Mind Prey

“They think he might be, the guys up there.”
    “Yeah. We’ve gotta keep the perimeter tight. I’m gonna go over there, see if I can figure the odds that he’s inside.”
    “Is there anything else?” Roux asked. “Any goddamn thing?”
    Lucas hesitated, then said, “Two things. The first one is, I’d be willing to bet that wherever he’s got them, it’s within a few miles of that computer shop. That’s where the phone calls were coming from, when we were trying to pinpoint the cellular phone. I think we oughta get everybody with a gun—highway patrol, local cops, everybody—and send them down there. We oughta filter every goddamn road. We don’t have to stop everybody, but we ought to slow everything down, look in every backseat, see if we can spot somebody trying to elude the blockade.”
    “We can do that,” Roux said.
    Lucas looked at Lester, grinned slightly, and said, “Frank, could you call in? Could you get the picture thing going?”
    Lester looked from Lucas to Roux and back, and then said, “What? I don’t want to hear this?”
    Lucas said, “You really don’t.”
    Lester nodded. “All right,” he said. “Back in a minute,” and he went inside.
    “What?” Roux asked when Lester was gone.
    “I might call you later in the morning and suggest that you…I don’t know, what?” He looked around, and then said, “…that you come over here and visit White. Spontaneously, without telling anybody exactly where you’re going. You won’t have to be out of touch long. Maybe half an hour.”
    She narrowed her eyes. “What’re you going to do?”
    “Are you willing to perjure yourself and say you didn’t know?” Lucas asked. “Because you might want to say that.”
    Roux’s vision seemed to turn inward, although she was gazing at Lucas’s face. Then she said, “If it’s that way…”
    “It’s that way, if you want to get them back—and keep your job.”
    “I’d do any fucking thing to get them back,” she said. “But I hope you don’t call.”
    “So do I,” Lucas said. “If I do call, it’ll mean that everything’s gone in the toilet.”
     
    M AIL PICKED OUT a house with lights on in the back. From the alley, he could see an older woman working in what must be the kitchen. He crossed a chain-link fence into the yard, wary of dogs, saw nothing. As he passed the garage, he stopped to look in the window. There was a car inside, a Chevy, he thought, not new, but not too old, either. That would work.
    He went on to the house, to the back door, leaned the shotgun against the stoop, took out the pistol, looked around for other eyes, other windows, and knocked on the door.
    The woman, curious, came to look. She was sixty or so, he thought, her gray hair pulled back in a bun, her thin face just touched with makeup. She was wearing a jacket over a silky shirt. A saleswoman, maybe, or a secretary. She saw the police hat and the uniform jacket and opened the inner door, pushed out the storm door, and said, “Yes?”
    Mail grabbed the handle on the storm door, jerked it open, and before she could make another sound, shoved her as hard as he could, his open hand hitting her in the middle of the chest. She went down, and he was inside, and she said, “What?” She tried to crawl away, slowly, and he straddled her and gripped the back of her neck and asked, “Where are your car keys?”
    “Don’t hurt me,” she whimpered. Mail could hear a television working in the other room and turned his head to look at it. Was somebody else out there?
    “Where’re the fuckin’ car keys?” he asked, keeping his voice down.
    “My purse, my purse.” She tried to crawl out from under him, her thin hands working on the vinyl floor, and he tightened his grip on her neck.
    “Where’s your purse?”
    “There. On the kitchen table.”
    He turned his head, saw the purse. “Good.”
    He stood up to get a better swing, and hammered her on the side of the head with the butt of the shotgun. She went down, hard, groaned, kicked a couple of times, and was still. Mail looked at her for a moment, then made a quick check of the small house. A weatherman with what looked like false teeth was pointing at a satellite loop of the Twin Cities area: “…a lake advisory with these winds, which could kick up into the thirty-mile-per-hour category by this afternoon…”
    The bedroom had only one bed, a double, already made up.
    A black-and-white photograph of a man in a Korean War Army uniform