thought I might get Randy to . . . do something to her,” Letty said.
    “What?”
    “When he gets mad, he makes her get down on her hands and knees, naked, and then he beats her with this stick,” Letty said. “I’ve seen the stick—it has blood on it. He hasn’t done it for a month and . . . I mean, I don’t know how evidence works, fingerprints and all that. But if he finds out she’s been lying to him, and he beats her with that stick, and she calls me, and we call the cops . . . He’ll go back, right? Her blood will be on the stick, fresh, and her back will have the marks, and his fingerprints will be on the stick?”
    Carey stared at her for a long fifteen seconds, then said, “Juliet is supposed to be your friend.”
    “My dad is my friend,” Letty said.
    “But Juliet . . .” Carey’s jaw