Mind Prey

trying to hold her skull together.
    He was close, on the stairs. “You have to lie down, just like you were,” Grace said fiercely. “With your hands over your eyes. Don’t say anything, no matter what.”
    She pushed her mother down, and they heard the slide-lock pulled back. Andi, too weak to argue, and without the time, nodded and put her arm up and closed her eyes. Grace pulled back in the corner, her feet pulled tight to her thighs, her arms around her legs, looking up at the door.
    Mail peered through the crack, saw them, undid the chain, opened the door. “Get up,” he said to Andi.
    Grace, frightened, said, “You did something to her. She hasn’t moved since you left.”
    That pushed him back.
    Mail’s forehead wrinkled and he said, harshly, “Get up,” and he pushed Andi’s foot with his own.
    Andi rolled half over, then pulled herself away from him, toward the wall, like a cartoon woman dying of thirst in a desert. She inched away, pathetic.
    “You really hurt her, this time,” Grace said, and she began to bawl.
    “Shut up,” Mail snarled. “Shut up, goddamnit, little fuckin’…whiner…”
    He took a step toward her, as though to hit her, and Grace choked off the sobs and tried to pull herself tighter to the wall. Mail hesitated, then pushed Andi again. “Get up.”
    Andi rolled some more, and began to inch away again. Mail caught her feet and twisted them, and she flipped onto her back. “Water,” she whimpered.
    “What?”
    Her eyes closed and she lay limp as a rag. Grace began bawling again, and Mail shouted, “Shut up, I said,” and backed away, uncertain now.
    “You hurt her,” Grace said.
    “She wasn’t like this when I put her back in,” Mail said. “She was walking.”
    “I think you did something to her…mind. She talks to Genevieve and Daddy. Where’s Gen? What did you do with her? Is she with Daddy?”
    “Ah, fuck,” Mail said, exasperated. He probed Andi again, pushing her left foot with his own. “You’d best get better, ’cause I’m not done with you yet,” he said. “We’re not done, at all.”
    He backed out of the room, and said to Grace, “Give her some water.”
    “I do,” Grace sobbed. “But then she…wets on the floor.”
    “Ah, for Christ sakes,” Mail said. The door slammed, but the bolt didn’t slide shut. Grace held her breath. Had he forgotten? No. The door opened again, and Mail threw in a towel.
    Grace had seen it, when he’d taken her mother out of the cell, lying on the floor beside the mattress he used when he raped her. “Clean her up,” Mail said. “I’ll be back in the morning.”
    The door closed again, and they heard his footsteps on the stairs. They waited, unmoving, but he didn’t return.
    “That was great,” Andi whispered. She pushed herself up and felt the tears running down her face and she actually smiled through her cracked lips. “Grace, that was wonderful.”
    “That’s once we beat him,” Grace whispered back.
    “We can do it again,” Andi said. She propped herself up and tilted her head back. “But we’ve got to find something.”
    “Find what?”
    “A weapon. Something we can kill him with.”
    “In here?” Grace looked around the barren cell, her eyes wide but not quite hopeless. “Where?”
    “We’ll find something,” Andi said. “We have to.”
     
    M AIL TOOK THE van—the van was blue now, and the sign on the side doors was clear: “Computer Roses”—and rode it down to Highway Three and I-494, filled the tank, and put a little more than four gallons in the red, five-gallon plastic gas can in the back. Inside the convenience store, he bought two quarts of motor oil and paid for it all with a twenty.
    He took forty minutes riding out to Minnetonka, thinking it over. Mail thought a lot about crime, about the way things worked. If he were in a movie, he’d break into the boat works, use a flashlight, go through the files, and then play a breathless game of hide-and-seek with a security guard.
    But this wasn’t a movie, and his best protection was simply timing and invisibility.
    Irv’s Boat Works was tucked into a curve in the road just off the lake, along with a shabby gas station, a grocery store, and an ice cream parlor, all closed. He drove by once, looking for movement, looking for cops. He saw two moving cars, one in front and one behind, and no cops. Nobody walking. The only light in the buildings was in an ice cream freezer.
    He drove a half-mile down the road to an