Naked Prey

“Murder?” He began beating Cash with the long stick, ripping strips of skin off Cash’s back and legs, as the blackman thrashed on the ground, gophering through the snow, trying to get away. “Murder, you fuckin’ animal, murder . . . ”
    He stopped after a while, too tired to continue, threw the stick back into the trees. “Murder,” he said to Cash. “I’ll show you murder.”
    The big man led one of the ropes over to Cash, tied a single loop around his neck, tight, with strong knots. He did the same with the second rope, around Warr’s neck. She was now shivering violently in the cold.
    When he was done, the big man stood back, looked at the two of them, said, “God damn your immortal souls,” and began hauling on the rope tied to Cash. Cash stopped screaming as the rope bit into his neck. He was heavy, and the big man had to struggle against his weight, and against the raw friction of the rope over the tree limb. Finally, unable to get him in the air, the big man lifted him and pulled the rope at the same time, and Cash’s feet cleared the ground by a meager six inches. He didn’t struggle. He simply hung. The big man tied the lower end of the rope around the tree trunk, and tested it for weight. It held.
    Warr pleaded, but the big man couldn’t hear her—later couldn’t remember anything she said, except that there were a lot of whispered Please s. Didn’t do her any good. Didn’t do her any good when she fought him, either, though it might have given her a brief thirty seconds of satisfaction.
    He couldn’t get her high enough to get her feet off the ground, and as he struggled to do it, a space opened between the bottom of his coat sleeve and the glove on his right hand. The space, the warm flesh, bumped against her face, and quick as a cat, she sank her teeth into his arm, biting ferociously, twisting her head against his arm. He let go of the rope and she fell, holding on with her teeth, pulling him down, and he hammered at the side of her head until she let go.
    She was groaning when he boosted her back up, and she ground out, “We’re not the only ones.”
    That stopped him for a moment: “What?”
    “They’ll be coming for you, you cocksucker.” She spat at him, from three inches away, and hit him in the face. He flinched, grabbed her around the waist and boosted her higher, his gloves slippery with blood, and then he had her high enough and he stepped away, holding tight to the rope, and she swung free and her groaning stopped. He managed to pull her up another four inches, then tied the rope off on the trunk.
    He watched them for a few minutes, swinging in the snow, in the dim light, their heads bent, their bodies violently elongated like martyrs in an El Greco painting . . .
    Then he turned and left them.
    They may have been dead then, or it might have taken a few minutes. He didn’t care, and it didn’t matter. He rolled slowly, carefully, out of the side road, down through Broderick and on south. He was miles away before he became aware of the pain in his wrist, and the blood flowing down his sleeve toward his elbow. When he turned his arm over in the dim light of the car, he found that she’d bitten a chunk of flesh out of his wrist, a lemon-wedge that was still bleeding profusely.
    If a cop stopped him and saw it . . .
    He pulled over in the dark, wrapped his wrist with a pad of paper towels and a length of duct tape, stepped out of the truck, washed his hand and arm in snow, tossed the bloody jacket in the back of the truck and dug out a lighter coat from the bag in back.
    Get home, he thought. Burn the coat, dump the truck.
    Get home.

2
    W EATHER D AVENPORT CRAWLED sleepily out of bed. The kid was squalling, hungry in his bedroom down the hall, and she started that. Lucas woke up as the housekeeper called, “I got him, Weather. I’m up.”
    “Ah, great,” Weather said. She came back to the bed, sat down, looked at the clock.
    “Getting up?” Lucas asked.
    “Alarm’s going off in fifteen minutes anyway,” she said. She yawned, inhaled, exhaled, pushed herself off the bed and headed for the bathroom, pulling off her cotton nightgown as she went. Lucas, lying half awake under the crazy quilt, could see nothing but darkness on the other side of the wood slats that covered the window. January in Minnesota: the sun came up at 11:45 and went down at noon, he thought.
    He shifted his head around on the pillow, tried to get comfortable, tried to get back