Mind Prey

edge of the roof and unwrapped them. Haywood alternately chewed and scanned the streets with a pair of Night Mariner glasses, not saying much.
    Lucas finished his sub, then took the cellular phone and the note from Ice out of his pocket and punched the number in. She answered on the second ring.
    “Ms. Ice, this is Lucas Davenport.”
    “Mr. Davenport, Lucas.” She sounded a little out of breath. “I think somebody is here. Looking at me. At my house.”

25
    I CE LIVED IN a brick two-story in St. Paul’s Desnoyer Park, a few blocks from the Mississippi. Only the upper floor was lit: when Del touched the doorbell, he said, without looking back, “Nothing.”
    Lucas was in the back of Del’s van, invisible behind the tinted glass, a radio in one hand, a phone in the other. His .45 was on the floor; he could see almost nothing in the dark. Behind them was a hurricane fence, and on the other side, the Town and Country Club golf course. “The guy on the porch can’t see anything,” he said into the phone.
    “Should I go down?” Ice asked.
    “No, no, just wait. He’ll be up, if the door’s open.”
    “It should be…”
    “Hang on,” Lucas said to Ice. And to Del, on the radio, “Go on in. Straight ahead to the white door, through it, then a hard right up the stairs.”
    “Jesus, I love this shit,” Del said. He was wearing a Derby hat, a white shirt pulled out at the waist, pants that were too large and too short, and a cotton jacket. A guitar case was slung over his shoulder. In the dark, from a distance, he might pass for a musician in his twenties. “I’m going in.”
    Del pushed through the front door, his right hand crooked awkwardly in front of his belly. He was holding a Ruger .357, trying to keep it out of sight from the street.
    When he disappeared into the house, Lucas crawled to the other side of the van and looked out, then quickly checked the street through the front and rear windows. There were only a few lights on. Nothing moved on the street. Lights went on, then off, in Ice’s house. Then Del’s voice burped from the radio. “I’m at the stairs. Not a sound. I’m on my way up.”
    Lucas said into the phone, “He’s coming up,” and to himself, He’s gone …
     
    M AIL HADN’T DECIDED what to do about Ice. Actually, he thought, he’d like to date her. They’d go well together. But that didn’t seem possible, not anymore. He was beginning to feel the pressure, to feel the sides of the bubble collapsing upon him. He was beginning to think beyond Andi Manette and her body.
    When he became aware of it—became aware of the barely conscious planning for “afterwards”—a kind of depression settled on him. He and Andi were working something out: a relationship.
    If he moved on, something would have to be done about her and the kid. He’d started working through it in his mind. The best way to do it, he thought, would be to take Andi out, and upstairs, and out in the yard, and shoot her. There’d be no evidence in the house, and he could throw the body in the cistern. Then the kid: just go down, open the door, and do it. And after a while, he could dump some junk into the cistern—there was an old disker he could drag over, and other metal junk that nobody would want to take out. Then, when somebody else rented the place, even if they looked in the cistern, there’d be no attempt to clean it out. Just fill it up with dirt and rebuild.
    Getting close to the time , he thought.
    But it depressed him. The last few days had been the most fulfilling he’d known. But then, he was young: he could fall in love again.
    With somebody like Ice.
    Mail was parked a block from Ice’s house, in the driveway of a house with a For Sale sign in the front yard. He’d been driving by when a saleswoman pulled the drapes on the picture window so she could show the view to a young couple from Cedar Rapids. Mail looked in: there was no furniture in the place. Nobody living there. When the saleswoman left, he pulled into the driveway, all the way to the garage, and simply sat and watched the lights in Ice’s house. He knew the layout of the neighborhood from fifteen minutes circling the golf course. If he wanted, he could probably get down the alley and come up from the back of the house, and maybe force the back door.
    But he wasn’t sure he wanted that. He just wasn’t sure what he was doing—but Ice’s image was in his mind.
    He was still waiting when the guitar player arrived in a