Mind Prey

pond as the cops. When they’d moved on, he dog-paddled across the pond and crawled out, picking up more duck shit. Now he began shivering uncontrollably. Cold; he’d never been this cold. He crawled straight ahead, toward the corner of the commercial building, the rubble on the ground cutting into his hands. He pushed into a clump of brush, where he stopped, and pulled his legs beneath him, trying to control the shivering. His hair hung across his forehead, and he pushed it back with one hand; he smelled like duck shit.
    Across the tracks, the helicopter was hovering in one spot, and three cop cars were bumping along the line of containers.
    “Found it,” he said out loud. They’d already found the goddamn van. The barking started again: were they tracking him with dogs? Jesus.
    More dogs were barking through the neighborhood, aroused by all the cops walking through. He had to move. Had to get out of here. He crawled back through the bushes, finally stood up and looked around. The cops seemed to have set up a perimeter, with more cops sweeping the area inside of it. He’d have to cross it, sooner or later.
    He thought: Sewer.
    And dismissed it. He didn’t know anything about sewers. If he crawled down a sewer, he’d probably die down there. And the idea of the sewer walls closing in…
    He’d always been claustrophobic, one reason he’d never go back to the hospital. The hospital didn’t fuck around with beatings; they knew how to really punish you. His claustrophobia had come out early in his stay, and they’d introduced him to the Quiet Room…
    Half-crouching, Mail crossed a driveway and climbed a short fence into the first yard. He crossed the yard, ran behind a house with several lights on, and down a line of bridal-wreath bushes, where he crawled over a wire fence, crossed the next yard, and climbed the fence again. He crossed the next yard, came to another fence, and heard the dog. Large dog, woofing along in the night at the other end of the yard. Take a chance? The dog smelled him at the same time he heard it, turned, and rushed the fence where he was hiding, snarling, slavering for him. Big black-and-tan body, white teeth like a tiger’s. No way.
    Mail went back, crawled over a fence, and turned left, looking for another way.
    A cop car flashed past, light rack spinning; dogs were barking everywhere, now, a mad chorus of mutts.
    This could take a while…
     
    L UCAS CALLED IN the plate number on the van, and the VIN.
    Thirty seconds later, on the radio: “Lucas: we’ve got an address down in Eagan.”

28
    T HE BEDSPRINGS WERE too flexible to make decent weapons. They’d hoped for something like an ice pick, but the springs would not fully uncurl. When pressed against anything resistant, they flexed.
    But if they couldn’t get ice picks from the springs, they got two fat, three-inch-long needles, honed on the granite rocks in the fieldstone walls.
    Grace stood on the Porta-Potti and began picking at the nail: “Lots better,” she told Andi. “This works great.”
    She picked for ten minutes and Andi picked for ten minutes more, then Grace started again. Grace was working on it when it finally came free. She thought it moved under the spring-needle, and grabbed it between a thumb and forefinger. It turned in her fingers, and she held tighter and put weight on it, felt it twist again.
    Grace said, breathlessly, “Mom, it’s coming. It’s coming out.” And she pulled it free, like a tooth.
    Andi put a finger to her lips. “Listen.”
    Grace froze, and they listened. But there were no thumps, no footsteps, and Andi said, “I thought I heard something.”
    “I wonder where he is?” Grace looked nervously at the door. Mail had been gone a long time.
    “I don’t know. We just need a little more time.” Andi took the nail, sat on the mattress, and began to hone it on a granite pebble. The nail left behind what looked like tiny scratches in the rock, but were actually whisper-thin metal scrapings. “Next time he comes, we have to do it,” she said. “He’ll kill me, soon, if we don’t. And when he kills me, he’ll kill you.”
    “Yes.” Grace nodded. She’d thought about it.
    Andi stopped honing the nail to look at her daughter. Grace had lost ten pounds. Her hair was stuck together in strings and ropes; the skin of her face was waxy, almost transparent, and her arms trembled when she stood up. Her dress was tattered, soiling, torn. She looked, Andi thought, like an old