Mind Prey

have much time now.”
    Click.
    Mail looked at the phone, then dropped it back on the hook and wandered around the living room, whistling, stepping over computer parts. The tune he whistled came from the bad old days at the hospital, when they piped Minnesota Public Radio into the cells. Simple Mozart: he’d probably heard it a hundred times. Mail had no time for Mozart. He wanted rhythm, not melody. He wanted sticks hammering out a blood-beat; he wanted drums, tambourines, maracas. He wanted timpani. He didn’t want tinkly music.
    But now he whistled it, a little Mozart two-finger melody, because he didn’t want to think about Andi Manette tricking him, because he didn’t want to kill her yet.
    Had she done this? She had—he knew it in his heart. And it made him so angry. Because he’d trusted her. He’d given her an opportunity, and she’d betrayed him. This always happened. He should have known it was going to happen again. He put his hands to his temples, he could feel the blood beating through them, the pain that was going to come. Christ, this was the story of his life: when he tried to do something, somebody always spoiled it.
    He took several laps around the living room and the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, looked blindly inside, slammed it; the whistling began a humming noise deep in his throat, and the humming became a growl—still two-finger Mozart—and then he walked out the back door and cut across the lawn toward the pasture beyond, and the old house in the back.
    He jumped the fallen-down fence, passed an antique iron disker half-buried in the bluestem and asters; halfway up the hill, he was running, his fists clenched, his eyes like frosted marbles.
     
    T HEY THOUGHT THEY were making progress, working on Mail: he hadn’t become gentle, but Andi felt a relationship forming. If she didn’t exactly have power, she had influence.
    And they were still working on the nail. They couldn’t move it, but a full inch of it was exposed. A few more hours, she thought, and they might pull it free.
    Then Mail came.
    They heard him running across the floor above them, pounding down the stairs. She and Grace looked at each other. Something was happening, and Grace, who’d been squatting in front of the game monitor, rocked uneasily.
    Then the door opened, and Mail’s face was a boiled-egg mask with the turned-in, frosted-marble eyes, his hair bushed like a frightened cat’s. He said, “Get the fuck out here.”
     
    G RACE COULD HEAR the beating.
    She could feel it, even through the steel door. She stretched herself up the door and pounded on it and cried, “Mom, mama, mother. Mom…”
    And after a while, she stopped and went back to the mattress and put her hands on her ears so she couldn’t hear. A few minutes later, weeping, she closed her eyes and put her hands on her mouth like the speak-no-evil monkey and felt herself a traitor. She wanted the beating to stop, but she wouldn’t cry out. She didn’t want Mail to come for her.
     
    A N HOUR AFTER he’d taken Andi, Mail brought her back. Always, in the past, her mother had been clothed when Mail put her back in the room: this time, she was nude, as was Mail himself.
    Grace huddled back against the wall as he stood in the doorway, facing her, the hostile frontality frightening as nothing else ever had been. Finally, she bowed her head between her knees and closed her eyes and began to sing to herself, to close out the world. Mail listened to her for a moment, then a tiny, bitter smile crossed his face, and he shut the door with a clang.
     
    A NDI DIDN’T MOVE .
    When the door closed, Grace was afraid to look up—afraid that Mail might be inside the room with her. But after a few seconds, when nothing moved, she peeked. He was gone.
    Grace whispered, “Mother? Mom?”
    Andi moaned and turned to look at her daughter, and blood ran out of her mouth.

16
    L UCAS PUT DOWN the file and picked up the phone. “Lucas Davenport.”
    “Yeah, um, I’m a game player?” The woman’s voice was tentative, slightly unplugged. Her statements came as questions. “I was told I should talk to you?”
    “Yes?”
    He was impatient; he was waiting for the LA cops to get back with information on Francis Xavier Peter, the fire-starting actor.
    “I think, um, I’ve seen the guy in the picture,” the woman said. “I played D&D with him a couple of months ago, in this girl’s house? In Dinkytown?”
    Lucas sat up. “Do you know his name, or