Mind Prey

hand on his pistol, leaned up to the window. “Hey, what the hell…”
    Lucas held up his ID and said, “Davenport, Minneapolis PD. Get me through.”
    The cop ran back to one of the squads, yelled something through an open window, and the cop inside backed it up. Lucas accelerated through the gap and up toward the water tower. Along the way, he saw cops in the streets, two different sets of uniforms. They were evacuating houses along the way, and women with kids in station wagons hurried down the streets away from the tower.
    A bomb? Chemicals? What?
    The water tower looked like an aqua-green alien from War of the Worlds , its big egg-shaped body supported by fat, squat legs. Three fire trucks, a cluster of squad cars, a bomb squad truck, two ambulances, and a wrecker were parked a hundred yards away. Lucas pulled into the cluster.
    “Davenport?” A stout, red-faced man in a too-tight cop’s uniform waved him over. “Don Carpenter, Cottage Grove.” He wiped his face on his sleeve. He was sweating heavily, though the day was cool. “We might have a big problem.”
    “Bomb?”
    Carpenter looked toward the top of the hill. “We don’t know. But it’s an oil barrel, and it’s full of something heavy. We haven’t tried to move it, but it’s substantial.”
    “Somebody said my name is on it.”
    “That’s right: Lucas Davenport, Minneapolis Police. Standard bullshit graffiti-artist spray paint. We were gonna open it, but then someone said, ‘Jesus, if this guy’s fuckin’ with Davenport, what’s to keep him from putting a few pounds of dynamite or some shit in there? Or a gas bomb or something?’ So we’re standing back.”
    “Huh.” Lucas looked up toward the tower. Two men were there, talking. “Who are those guys?”
    “Bomb squad. We were all over the place before somebody thought it might be a bomb, so we don’t think it’s dangerous to get near. A time bomb doesn’t make sense, because he didn’t know when we’d find it.”
    “Let’s take a look,” Lucas said.
    The bottom of the tower was enclosed by a hurricane fence, with a truck-sized gate on one end. “Cut the chain on the gate and drove right in,” Carpenter said. They were at the crest of the hill, and below them a steady stream of cars was leaving the neighborhood.
    “But nobody saw it.”
    “We don’t know—we were talking about a door-to-door, but then the bomb idea came up, and we never got to it.”
    “Maybe later,” Lucas said.
    The two bomb squad cops walked over and Lucas recognized one of them. He said, “How are you? You were on that case out in Lake Elmo.” The guy said, “Yeah, Bill Path, and this is Jesus Martinez.” He threw a thumb at his partner, and Lucas said, “What’ve we got?”
    “Maybe nothing,” Path said, looking back at the tower. Lucas could see the black oil drum through the hurricane fence. It sat directly under the bulb of the four-legged water tower. “But we don’t want to try to move it. We’re gonna pull the lid from a distance and see what happens.”
    “We’ve drained the tower,” Carpenter said. He wiped his sweating face on his sleeve again. “Just in case.”
    “Can I?” Lucas said, nodding at the oil barrel.
    “Sure,” said Path. “Just don’t kick it.”
    The barrel sat in the shade of the tower, and Lucas walked over to look at it, and then around it: a standard oil barrel, with a little rust, and a lid that looked professionally tight.
    “One of the first guys knocked on it, and nothing happened; so we knocked on it when we got here,” Martinez said, grinning at Lucas. He stepped up to the barrel and knocked on it. “It’s full of something.”
    “Could be water,” said Path. “If it’s full, and it’s water, it’d weigh about four-fifty.”
    “How’d he move it?” Lucas asked. “He couldn’t use a fork lift.”
    “I think he rolled it,” Path said. “Look…”
    He walked away from the barrel, peered around, then pointed. There was a deep edge-cut in the soft earth, then a series of interlocking rings along with a wavy line. “I think he rolled it to here, then tipped it up, then rim-rolled it to the middle.”
    Lucas nodded: he could see the pattern in the dirt.
    “Hey, look at this, Bill,” Martinez said to Path. He pointed at a lower corner of the barrel. “Is that just condensation, or is there a pinhole?”
    A drop of liquid seemed to be squeezing out of the barrel. Path got to his knees, peered at it, then grunted, “Looks