Mind Prey

the central shaft of the building, popped on. The building had been remodelled since it had last been used to store grain, and the grain storage shaft had been partitioned into storage rooms and a receiving dock. The rooms had no ceilings, but looked straight to the top of the shaft. The light inside the shaft was weak—the volume was too big for the three operable bulbs.
    But in the gloom above them, something moved. They all saw it at once, and Lucas and the fed pressed back against the walls, their guns up.
    “What is it?”
    “Aw, Jesus,” Dunn shouted, turning in his own footprints, head craned up. “It’s Andi, Jesus…”
    Then Lucas could see it, the body in black, the feet below it, twisting from a yellow rope at the top of the shaft. The door they had not yet tried went into the receiving dock and the main part of the shaft itself. Dunn broke toward it, hands out to stiff-arm the door…
    “Wait, wait,” Lucas screamed. He launched himself across the room in a body block, caught Dunn just behind the knees, and cut him down. The fed stood frozen as they thrashed on the floor for a moment, and Lucas, gun still in one hand, trying to control it, sputtered at the fed, “Hold him, for christ sakes.”
    “That’s Andi,” Dunn groaned as the fed put away his pistol and grabbed Dunn’s coat. “Let me up.”
    “That’s not your wife,” Lucas said. “That’s a woman named Crosby.”
    “Crosby? Who’s Crosby?”
    “A friend of Mail’s,” Lucas said shortly. “We’ve been trying to track her, but he got to her first.”
    Lucas, back on his feet, holstered his pistol and went to the partially open door to the shaft. There was a slight draft through the doorway, but nothing else. Lucas reached through, found another light switch, hesitated, then flipped it on. Again, the lights worked. He looked through the crack in the door, saw nothing. No wires, nothing that might be a bomb. He gave the door a push and was ready to step through.
    But the door seemed to resist for a split second, just a hair-trigger hold, and then a break, almost imperceptible, but enough that Lucas jumped back.
    “What?” The FBI man was grinning at him.
    “I thought I felt…” Lucas started. He put his hand out toward the door and took a step.
    And was nearly knocked off his feet as the door seemed to explode a foot from his face.
     
    C AN SEE, HE thought, his hands up in front of his face. Nothing hurts …
     
    “W HAT?” THE FED was shouting, his gun out again, pointing at the shattered wooden door. “What? What? What was that?”
    Dust filtered down on them and rolled out of the back room like smoke. Lucas could taste dirt in his mouth, feel the grit in his eyes. Dunn had reflexively turned away, but now turned back, his hair and shoulders covered with grime.
    “What was that?”
    Lucas stepped back to the door, pushed it, pushed it again, pushed hard. It opened a foot and he looked through. On the other side, the floor was littered with river rocks, granite cobblestones the size of pumpkins, fifteen or twenty of them.
    “Trap,” Lucas said. He pushed the door again and a rock rolled away from it. Lucas stepped through and saw the rope from the top of the door leading up into the darkness. “They fell a long way. If one of them hit you, it’d be like getting hit by a cannonball.”
    “But that’s not Andi?” Dunn said, following him through, looking up at the body. In the stronger light, they could now see the soles of the woman’s feet, like dancing footprints above their heads.
    “No. That’s just bait,” Lucas said. “That was to get us to run through the door without thinking about it.”
    “Asshole,” said the fed. He was dusting himself off. “Somebody could have got hurt.”

23
    M AIL’S TRAP HAD snapped, but it had come up empty. Still, it had excited him: figuring it out, setting it up. He hadn’t planned to put Gloria’s body in the loft section, but it had worked so well in his mind—the cheese to pull them, unthinking, into the trap.
    And it must’ve been close, because they’d tripped it. He could tell by the way they were acting.
     
    “W E KNEW THERE’D be a booby trap, that there’d be something ,” Davenport said. He seemed to find the situation almost funny, in a grim way. He stood with his back to the Bit & Bridle, his hard face made even harder by the television lights; his suit seemed unwrinkled, his tie went with his cool blue eyes. “We were hoping that by