Mind Prey

south, if you can.”
    “Strangest thing I ever saw,” Del said from the back as Lucas signed off the radio. Del, who liked high places, had his face pressed against his window. “A man-made traffic jam. God, look at those guys. I’d hate to be down there, though.”
    “Is that Pilot Knob there?” the pilot asked, pointing at a street with a gloved hand. “Or is that Cedar?”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said, turning the map. He hated flying, didn’t like the exposed front on the helicopter: he would have preferred something solid, like sheet steel. “Where’s due south?” The pilot pointed and he turned the map. “Okay, there should be a golf course.”
    “There’s a golf course,” the pilot said, pointing to her right. “But…there’s another one.”
    “There should be a lake, a crescent-shaped lake,” Lucas said.
    “Okay, there’s a lake.”
    “Okay, yeah, that’s it—there’s the little lake by the big one. So that’s gotta be Pilot Knob right there.”
    They churned south, following the road, past another golf course, out into the countryside, corn going brown, a green-and-yellow John Deere rolling through a half-cut field of alfalfa.
    Dispatch called back. “Lucas, we got the mailman, here he is…” There was a pause, and then a man’s distant voice. “Hello?”
    Lucas identified himself. “Did the dispatcher tell you what we need?”
    The mailman said, “Yes. You want the fifth house from the corner, on the south side of the road. It’s about three-quarters of a mile from the corner, sits up on a slope with a gravel driveway. White house—needs paint, though—and it’s got a porch and a screen door and a couple old tumble-down buildings out back. There’s a shutter off on the front; one window’s only got one shutter. The mailbox is silver and there’s an orange Pioneer Press delivery box on the same post under the mailbox.”
    “Got that,” Lucas said. A swamp flicked past, a thousand feet down. “Thanks.”
    “Listen, you still there?”
    “Yeah.”
    “One of the guys here has a TV going, and I just saw the picture. You got the right guy. That’s him, all right. He’s not around there much, but I saw him a couple times.”
    “Got that,” Lucas said.
    In the backseat, Del said, “Hot dog,” and slipped his pistol out from under his jacket and punched out the clip.
    Sherrill said, “Don’t say that.”
    “What?”
    “The dog thing,” Sherrill said, and she swallowed, and started fumbling for her gun.
    “Hold on, I’ll have you on the ground in two minutes,” the pilot said. She’d been looking at the map, where Lucas’s fingers pinched the road. “So we’re looking for a loop, like a suburb or something, and then it’s three miles on.”
    “There’s the loop coming up,” Lucas said, pointing at a cluster of houses, with tiny trees sprouting in the expansive front yards. They all looked the same, variations of beige with simple, peaked roofs, like properties on a Monopoly board.
    “Okay. Then that must be the road, right there,” the pilot said. Up ahead, Native American Trail was a beige thread in a blanket of green. “There’s somebody heading down there…”
     
    A RED CAR was throwing up a cloud of gravel dust as they closed on the road. “One-two-three-four-five, Jesus, I think he’s heading in there, he’s slowing down, he’s turning,” Lucas said.
    “Wrong drive, wrong drive. The fifth house is over there, down farther,” the pilot said, pointing.
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Look, he’s in a hurry, he’s moving.”
    The pilot groped at her feet and handed Lucas a pair of battered 8×50 marine binoculars. “You call it: whatever you want to do.”
    They were coming in fast, but they were still a half-mile out; Lucas put the heavy binoculars on the house, picked out the mailbox and the brilliant orange paperbox on the post below it. To the right, the red car had topped a hill, and as Lucas watched, a man got out of the car, turned his pale face toward them: black hair, tall; the white face, at the distance, a featureless wedge. But a wedge that felt right.
    The man darted into the ramshackle house in the cornfield; he carried something—a shotgun? He was too far away to be certain. “That’s him,” Lucas said, half-shouting. “Put us on him, put us on him.”
    “What are we doing?” Sherrill shouted from the back. She had a revolver out, and a speed loader in her other hand. Below them to the front and