Mind Prey

else.”
    “Glad he said that,” Lucas muttered to Sloan, who was riding with the second group.
    “You ready?” Sloan asked. Lucas feared airplanes in a way that amused other cops. Sloan no longer thought it was very funny.
    “Yeah.”
    “They’re pretty safe…”
    “Helicopters don’t bother me the way planes do,” Lucas said. He grinned briefly and looked up at the chopper. “I don’t know why, but I can ride a chopper.”
     
    A T EIGHT FORTY-FIVE they were in the air, lifting out of the airport landing zone, Lucas’s group of choppers fixing themselves over I-494 south of Minneapolis, while Sloan’s group hovered south of St. Paul. Below them, the lights in the cars on I-494 went by like streams of luminescent salmon, and the street and house lights stretched into the distance in a psychedelic chessboard. At nine-twenty, the techs were happy: “Let’s do it,” said the tech in Lucas’s chopper.
    And at the radio station, the DJ picked up a phone, said, “OK,” looked through the glass of the broadcast booth at the engineer and the general manager behind him, and nodded.
    …wrapping up with “Bohemian Rhapsody” from Queen. Tell you what, sports fans, it’s time to play a little squeeze. Here, I’ll stick my hand in the fifty-five-gallon drum… There was a deep thumping, a man trapped inside an oil drum) …and pull out one of these telephone numbers. We’ll give it ten rings. If we don’t get it in ten, then we push the prize up by ninety-three dollars and try again. So…
    John Mail listened with half an ear: he was playing one of Davenport’s fantasy games on a Gateway P5-90. He was in trouble: all of Davenport’s games were full of traps and reversals. When you were killed, you could restart the game, carefully edge up to the point when you were killed—and get killed by something that passed you through the first time. A back-trail trap, a switchback ambush; must be some kind of circular counting mechanism in the program, Mail thought. He felt he was learning something about the opposition.
    On the tuner, the DJ’s voice followed a nice set of Queen. His phony bubble-gum rap was a subliminal annoyance, but not worth changing. Mail heard the beep-beep-boop of the phone dialing. And when the phone rang on the radio—at that very instant—the phone rang in Andi Manette’s purse.
    Mail sat up, pushed away from the game with a spasm of fear. What was that? Something outside? The cops?
    When he’d finished with Andi Manette the first night, he’d gone to the store for groceries and beer. Andi’s purse was on the front seat of the van, where he’d thrown it after the attack. He opened it as he drove and pawed through it. He found her billfold, took out almost six hundred dollars, a pleasant surprise. He found her appointment book, a calculator, miscellaneous makeup, and the two pounds of junk that women seem to accumulate. He’d pushed it all back in the purse.
    Later, a little drunk, and preoccupied with the question of Genevieve—the presence of the too-young girl bothered him; a kind of psychological thorn, for no reason that he understood—he dropped the purse on the floor near the kitchen door, intending to get rid of it later.
    Now he stood, tense, up on the balls of his feet. Gun , he thought. The .45 was on a bookcase, and in two steps, he had it. Lights? No, if he turned them off, they’d know he’d heard them.
    The buzzing continued. Nothing furtive about it. The fear recoiled a notch, but he kept the gun. Somebody outside? Or the stove clock? A broken smoke alarm? He moved quickly toward the kitchen, looked around—and saw the purse. In the background, the phone was ringing on the radio, the DJ said, “That’s four…” and Mail’s ear picked up the synchronized ringing between the radio and the purse.
    He dumped the purse on the table. No phone, but the purse still rang at him, and was too heavy in his hand. He pulled open the front pocket and found it, a portable phone. As he looked at it, the DJ was saying, “That’s six…and that’s seven. George Dunn, if you’re on the pot you better get off, ’cause…that’s eight…”
    Mail turned the phone in his hands, flipped it open, saw the phone switch. He looked out the window—nothing. If it was the cops calling, they didn’t know where he was.
     
    “H E’S NOT GONNA answer,” the tech said. “That’s nine.”
    Mail answered on the tenth ring. “Hello?” And Lucas jabbed a finger at the