Mind Prey

stores; the long row of brick storefronts was inflected by the white plastic of a Fina station.
    Lucas slumped in his seat, Sloan’s baseball cap on his head, only his eyes above the windowsill. He hoped he looked like a child but wouldn’t have bet on it. “Two million vans,” he said. “Everywhere you look, there’s a van, if the sonofabitch is dumb enough to still be driving that van around.”
    The chopper: Subject proceeding through Bayport.
    Sloan idled the length of the town, and they saw nothing of interest: storefronts full of tourists, teenagers idling along the walks, one kid who might’ve been Mail but wasn’t. In the light of a pizza place, his face was five years too young.
    At the north end of town, Lucas said, “We’ve got three or four minutes to set up. Let’s go back to the other end and find a spot where we can watch the street. If he turns off right away, we should be able to see him. If he goes on past, we can fall in behind.”
    “Piss off the feds,” Sloan said.
    “Fuck ’em. Something’s happening.”
    Sloan made a U-turn in the parking lot of a run-down building with a line of dancing cowboy boots painted on the bare, corrugated metal in flaking house paint. They waited for a break in traffic and then drove back to the south end of town, pulled into a parking lot, and found an empty handicapped parking space facing the street. A line of pine trees separated the lot from the street. “Probably get a ticket,” Sloan said as he pulled into the handicapped space.
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “I’ve always thought of you as handicapped.”
    Radio: The subject has exited Bayport and is proceeding north.
    “Why’s he talking like that?” Sloan asked.
    “He’s got that camera with him. He’ll say perpetrator in a minute.”
    From their vantage in the parking lot, they could look through the line of trees and see the cars coming into town on Highway 95. Dunn drove a silver Mercedes 500 S, and as the chopper radio said Subject is entering Stillwater , Lucas picked it out in the traffic stream.
    “See him?”
    “I’ve got him.”
    “Let him get past.”
    Sloan backed the car out of the handicapped slot. “I wonder where the feds are?”
    “Probably not real close.”
    They waited behind the trees until the Mercedes went past, and then Sloan pulled out of the lot and back onto Main Street. There were two cars between them and Dunn. Lucas, slumped in his seat, couldn’t see him.
    “What’s he doing?” he asked, when they all stopped for a red light.
    Sloan had edged a bit to the left, and said, “Nothing. Looking straight ahead.”
    “What do you think? Is Dunn legit?”
    Sloan looked at him. “If he’s not, they had to set it up ahead of time.”
    “Well, he’s a smart guy.”
    “I don’t know,” Sloan said. The traffic started moving again. “That’d be awful tricky.”
    “Yeah.”
    After a moment, Sloan said, “It looks like he’s going all the way through town. Unless he’s going to that old train station. Or one of the antique places.”
    “Shit: I hope he doesn’t take a boat somewhere. Did the feds think of a boat? Boy, if the sonofabitch goes out on the water…”
    “We could grab a boat from somebody,” Sloan said.
    “I’d give ten bucks to see that note he got from the picnic table.”
    “With your money, you could do better,” Sloan said. “Hey. He’s slowing down. Goddamn, he’s turning around right where we did.”
    “Go on past,” Lucas said. He sat up a bit and saw the silver Benz turning in the gravel parking lot outside the building painted with the cowboy boots. Sloan pulled into the next parking lot, a marina, and found a space with two cars between them and Dunn.
    “Goddamnit,” Lucas said. He put his hand to his forehead.
    Subject has stopped. Subject has stopped. Five, are you on him?
    We see him, we’re proceeding into parking lot down the street.
    “The whole fuckin’ lot’s gonna be full of cops,” Sloan said. “That must be them.” A dark Ford bumped into the lot, and Lucas could see that it was full of adult-sized heads.
    “Can you see the name of that place?” Lucas asked. “Where he’s at?”
    “No light,” Sloan said. Across the street, Dunn was getting out of his car. He looked up at the boot store and started toward it, ponderously. He carried a briefcase and slumped with it, as though it weighed a hundred pounds.
    Lucas picked up the federal radio. “This is Davenport. We’re in the