Mind Prey

intersection, did a U-turn, and went back the same way. Another car passed; a house a quarter mile past the station was fully lit, although he didn’t see anybody around. He drove out to a Super-America store, parked, walked around to the back of the van, and let himself inside. He took just a minute to mix the motor oil with the gas, the fumes giving him a small mental charge: he hadn’t done this since he got out of the hospital—he didn’t need it anymore—but it still held something for him.
    When he finished mixing, he went into the Tom Thumb and bought a cheap plastic cigarette lighter and a Coke. He already had a role of duct tape in the glove compartment. Back in the truck, he put the tape on the lighter so it’d be ready, opened the Coke and put it in the van’s can-holder, and drove back toward Irv’s.
    The place was little more than a wooden shack, with a dock, gas pump, and launching ramp out back. Twenty aluminum fishing boats bobbed off the dock. Inside, he remembered a counter with a cash register, a half-dozen tanks for minnows and shiners, a few pieces of cheap fishing gear in wall racks, and a big, loose pile of green flotation cushions and orange round-the-neck life preservers. The whole place smelled of gas and oil, waterweed and rot.
    Mail drove by once more, did his U-turn, looked for cars coming up behind, waited until one passed, and then followed it back to Irv’s. Nothing out ahead. He swerved into the parking lot, stopped just outside the dusty picture-window where the fading red stick-up letters said, IRV’S BOAT WORK with a missing final “s.”
    He left the engine running, walked quickly around to the back of the van, took a jack-knife out of his pocket, and cut a grapefruit-size hole in the top of the plastic gas can. The smell of gas was thick. He picked the can up, ready to ease it out the door, when headlights came up. He stopped, listening, but the car purred past.
    He climbed out, got the lighter off the passenger seat, turned it up full, taped the sparking-lever down so he had a miniature torch, then picked up the five-gallon jug and heaved it through the window.
    The window shattered with the sound of a load of dishes dropped in a diner: but nobody yelled, nobody came running. He tossed the lighter after the gas, and the building went up with a hollow whoom. By the time he was out of the parking lot, the fire was all over the inside of the building.
    Damn. Wished he could stay.
    He watched the building in the rearview mirror, until it disappeared behind a curve. When he was a kid, he’d torched a house in North St. Paul and had come back to sit on an elementary school embankment to watch the action. He liked the flames. Even more, he’d liked the excitement and companionship of the crowd, gathered to watch the fire. He felt like an entertainer, a movie star: he’d done this.
    And listening, back then, he realized that everybody could find a little joy in watching one of their neighbors get burned out.
    On the way back home, under the night sky, he thought about Andi Manette. Maybe this break was for the better. He’d been fucking her a lot, he could use the rest.
    Tomorrow, though, he’d need her—need one of them, anyway.
    He could feel that already.

11
    L UCAS GOT UP a few minutes after Weather, struggling with the early hour, the morning light pale in the east windows. Weather put breakfast together while Lucas cleaned up. When he was dressed, Lucas got the ring from his sock drawer, fiddled with it, then dropped it in his pants pocket as he had almost every day for a month.
    In the kitchen, Weather was standing at the sink, humming to herself as she sliced the orange heart out of a cantaloupe. Lucas still felt like he’d been hit in the forehead with a gavel.
    “Anything good today?” he asked. His morning voice sounded like a rusty gate, but she was used to it.
    “Not especially interesting,” she said. “The first one is a woman with facial scarring from an electrical shock.” She touched her cheek in front of her ear, to indicate where the scarring was. “I’m going to take out as much of the scar as I can—all of it, I hope.”
    “Sounds like she needs a plastic surgeon,” Lucas said. He pushed two slices of bread into the toaster and started looking for the cinnamon.
    “Sometimes I am a plastic surgeon,” Weather said. “We do have that child coming up; that will be interesting. Six operations, probably. We’re going to have to rotate