John Sandford - Mind prey

"How bad? How bad is it?" Sherrill asked, her face a waxy white. "I hurt…"

"Just your leg, you'll be okay," Del said, and he grinned at Sherrill with his green teeth.

Lucas picked her up, cradling her, and carried her groaning with pain to the chopper, where the pilot had shoved open the passenger-side door. "Bleeding bad, hit an artery," Lucas shouted over the prop blast. "Got to get her to Ramsey."

The pilot nodded, gave him a thumbs-up. Lucas shouted at Del, "You go-keep the hole packed up."

"You're gonna need help…"

"Gonna have a lot of help in one minute," Lucas shouted back. "This is just gonna be a dog hunt now."

Del nodded, and they fitted Sherrill into the passenger seat with Del straddling her; and the chopper lifted off.

Lucas turned and saw Andi Manette at the door of the old farm house. She had her daughter under one arm, and with her hand, tried to hold together the pieces of what once had been a suit.

"You're Davenport," she said. She looked bad: she looked like she was dying.

"Yes," Lucas nodded. "Please sit down, both of you. You're okay…"

"He's afraid of you," Andi said. "John's afraid of you."

Lucas looked from Andi Manette and Grace toward the cornfield. "He should be," he said.

The Dakota deputies had pursued people into cornfields before; they knew how to isolate a runner. The field itself covered a half-section, a mile long by a half-mile wide. The road ran along one edge, and recently cut alfalfa fields along two more. A bean field, still standing, stretched along the fourth side. Cop cars were stationed at three of the corners of the field, and cops climbed on top, with binoculars, so they had clear views down the road and the surrounding alfalfa and soybean fields.

Mail might try to crawl out through the beans, but that was on the far side of the corn, a long run; and within a couple of minutes, a cop car bumped down into the beans and quickly ripped a three-car-wide path along the edge of the corn, then retired to the highest point along the path. A deputy with a semiautomatic rifle set up behind the car.

For now, that would hold; in five minutes, there would be twenty cops around the field. In ten minutes, there would be fifty.

Lucas stood with Andi Manette, on the handset. "I've got Mrs. Manette and Grace. We need to lift them out of here, we need a medevac now."

"Lucas, the chief is here."

Roux came on. "They say you got them."

"Yeah, but we need to get them out, we need to get a chopper down here."

"Are they hurt bad?"

"Not critical," Lucas said, looking at the two women, "But they're pretty beat up. And Sherrill's hurt bad."

"I was listening to Capslock on the radio. They'll be at Ramsey in three or four minutes. We've got another chopper on the way. Dunn's being notified."

Andi Manette, now with both arms wrapped around her sobbing daughter, said, "Genevieve. Do you have Genevieve?"

Lucas shook his head, and her face contorted and she choked out, "Do you know…?"

"We hoped she was with you," Lucas said.

"He said he would drop her off in a mall. I gave her a quarter to call with."

"I'm sorry…"

A caravan of police cars, now including city cars, barrelled up the track: two more jammed into the driveway at Mail's house, and all around them, cops with rifles and shotguns were posting around the cornfield. The ranking sheriff's deputy hurried toward them.

"Davenport?"

"Yeah. Who're you?"

"Dale Peterson. Are you sure he's in the corn?"

"Ninety-five percent. We saw him go in and there wasn't any place to get out."

"He's hurt bad," Andi Manette said. Peterson reached a hand out to her, but she edged away and Lucas backed him off with a quick shake of the head. "I stabbed him," she said. "Just before he ran."

She lifted her hand; she still held the spike, and her fingers were smeared with blood. Grace turned her head in her mother's arms and said, "I did, too. I stabbed him in the eye." And she showed them the bedspring needle.

"He was going to kill us," Andi said numbly.

Lucas said, "You did right." And he laughed, and said, "Goddamn, I'm proud of you." And he lifted his hand to pat her shoulder, and remembered, and turned instead toward Peterson. "You gonna handle this?"

The deputy nodded: "We can."

"Do it, then," Lucas said. "I'd like to help out. He just shot a friend of mine."

Peterson nodded. "We heard. But, you know… take care." He meant, Don't murder him.

"I'm fine," Lucas said, and Peterson nodded. To Andi: "Miz Manette, if you guys would like to ride down to the road, a helicopter will be picking you up."

"Got media coming," a deputy called from the last car down.

"Keep them out," Lucas said.

"Block them out at the corner," Peterson called. "And get Hank to call the FAA, keep the TV choppers out of here."

"Thank you," Andi Manette said to Peterson. And to her daughter, "Come on, Grace."

Grace said, "Genevieve?"

"We'll look for her," Andi promised.

Lucas walked with them toward the last of the sheriff's cars. "I'm sorry it took so long," he said. "He isn't stupid."

"No, he isn't," Andi said. A deputy opened the back door of his car. Andi helped Grace into the backseat, then turned to say something else to Lucas. Her eyes reached up toward his face, then stopped, looking past his shoulder. Lucas turned to see what she was looking at, his band dropped toward his pistol. Had she seen Mail? Then she brushed past him, took three quick steps, and suddenly was running toward the house.

Lucas looked at the deputy, said, "Watch the kid," and started after her, walking quickly, and then, when he saw where she was going, broke into a run, shouting, "Mrs, Manette, wait, please wait, wait…"

Peterson was on the radio, but he dropped the microphone when he saw Andi Manette running toward the house, and he hurried after her.

She was running toward a six-foot square of weathered wood set on a six-inch-high concrete platform. Lucas, forty feet behind her, shouted, one last time, "Don't, wait," but she was already there. She stooped, caught the edges of the old cistern cover, and heaved.

Lucas had to stop her, because he'd realized what Andi Manette knew by instinct: this was where Genevieve was. The doll in the oil barrel was the girl in the cistern; a watery grave.

When Lucas had still been in uniform, he'd worked a kidnapping case where the child had been shot and thrown in a creek. The body had washed up on the bank, and he'd been with the group of searchers that had found it. He'd seen so much death in his years on the force that it no longer affected him, much. But that child, early in his career, with the white, pudding flesh, the absent eyes… he still saw them sometimes, in nightmares.

The cover on the cistern was too heavy for Andi Manette. There was no way that she could lift it. But she got it up a foot, staggered, and as Lucas reached her, slipped it sideways and heaved, opening the hole.

Lucas grabbed her, wrenched her away as she screamed, "No," and Lucas, turning, looked down and saw… What?

Nothing, at first, just a bundle of junk on the side of the hole, above the black water at the bottom.

Then the bundle moved, and he saw a flash of white.

Peterson had wrapped his arms around Andi Manette, pulling her away, when Lucas, eyes wild, waved at him, shouted, "Jesus Christ, she's alive."

The cistern was perhaps fifteen feet deep, and the bundle hung just above the water. It moved again, and a face turned up.

"Get something," Lucas screamed back at the cars. "Get a goddamn rope."

A uniformed cop was pulling Andi Manette away; Andi was fighting him, crazy. Another cop popped the truck on a patrol car, and a second later was running toward them with a tow rope. Lucas peeled off his shoes and jacket.