Mind Prey

the light passed on.
    He looked up, saw the zigzagging chopper chattering slowly toward the overpass. He got to his feet and began running again.
    A cop car, lights flickering, ran through the neighborhood on the other side of the tracks, but a street or two west of him. He was running toward some kind of commercial building with trees around it. He swerved toward it; he could hide in the brush. The cops on the bridge swept him with the searchlight and he went down. A second later, the light came back, swept overhead, picking away at him. When it drifted back toward the tracks, he made it the last few feet to the trees.
    And found his way blocked by water.
    “No-no,” he said, out loud. He couldn’t catch a break.
    He was in a small neighborhood park, with a pond in the middle of it. The light came back, and he dropped to his hands and knees and crawled toward the water. His hands slipped on the grass and a stench reached up to him. What? Whatever he was crawling through was slick; then a small thing moved to his right, and he realized it was a duck. He was crawling through duck shit. The light came back and he dropped into the stuff, then slithered down the bank into the chill water. And heard the shouting behind him.
     
    T HE NIGHT GLASSES were useless. They were fine in steady, low light, but the sweeping searchlights were screwing up the sensors, and Haywood put them away.
    “That way,” Lucas said. “Up in those containers.”
    They ran along the track and were quickly pinned and dazzled by the searchlights from the overpass. Lucas got on the radio, waved the lights off.
    “Can’t see a fuckin’ thing,” Haywood said. “I never been on the other end of those lights.”
    Lucas stepped into a hole in the line of containers, found a second row of containers with a track between them, all dark as pitch.
    “If he’s down there and he’s got a gun, it’d be suicide to go in,” Haywood said.
    “Yeah.” Lucas got on the radio, got the chopper. “Can you come back toward the elevator? There’s a double line of containers; we want the light right down the middle.”
    The pilot took a minute to get lined up, then hung above them, the downwash from the rotors battering down at them as they walked up the line. A hundred feet from the end, Lucas caught an edge of chrome in a hole in the wall. He shouted “Whoa” into the radio and caught Haywood’s arm, shouted, “There’s the van, there’s the van.”
    Haywood went right while Lucas went left, and the chopper moved up, found the hole, and dropped the light on it.
     
    T HE COPS WERE walking through the neighborhood, and lights were coming on. Mail could hear their voices, far away, but distinct enough: a woman yelling to a neighbor, “Is it the gas? Is it the gas?”
    And the answer, “They’re looking for a crazy guy.”
    Mail dog-paddled across the pond to a muddy point, where a weeping willow tree hung over the water. A half-dozen ducks woke and started inquisitively quacking. “Get the fuck…” he hissed and started out of the water. The ducks took off in a rush of wings, quacking.
    Christ, if anybody heard that…
    He crawled up on the bank, shivering—very cold now—and had started through the trees when he heard the cops coming, marked by a line of bobbing flashlights. He looked around, then back at the water, and reluctantly slipped in, his head below the cutbank under the willow.
    The chill water was only about three feet deep but wanted to float him. Groping along the bank, his hand caught a willow root, and he used it to push himself down and stabilize. He turned his face to the bank and pulled the dark jacket over his head.
    “Probably breathing through a straw,” a cop said, the voice young and far away.
    “Yeah, like you’re talking through your ass,” said another, equally young. “Jesus, there’s goose shit all over the place.”
    “Duck shit,” the first voice said. Farm boy. “Goose shit’s bigger; looks like stogies.”
    A third voice: “Hey, we got a shit expert.”
    “Somebody ought to kick through those bushes…”
    “I’ll get it…?”
    Mail bowed his head as the footsteps got closer. Then the cop began kicking through the brush overhead. The cop came all the way down to the willow tree: Mail could have reached out of the water and grabbed his leg. But the cop just shined his light out over the water and then headed back for the others, calling, “Nothing here.”
    Mail was on the same side of the