Naked Prey

back on. They think that they might do some revisions next week. She’s going to be a hurting little kid for a while.”
    “Huh. She was pretty unhappy when I talked to her last night,” Lucas said. He half-grinned. “Anderson took her new gun away from her, for one thing. I don’t think she’s gonna get it back.”
    “She’s gotta be traumatized,” Weather said. “Her mother might not have meant to do it, but that little girl has been abused. That’s what it amounts to. Taking care of adrunk when you’re twelve years old? And she’s done it for years. She was the adult in the family. And then she’s shot and shoots back, and her mother’s killed . . . It’s amazing that she hasn’t gone catatonic.”
    “Yeah . . . ” They chewed for a moment, then Lucas said, “Anderson said that Ruth Lewis took off. He’s trying to find her, but the older lady up there, at the church, said Ruth crossed into Canada, something to do with her network. Said she’d be back in a few days. Sheriff said he checked, and the border people have a record of her crossing this morning. So . . . I suspect she’s rearranging things. They’ll be bringing the dope across somewhere else.”
    “Hope she pulls it off,” Weather said. “She seemed like she was trying to do the right thing.”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “I’m not smart enough to figure out all the what-ifs.”
    T HEN L UCAS SAT tapping his fingers on the table for a minute, inspecting an olive that had squirted out of his sandwich, and finally, Weather said, “What?”
    He put the sandwich down and made his face sincere, like when he wanted to do something that Weather might not like. “You think, uh, Letty might be able to move in with us for a while? Until things get figured out?”
    Weather ripped open the nearly empty sack of potato chips, and dumped the last four chips on the table. She took two of them. “I wondered if you were going to ask. I think we could, though I would predict some trouble. She’s tough, she’s gonna do what she wants to do, and she doesn’t mind giving you a hard time.”
    “Which reminds of us who?” Lucas asked.
    Weather was puzzled. “Who?”
    “Jesus Christ, Weather, you just described yourself perfectly.” He took one of the remaining chips.
    “I did not.” She was amazed. “I’m the most flexible person I know.”
    “Aw, man . . . ” He gave up. “But you think we can do that?”
    “I think we could. I like her a lot,” Weather said. “We’ve got plenty of room. Even if we have another child, the two little ones could sleep together until Letty went off to college . . . ”
    “Another . . . hmm.”
    “I’m not pregnant, dummy,” she said. “I’m just talking theory, at this point.”
    Lucas looked at the table. “You gonna eat that chip?”
    T HAT SAME NIGHT, Margery Singleton was surprised to find her back door open when she got home. She always locked it. Or almost always—though, it being a small town, she sometimes forgot.
    She pushed inside, trying to recapture the feeling of the morning. Hadn’t she gotten the key stuck in the door that morning? Or was it yesterday?
    She pushed the door closed, flipped the light, took a step into the kitchen and stopped. A woman was sitting at the table and Margery took a step back. “Who the hell are you?” Then she saw the pile of money on the table. “That’s my money, there.”
    Ruth Lewis picked up Loren Singleton’s .380.
    “You killed my sister, Mom. And you killed those little girls with needle injections. And God only knows who else. Something has to be done about that.” She was pointing the pistol at Margery’s chest.
    The pistol, which Ruth had picked up at the church, had been surprisingly simple to work. She’d done a littlepractice before she’d sent another one of the sisters across the border with her driver’s license. Ruth would cross herself later that night, with that sister’s ID. A simple-enough alibi—she’d learned to think like a criminal.
    “Well, you can’t just shoot me,” Margery said. She was thinking ahead two squares, like she had with Loren. Loren had been dead and gone before he’d left her house that night, and she’d known it. But Loren was screwed up in the head, and if the cops had gotten a handle on him, he would’ve spilled all the beans. And when they found the little girls at the dump, and found those needle pricks . . . who would have thought they could do that,