Extreme Prey Read Free

silhouetted in the silvery moonlight, and she’d reach out and touch an empty pillow and whisper, “Wilt.”
    All she had left of Wilt was Cole’s wide gray eyes.
    —
    THE HIGHWAY PATROL kindly ruled Wilt’s death an accident and the insurance company had been forced to fork over the money that bought the current house and the acreage outside of Pella.
    When they bought it, the house had essentially been abandoned, inhabited by bats and mice and even a raccoon that had nested in the thin attic insulation. Marlys put the kids in school and worked two part-time jobs during the day and then worked half the night fixing up the house and barn, planting her trees and berries and grapes, paying for the compact John Deere tractor she needed to work her gardens.
    The kids worked with her: they’d had to.
    She’d almost gotten straight with herself and with Wilt’s death, when Cole went off to Iraq in ’05 and ’07 and came back funny.The next year, the economy collapsed and friends and neighbors began losing jobs and homes again.
    She could see so clearly that it was not their fault.
    The system was rotten. The Administration was rotten, the Congress was rotten, the banks were rotten, the oil companies were rotten, the media were liars and thieves. Michaela Bowden was their instrument, mixed right in there with them.
    Something had to be done to save America. The country needed a strong president whose heart was in the right place, who’d take care of the struggling folks at the bottom of the economic heap.
    Somebody like Minnesota’s governor, Elmer Henderson.
    —
    THE MOUNT PLEASANT MEETING was in the home of Joseph Likely, an aging activist and gasbag who nevertheless knew a lot of history, and how history seemed to work through certain small moments—the assassination of John Kennedy or the 9/11 attacks. Moments that changed the world, usually for the worse.
    But not always. Not always, Marlys thought.
    —
    AT LIKELY’S HOUSE Marlys got out of the car and took the insulated pizza-delivery bag, left from one of her part-time jobs, from the passenger seat. The bag was still warm. She climbed the porch and knocked on the door. She could see a dozen or so people already sitting in the living room and then Joe Likely threading his way through them. Likely was a sixties leftover, with a nicotine-stained beard and eyebrows like tumbleweeds.
    He opened the door and smiled and said, “I hope to hell that’s apple pie you’re carrying.”
    “Two of them. How are you, Joe?”
    “Getting older,” Likely said. “Hoping to make it until Christmas.”
    She followed him into the living room, where ten other people were sitting on metal folding chairs. She knew them all. Joe said, “Marlys has brought pie.”
    A few people said, “Yay,” and “Thanks, Marlys,” and Joe took the pies into the kitchen, then came back and stood at the front of the room.
    “Like I was saying before Marlys got here, the news isn’t real good, but I guess you all know that. Right now, politically, we’ve got nowhere to go. The Republicans, as usual, are batshit crazy, and with the Democrats, well, choose your poison. Dan Grady has filed papers to run for governor . . .” There was a smattering of applause. “. . . but even those of us who like Dan know that he won’t get even two percent of the vote. We’re back in survival mode. I have to admit that our network is getting thinner, not stronger. So, the question is, what do we do? We need fresh ideas.”
    Fresh ideas from this group was virtually an oxymoron, Marlys thought, wriggling her butt against the comfortless chair.
    She heard the same old things about organizing, about reaching out to young people, about getting in touch with the unions, about starting a website. The ideas were mostly inane; a few were actively goofy. None of them had even a touch of realism about them. Given what happened to her pies during the break, she began to wonder how many people still came to