Stolen Prey

looked from her stricken face to the TV: “¿
Qué?”
    E ARLY IN the afternoon, Sanderson went to Mom’s house. She’d been worrying obsessively about the gold—with Turicek dead and Kline incapacitated, with the Mexicans visiting her apartment, with the cops all over her, she began experiencing the symptoms of what her doctors had previously described as aschizophrenic break; she’d experienced them a few times before, but not for a few years. She hadn’t been able to eat or sleep at all, a ragged headache was a constant companion, and her normal mental playacting had become dominant, the plays more real than the world around her.
    One of the plays ran over and over, a sequence in which Edie Albitis went to Mom’s house and stole all the gold, and then Sanderson, seeing herself standing in the house with an empty bag, peeked out the window and saw Davenport and more cops gathering on her lawn, with guns….
    She kept trying to rerun the vision to eliminate the cops, to get the gold back, but none of it worked: the vision was assertive, and inescapable.
    So she went to Mom’s: the presence of the gold, she thought, would be curative: if she had it in her hands, it couldn’t have gone with Albitis. If she had the gold in her hands, the vision would go away.
    And she should move the gold, she thought. Take it somewhere nobody would know, for safekeeping. Out in the countryside. She could get a shovel….
    A S WAS THE CASE with paranoia, a little schizophrenia could work for you, if it wasn’t too severe. In her most acute episodes, Sanderson’s visions were actually tactile. When the visions involved conflict with threatening people, she’d worked out all kinds of evasive tactics. She would evade the threats on foot and in her car, in airplanes, on horseback, on snowmobiles, and in boats…. She’d worked all through it, in her dreams.
    Now, with an actual threat of police surveillance, she wentdown to the garage and carefully looked around, until she was confident that she was alone, then looked under her car for suspect boxes and wires. She’d seen GPS trackers on some cop show on TV, though she wasn’t sure whether they were real or fictional.
    Finding nothing, she got in her car and went through an evasive routine imagined many times in the past; it took a while, and involved twisting routes through the parking ramps at the Mall of America, followed by a trip through country lanes south of the Cities, and finally, unable to discover the slightest sign that she was being followed, she drove back into town, to Mom’s.
    Calmer now, after her journey through the real world, she pulled into the driveway, lifted the garage door, and drove in. The gold was packed into small cardboard boxes, and made a fairly compact stack. But then, dumbbells were also fairly compact: gold is heavier than lead, and though the gold pile was not particularly impressive, it weighed something like 860 pounds.
    She looked at it for a few minutes, snapped to the vision of the cops arriving outside, and ran to the front window and peeked: the street was empty. Breathing hard, and struggling to calm herself, she went to the kitchen, got a glass of water, then went back to the gold. She tried picking up three boxes, but together they were heavier than a car battery, and she dropped the bottom one. Two at a time were more manageable, and she took two the first and second trips, shuttling out to the garage, but after that, she slowed down, taking one box at a time.
    She was two-thirds of the way down the stack when she heard a car in the driveway. She was standing next to her own car, having just dropped another box in front of the backseat, when she heard it, and there was no doubt about it.
    But then, what she heard and saw wasn’t necessarily what was out there, and she knew that: she was mildly schizophrenic, and fully aware of that fact. She went back to the front window and peeked again.
    Edie Albitis was getting out of a car parked at the curb.
    A LBITIS HAD SPENT the night sleeping at the office condo, on a blow-up mattress she’d bought at an all-night Walmart. She had her suitcase with her, and in the morning had managed to clean up using a six-pack of bottled water she’d gotten at the same Walmart.
    She was frightened: the drug gang and the police had been all over Turicek, Kline, and Sanderson. It was unclear to her whether the Mexicans had had Turicek for any length of time, if he might have given away Mom’s