Mind Prey

the pilot gesturing frantically, when Lucas crawled up the coal chute. Lucas turned and saw Mail vault a barbed-wire fence into the cornfield; he vanished in an instant.
    A sheriff’s car slewed sideways in the yard as Lucas ran to Sherrill, put his hand on her back: “Hit?”
    “My legs, man, my legs, it hurts so fuckin’ bad, it just fuckin’ burns…”
    Del was out now, and Lucas waved at the pilot, pulling her down, then ran to the uniformed deputy, who stood by the fender of his car, a shotgun on his hip.
    “He’s in the cornfield—he’s right in there,” Lucas shouted over the blast of the chopper blades. Grass and bits of weed whipped past them as the chopper settled. “Get a couple guys on the road, and get in those hay-fields. Cut him off, cut him off…”
    The deputy nodded and ran back to the other cars. Lucas went back to Sherrill. Del was kneeling over her, had ripped open her pants leg. Sherrill had taken a solid hit on the inside of her left leg between her knee and her hip; bright red arterial blood was pulsing into the wound.
    “Bleeding bad,” Del said; his voice was cool, distant. He pulled off his jacket, ripped off a sleeve, and pressed it into the wound.
    “Hold it there,” Lucas said to Del. “I’ll carry her.”
    “How bad? How bad is it?” Sherrill asked, her face a waxy white. “I hurt…”
    “Just your leg, you’ll be okay,” Del said, and he grinned at Sherrill with his green teeth.
    Lucas picked her up, cradling her, and carried her groaning with pain to the chopper, where the pilot had shoved open the passenger-side door. “Bleeding bad, hit an artery,” Lucas shouted over the prop blast. “Got to get her to Ramsey.”
    The pilot nodded, gave him a thumbs-up. Lucas shouted at Del, “You go—keep the hole packed up.”
    “You’re gonna need help…”
    “Gonna have a lot of help in one minute,” Lucas shouted back. “This is just gonna be a dog hunt now.”
    Del nodded, and they fitted Sherrill into the passenger seat with Del straddling her; and the chopper lifted off.
    Lucas turned and saw Andi Manette at the door of the old farmhouse. She had her daughter under one arm, and with her hand, tried to hold together the pieces of what once had been a suit.
    “You’re Davenport,” she said. She looked bad: she looked like she was dying.
    “Yes,” Lucas nodded. “Please sit down, both of you. You’re okay…”
    “He’s afraid of you,” Andi said. “John’s afraid of you.”
    Lucas looked from Andi Manette and Grace toward the cornfield. “He should be,” he said.
     
    T HE D AKOTA DEPUTIES had pursued people into cornfields before; they knew how to isolate a runner. The field itself covered a half-section, a mile long by a half-mile wide. The road ran along one edge, and recently cut alfalfa fields along two more. A bean field, still standing, stretched along the fourth side. Cop cars were stationed at three of the corners of the field, and cops climbed on top, with binoculars, so they had clear views down the road and the surrounding alfalfa and soybean fields.
    Mail might try to crawl out through the beans, but that was on the far side of the corn, a long run; and within a couple of minutes, a cop car bumped down into the beans and quickly ripped a three-car-wide path along the edge of the corn, then retired to the highest point along the path. A deputy with a semiautomatic rifle set up behind the car.
    For now, that would hold; in five minutes, there would be twenty cops around the field. In ten minutes, there would be fifty.
    Lucas stood with Andi Manette, on the handset. “I’ve got Mrs. Manette and Grace. We need to lift them out of here, we need a medevac now.”
    “Lucas, the chief is here.”
    Roux came on. “They say you got them.”
    “Yeah, but we need to get them out, we need to get a chopper down here.”
    “Are they hurt bad?”
    “Not critical,” Lucas said, looking at the two women. “But they’re pretty beat up. And Sherrill’s hurt bad.”
    “I was listening to Capslock on the radio. They’ll be at Ramsey in three or four minutes. We’ve got another chopper on the way. Dunn’s being notified.”
    Andi Manette, now with both arms wrapped around her sobbing daughter, said, “Genevieve. Do you have Genevieve?”
    Lucas shook his head, and her face contorted and she choked out, “Do you know…?”
    “We hoped she was with you,” Lucas said.
    “He said he would drop her off in a mall. I gave her a quarter to