Mind Prey

and once they were on the ground, they could no longer see it. They were running awkwardly over the uneven ground toward the grain elevator when one set of headlights caught them in the back, then another. They turned and saw two squads coming down toward them; Lucas waved them on and kept running.
    When the cars caught up, Lucas pointed up ahead. “He was going under the elevator.”
    The driver in the lead car was a sergeant. “No way out of there,” he grunted. “That’s all dead end back there.”
    “Could he just bump it across the tracks?”
    The cop shrugged. “Maybe. But we’d see him. He might be able to snake his way out alongside of them.” He picked up his radio and said, “We need a car on the 280 overpass across the tracks. Put some light down onto the tracks. Where’s the chopper?”
    “Chopper’s just leaving the airport, he’ll be five minutes. We’re confirming the car on the tracks.”
    “Get some K9 down here,” Lucas said.
    The sergeant said, “We called them; they’re on the way.” And the car pulled ahead of them, the second car close behind him. The sergeant spoke into the radio: “We need some guys north of the tracks.”
     
    “G ONNA BE DARK in there,” Haywood grunted as they jogged up toward the elevators.
    “But once we got him, even if we only get his van, we get the VIN even if he’s pulled the plates…then we get a name and an address.”
    “You’re counting your chickens,” Haywood said.
    “First goddamn chicken we’ve had to count, and I’m counting the sonofabitch,” Lucas said.

27
    T HE COP SLIPPED down the side of the building, his right hand cocked away from his body.
    Carrying a gun, Mail thought. The night air was thick, cool, and moist, and the night seemed particularly dark; he couldn’t see that well, but the cop was too small to be Davenport.
    Still, it had been a trap, a rudimentary one. Mail smiled and turned to go, then slowed, turned back, lingered. Davenport’s building was a block away and he felt remote from it, as though he were watching a movie. The movie was just getting good.
    He’d found Ricky on a Hennepin Avenue street corner, half-drunk, his face sullen, his hair stuck together like cotton candy. He’d whispered cocaine , and just a bunch of computer pussies in there , and Ricky’d started slavering. He couldn’t wait to get started.
    Ricky needed drugs to function: without cocaine, speed, acid, grass, peyote, alcohol, even two or three of them at a time, the world was not right. He’d spent years on the inside and barely remembered a time when he didn’t have a drug flowing through his veins—and what he remembered about that drugless state, he didn’t like. He needed more dentists, he thought, people who’d say, “Here—I’ll numb that up for you.”
    Even inside, with very strange people around—people who spoke to God, and got personal letters back—Ricky had been considered mad as a hatter.
    But he could function in society, the shrinks said, so they had let him out and seemed proud of themselves when they did it. Now Ricky ate from trashcans and shit in doorways and carried a piece-of-crap revolver in his waistband. He gobbled up any pill he could beg, buy, or steal.
     
    N OW R ICKY WAS out of sight, trying the windows on the far side of the building. The cop was running along the back of the building, to the side where Ricky was; he looked like an inmate in a prison movie, caught in a spotlight as he ran along a wall. The cop stopped at the corner, did a quick peek, pulled his head back, peeked again, ran out from the building, pointing his gun, and the shouting began, the words indistinguishable in the distance.
    Again, Mail turned to go. Then he heard the gunshot, and turned back: “Sonofabitch.”
    He smiled again, amused; he almost laughed. What a joke. They’d shot Ricky, or Ricky had shot one of them. The cop he could see had dropped his pistol to his side and moved forward. So it had been Ricky.
    Time to move.
    He ran across the parking ramp, down a short flight of stairs, to the street. The van was already pointed into University Avenue. He’d be a mile away in a minute and a half. He unlocked the door, hopped in—he’d leave the lights blacked out for a few hundred feet—pulled up to the corner, looked right, looked left. And heard the sirens, saw the lights.
    A cop car, far down the street to the left, coming in a hurry: but that was the way he wanted to go. If he turned right, he’d