Mind prey

CHAPTER 13

Mail punched the Off button and with the phone still in his hand, ran outside. Overhead, a jetliner passed in-bound for Minneapolis-St. Paul. That's how they'd come, he thought, looking into the sky for lights, red or white, blinking, swooping, focusing on him. Choppers. An envelopment.

He ran down to the drive and piled into the van, fumbled the keys out of his jeans pocket, roared backwards out of the driveway onto the gravel road. If they were coming, and if he could get just a little bit north, maybe he could lose himself in the suburban traffic…

Mail wasn't frightened as much as he was excited. And angry. They'd played him for a sucker. He'd bet a hundred-to-one that Davenport was behind the call. Hell, he'd go a thousand-to-one. It was all very slick. So slick that he found himself grinning in the night, then sliding into an angry sulk, then grinning again, despite himself. Slick.

But not quite slick enough, he thought.

From a mile away, atop a hill, Mail looked back at his house. He couldn't really see it, but he could see the lighted kitchen door, which he'd left open, a thin candlestick against the dark fields. There was nothing near him-nothing coming. He shifted into park, and let the engine idle. Nothing at all.

After a moment, he turned off the engine and got out to listen: nothing but a thin breeze blowing through the goldenrod in his headlights…

Andi and Grace had nearly given up on the weapon idea. The only thing they could find, that might be anything at all, was a large nail that had bent over when it was being driven into the rafters above them. If they could pull it free, Andi thought, they might be able to hone it on the granite fieldstone in the walls.

"ltd be like a short ice pick, I guess," Andi said. They had nothing to work with, except the aluminum cans that the strawberry soda came in. While they were trying to figure out how to use the cans to pull the nail free, they began experimenting with the cans themselves. They could pull the tops and bottoms off without too much trouble-Andi wrapped her fingers in her shirt, and literally tore the aluminum free. They then had a thin, flexible sheet of aluminum. They tried folding it and flattening it, with the idea of sharpening the point and using it like a knife blade.

They could get a point, but not with enough stiffness to penetrate skin and muscle deeply enough to do damage. They might get an eye.

They tried twisting the stuff into spirals, but that wasn't as good as folding it. Grace suggested that since the edges of the aluminum were quite sharp when freshly torn, if they could somehow mount an edge between folded pieces, they might be able to use it like a razor. Again, it seemed that it might cut, but not enough to do mortal damage.

"If he was… on you, and I tried to cut his throat…" Grace suggested, her face pale.

Andi shook her head and pressed a strip of aluminum ingot into the back of her arm. "It takes too much force," she said. "Look."

She pressed hard, and got a long red line with just a hint of blood at one end. "It's harder to cut really deeply than you'd think. I remember from med school: the bodies cut like clay." She looked at the ceiling, and the bent nail. "The nail would do it, though. If we could get it out…" '

"We'll just have to work on it," Grace said.

And they did, Grace sitting on Andi's shoulders, digging at the wood with small pieces of the torn aluminum. The nail head was free, but stubbornly unmoving, when they heard him coming.

Grace took her arm, and Andi was struck at how old her daughter had become. "Don't fight him," Grace said. "Please, don't fight."

But she would.

She had to. If she didn't, he might start losing interest, and look at Grace, or… just get rid of them. Mail wanted her to fight. Wanted to conquer her, she'd figured that much.

Mail took her out of the cell, locked it, and then spun her toward the mattress. She let herself spin, stumbled, and went down hard. Better to go down than be knocked down.

And he liked the fear in her voice. He'd beat her to inspire it, if he had to, so she'd learned to beg: "Please, John," she said. "Please, you don't have to hurt me."

"Get out of the clothes," Mail said. Andi started pulling off her blouse. But now she looked around, carefully, the fearful look pasted on her face. Was there anything in the basement that might be used in a brawl?

"Come on, hurry up, goddamnit," Mail said. He was nude, erect, coming; across the basement at her.

"John…"

He was standing over her. "We're gonna move on, try something new. If I get bit-I really don't wanna get bit-if I get bit, I'll beat the shit out of you, then I'll take Grace down to the house and put her hands in the garbage disposal, then bring her back here so you can look at her. You got that?"

She nodded dumbly, and he said, "Okay, then…"

Afterwards, lying on the mattress, he said, "You know what that fuckin' Davenport did?" And he told her about the radio. "I saw it, though," he bragged. "They took me for a minute, but I saw right through it and I said it right on the air, 'Davenport, you cocksucker,' I said." He was animated as he talked, and they might have been teenage lovers lying on a mattress in a cold-water flat, talking about dreams. "He thinks he's pretty fuckin' smart. But what he don't know is hurtin' him."

"I… what?" She was responding automatically, keeping the talk going as she inventoried the basement. Mail hadn't beaten her this time, and the sex had become inconsequential; there just wasn't much more that he could do to her, and she could handle it… she thought.

The inventory: a stack of old terra-cotta pots in the corner-they could be thrown, or used as a club. And over there, was that a beer bottle? God, if she could get that bottle, they could break off an end of it, maybe get some glass splinters. Those would be real weapons.

Mail said, "I've got a spy watching his every move."

Andi, doing her reconnaissance, had lost track of the conversation. A spy? "A spy?" she asked. A delusion?

"Somebody you know," Mail said to her, turning to watch her reaction. "A friend of yours; put me on you in the first place."

"Who?" His voice suggested this was more than a delusion-he was too matter-of-fact.

"Can't tell you," Mail said.

"Why?"

" 'Cause I want you thinking about it. Maybe it's your husband, trying to get rid of you and the daughters. Maybe it's your mother…"

"My mother's dead."

"Yeah? How'd she die?"

"She drowned."

"Huh," Mail seemed about to say something else, but then he rolled to his knees, looming over her again. "Well, then, maybe it's your partner. Maybe it's your father."

She took the risk. "John, I think you're making it up."

For a moment, she thought he might strike her-his eyes widened in instant, unreflective anger, and he seemed to pull within himself, as when he beat her. But then he smiled, slightly, and said, "Yeah, I'm bullshitting you. There really is a spy. But I don't know who it is."

She shook her head.

"Called me up out of the blue," he said. "Said, 'Remember Andi Manette who sent you away? She talks about you all the time.' "

"Somebody said that?" She believed him now-and she was appalled.

"Yeah. Said you thought I was some kind of devil. Pretty soon I couldn't get you out of my head. I never forgot you, but you were in the back of my mind some place. I didn't have to deal with you. But the spy called…"

"Yes?" A psychiatrist's prompt, and she felt a little thrill of power.

"I can remember sitting in that detention room, and you always sat there in these… dresses… you had these tits, you wore this perfume, I could see up your legs sometimes, I used to think I could see your pussy in there; I'd lay up at night and think about it. Could I see it? Or maybe not…"

"I didn't realize…" Another prompt.

"You never knew what made me work, and I couldn't explain it," Mail said. "After a while I'd just sit there and look at your tits and burn."

"Somebody kept calling you?"

"I don't wanna talk any more," he said, the anger suddenly back. And his eyes turned inward, jelled over. "I want to fuck…" He swatted at her and hit her on a shoulder. She quailed away, and he said, "Get over here, or I'll really fuckin' beat your ass."

Later she said, "Can I call somebody? My husband, or somebody, to tell them that we're alive?"

He was irritated. "Fuck no."

"John, pretty soon they'll think we're dead. Pretty soon all this activity will die down, and it'll just be one long grinding hunt, and they'll get you and lock you up forever. If they know I'm alive, you might be able to… move better. There might be a deal somewhere, something you can work."

Again, talking almost like lovers: she concerned for his future. He shook it off. "There won't be any deal. Not with me."

"It gives you more power," she said. "If they convince themselves that I'm dead, they can do anything they want. If they know I'm alive, things'll be more awkward for them. As a gamer, I'm sure you can see that. And I just want people to know that I'm still out here. I don't want them to forget me."

Mail stood up, began to dress, kicked her clothes at her. "Put them on." And when she was dressed, he said, "I'll think about it. You can't call direct, but maybe we could tape something. I could call the tape in from somewhere else."

"John, that would be…" She almost laughed. "That would be great."

He reacted to that: he puffed up, she thought. He liked the flattery, especially from her. "I'll think about it."

Back inside the cell, after the door had closed and his feet had thumped away, she said to Grace, "We've got to think of a message to tape-he might tape a message for us. We have to figure out a code, or something."

She was excited, and Grace watched her, her young face solemn, withdrawn, and Andi finally said, "What? What?"

And Grace said, "You've got blood all over your face, Mom. It's all over."

Grace pointed to the right side of Andi's face and suddenly her hand began to shake with fear, and she began to cry, backing away from Andi, and Andi scrubbed at the side of her face and the blood from her nose that had dried there, after Mail, excited, had begun slapping her during the last sexual frenzy.

She hadn't noticed the blood, she thought, as Grace huddled in the corner. She was becoming used to it; a condition of her servitude.

But things had changed this time. Things had changed.