Mind Prey (32 page)

"He told me. You looked great on the tube, by the way. You almost might've been telling the truth, about figuring out the trap business," Roux said.

"The feds are going along," Lucas said.

"Not much choice. If they don't, they look like fools." Roux turned to tamp the cigarette out in an ashtray, fumbled another one out of the pack, and lit it with a plastic lighter. "Are you sure we're looking for this Mail guy?"

"Yeah. Pretty sure," Lucas said.

"But you don't want to go out with it."

"I'm afraid it might trigger him. If we put his actual face on the air, he'd have to run for it. He wouldn't leave anybody behind."

"Huh." Roux tapped ashes off the cigarette. "I could use something that would look like progress."

"I don't have anything like that."

"Mail's name is gonna get out," she said.

"Yeah, but maybe not for a day or two. I don't see it going much longer than that."

"I wonder if she's still alive? Manette."

"I think so," Lucas said. "When he kills her, we won't hear from him any more. There wouldn't be any point. As long as he's fucking with us, as long as he's calling me, she's alive. And I think one of the girls."

"Christ, I'm tired," she said.

"Tell me," Lucas said. He yawned. "I'm sleeping at the company tonight. On a cot."

"Who's with you?"

"Intelligence guys. And Sloan is over there tonight."

"You still think he'll come in?"

"If he's watching TV, he might. He'll be curious. And in the meantime, we're trying to nail down his friends."

A few clouds had come through in the late evening and dropped just enough rain to clear the air. Now they'd gone, and the brighter stars were visible through the ground lights. Lucas got the car and cut across town to University Avenue. He noticed a van in his rearview mirror and thought about it: there were tens of thousands of vans in the Twin Cities. If Mail showed up at the company during the day, and they flooded the area with squads, as they were planning, how many vans would be in the net? A hundred? A hundred might be manageable. But what if it were five hundred, or a thousand?

Maybe the techies at the office had some kind of statistics software that would tell him how many vans he could expect in, say, a ten-minute period in a square mile of the city. Would the density of vans be higher in an industrial area than in a suburb?

He was still mulling it over when he pulled into a Subway shop off University. He could see two young sandwich makers through the front window, both red-haired, maybe twins. Nobody else was in the shop. He yawned, went inside. The place smelled of pickles and relish; the clean, watery odor of lettuce mingled with the yeast smell of bread.

"Give me a foot-long BMT on white, everything but the jalapenos," he said.

One of the redheads had disappeared into the back. The other started working on the sandwich. Lucas leaned on the counter and yawned again and turned his head. A van was parked across the street. As Lucas turned his head, the taillight flickered. Somebody inside the dark vehicle had stepped on the brake pedal. The van looked like the one he'd seen in his rearview mirror.

"Hey, kid," Lucas said, turning back to the sandwich man. "I'm a cop and I've got to make a cop call. I don't want you to look up while I'm talking. Just keep working on the sandwich, huh?"

The kid didn't look up. "What's going on?"

"There's a van across the street, and it might be trouble. I'm gonna call in a squad car to check. Hand me one of those large root beer cups and keep working on the sandwich."

"I'm almost done," the kid said, glancing up at Lucas.

"Make another one. Same thing. Don't look out the window."

Lucas carried the root beer cup to the soda machine, where he was out of sight, took the cellular phone out of his pocket, and called in. "This is Davenport. I've got a van tailing me out to a Subway on University Avenue, I need a couple of cars here quick." He gave the dispatcher the address and asked that the cars come in at the corners on either side of the van. "Get one guy out of each car to walk to the corner on foot. Let me know when they're in position, and I'll come out."

"Hang on." The dispatcher was back fifteen seconds later. "Two cars on the way, Lucas. They'll be there in a minute or a little more. Stay on, and we'll let you know."

"Do they know what they're supposed to do?"

"Yes. They'll wait until they see you moving out of the Subway."

The kid was finishing the second sandwich when Lucas moved back to the counter with the cup full of cellular telephone.

"We gonna get robbed?" the kid asked, keeping his head down.

"I don't think so," Lucas said. "I think this is something else."

"Been robbed twice, this place has," the kid said. "I wasn't here. My brother was."

"Just give them the money," Lucas said, handing the kid a ten-dollar bill.

"That's what everybody says." The kid handed him some change, and the cellular scratched from the cup. Lucas put it to his face and said, "Say that again?"

"We're all set."

"I'm on my way out."

A hell of a way to end it, Lucas thought as he walked toward the entrance. He was tight: something was wrong at the van. Something was about to happen. Anyone who had been on the streets would have seen it, would have felt it coming.

At the door, the sandwich bag in one hand and the cup and cellular phone in the other, he paused, put his hand in his pocket as though fumbling for car keys, and checked the van. It was older, with rusted-out holes on the fenders, side panels, and around the taillights. The cup said something to him, and he put it to his mouth. "What?"

"Two men just got out of the other side of the vehicle where you can't see them. They may be armed."

"Okay." Two men?

Lucas pushed through the door and started toward the Porsche. He was halfway to the car when the two men came around the back of the car and started toward him. One was tall and thin, with a thin goatee; the other short and muscular, with long, heavy arms. The tall one wore a thin cotton jacket; the short one wore a high school letter jacket without a letter. They were pointing toward him, and he thought:A mugging? Maybe nothing to do with Mail ?

They were twenty yards away and walking fast, hands in their pockets, looking at him, cutting him off from the car. Lucas stopped suddenly, and they changed direction toward him, and he stooped and put the sandwiches on the blacktop and drew his pistol in the same motion, pointed it at them.

"Police. Stop right there. Get your hands in the air, get your hands up."

And two uniformed cops came running in from behind, guns drawn, and one shouted, "Police."

The van tried to leave--the driver, unseen behind the dark glass, cranked the engine, gunned it forward, and a squad popped out of the street halfway down the block, and paused. The van driver stopped, then pulled to the side of the street. The two men in the street were looking around, uncertainly, and one pulled his hands from his pockets slowly and said, "What? What do you want?" The other slowly lifted his hands.

"On the ground," Lucas shouted. "C'mon, you know the routine: on the ground."

And they knew. They dropped to their knees, then lay on the ground with their hands behind their heads.

Lucas moved in close and asked, "Is that Mail in the van?"

"Don't got no mail," the taller of the two men said. "What're you doing to us?"

"You know what the fuck I'm talking about," Lucas said harshly. "You've sot Andi Manette and her daughters, and if we don't find out real fuckin' quick where they're at, we're gonna turn you over to the feds. The federal penalty for kidnapping is the electric chair, my fine friends."

The shorter man now turned his eyes up. He was scared and puzzled. "What? What're you talking about?"

The two cops on foot had arrived, while the two squads boxed the van. "Cuff 'em," Lucas said.

He walked down to the van, where the driver was slowly climbing out, keeping his hands in sight. He was black. Lucas said, "Shit," and walked back to the two men on the ground. The uniforms had frisked them and had come up with a Davis .32 and a can of pepper gas.

"So what are we doing?" asked one of the uniforms, a sergeant named Harper Coos.

"Aw, they were gonna mug me," Lucas said. "Probably picked up on the car. I thought it might be the other thing."

The cops at the van called, "We got a gun."

"Run 'em, and if you can do a gun charge, do it," Lucas said. "Otherwise, you're gonna have to cut them loose. I never gave them a chance to actually start mugging me."

"Too bad," Coos said.

"Yeah," Lucas said. "Fuckheads had me excited."

There were a half-dozen cars in the parking lot outside the company, and almost every light in the building was turned on.

"Bring me a sandwich?" The voice floated down out of the sky.

"Who's that?" Lucas looked up, but with the brightly lit windows couldn't see anything in the dark along the roof line.

"Haywood."

"I got an extra sub."

"I'd pay a hundred bucks for a sub."

"I'll run it right up."

"How about, uh, three bucks? Which is what I got."

"You can owe the ninety-seven," Lucas said.

Sloan and three young programmers were staring ata single screen, when one of the programmers saw Lucas come in. He prodded the guy working the keyboard, who turned and said, "Ah. Hi." The screen in front of him went blank.

"Hey. I'm gonna run this sub up on the roof. What you got going?"

"Um, just messing around."

"Show him," said Sloan. "He'll probably make another million with it."

"Yeah, show me," said Lucas, walking over to the group.

The programmers were all grinning at the guy in the chair, who shrugged and started tapping on keys. "You know those screen-savers? The flying toasters, and the tropical fish that swim around the screen, and all that?"

"Yeah."

"And you know how some of the magazines put out, uh, pinups as screens avers?"

"Yeah."

"Well..." A pinup appeared on the screen, one leg lifted coyly, but her almost impossibly perky breasts in full view.

"Yeah?" Lucas waited. The woman was pretty but nothing special.

Until her breasts took off and began flying around the screen on their own, like the flying toasters.

"Flying hooters--Davenport Simulations' answer to the Flying Toasters," the kid said.

"If Davenport Simulations' name appears anywhere on this product, I'll be forced to take out my gun and kill you all," Lucas said.

"Some people might feel it's in poor taste," the kid in the chair conceded.

"Does this mean you wouldn't be interested in the swimming pussys?" asked Sloan.

"I'll pass," Lucas said.

He started away and then turned. "What does Ice think about these things?"

The programmer in the chair shuddered: "She doesn't know. If she knew, she'd hunt us down and kill us like vermin."

"Which reminds me," said one of the others. "She called and asked if you were around. She said she'd try you at the police department."

"When was this?"

The other man shrugged. "Ten, fifteen minutes ago. She's at home--I got her number." He handed Lucas a slip of paper.

"Okay." Lucas stuck the paper in his pocket and walked through the back to the stairs, took them to the second floor, then on up a shorter flight to the roof.

Haywood was pacing the perimeter of the building when Lucas came through the roof door.

"Anything?"

"A bunch of juvie skaters coming and going, that's about it," the cop said. He was wearing a black, long-sleeved shirt and blue jeans, with a black-and-green Treebark camo face mask. He'd be invisible from the street. "There's a little coke getting served outside the Bottle Cap, down on the next block."

"Nothing new there," Lucas said.

The night was pleasant, cool, with the stars brighter away from the heavy lights of the loop. Lucas handed him a sandwich and they sat on the wall along the 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."

Chapter
25

>

Ice 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.