John Sandford - Mind prey

"Just belay the end, get a couple of guys," Lucas yelled. There were cops running at them from all over the yard.

Andi Manette was pleading with the cop who held her; Peterson shouted into the swarm of men now around the cistern, "Let her come up, but hold her, hold her."

Lucas took the end of the rope and went over the side, feet against the rough fieldstone-and-concrete wall. The cistern smelled like new, wet earth, like early spring, like moss. He went down, passed the bundle on the wall, lowered himself into the water.

The water was three feet deep, coming up just to his hip joint; and it was cold.

"Genevieve," he breathed.

"Help me," she croaked. He could barely make out her voice.

Some kind of mechanism-a secondary pulley, perhaps-had once been mounted about three feet above what was now the water line. Whatever it was, was gone: but there were two metal support fixtures on either side of the cistern, and Genevieve had managed to crawl high enough up the rocks to spear the bottom of her raincoat over one of the fixtures.

With the coat buttoned, she had created a sturdy cloth sack hanging on the side of the cistern, above the water, like a cocoon. She'd crawled inside and hung there, legs in the sleeves, for nearly a hundred hours.

"Got you, honey," Lucas said, taking her weight.

"He threw me in… he threw me in," she said.

Peterson shouted down, "What do you want us to do? You need somebody else down there?"

"No. I'm gonna leave her in the coat, I'm gonna hook the rope through this hole. Take her up easy."

He hooked it up, and Genevieve groaned, and Lucas shouted, "Easy."

And Genevieve went up into the light.

Half-blind, his ears ringing with the blast of the shotgun, Mail crawled down the rows of corn, the field as dense as a rain forest. He couldn't see very well; he didn't really understand why, he just knew that one eye didn't seem to work. And every time his weight came down on his hand, pain shot through his abdomen.

But part of his mind still worked: fifty feet into the field, he went hard to his right, got to his feet, and running in a crablike crouch, one hand carrying the shotgun, the other pressed flat against his stomach, he headed downhill toward the road. Any other direction would lead to an open field, but if he could somehow get across the road, there was another mile-long cornfield, coming up to a farmhouse. The farmhouse would have a car.

And a culvert crossed under the road.

It wasn't large-maybe not even big enough to take his shoulders-but he remembered seeing the rust-stained end of it sticking out into a small cattail swamp in the ditch. If he could make it that far.

He was breathing hard, and the pain was growing, beating at him with every step. He fell, caught at the cornstalks with his free hand, went down. He lay there for a moment, then turned, rocked up on his butt, looked down at his stomach, and saw the blood. Lifting his shirt, he found a hole two inches below his breast bone, and a cut; blood was bubbling out of the hole.

The whole sequence, from the time he'd opened the door of the cell, through the shooting in the yard, was a shattered pane of memories, flashes of this and that. But now he remembered Andi Manette coming into him, and the bite of pain as she stabbed him with something.

Jesus. She'd stabbed him.

Mail's face contorted, and his shoulders lifted and he shuddered, and he began to sob. The cops would kill him if they found him; Manette had stabbed him. He had nowhere to go.

He sat, weeping, for fifteen seconds, then forced it all back. If he could get out of the field, if he could get through the culvert, if he could get a car and just get away from these people, just for a while; if he could rest, if he could just close his eyes-he could come back for Manette.

He would come back for her: she owed him a life.

Mail put his head down and began to crawl. Somewhere, he lost the shotgun, but he couldn't go back for it; and the pistol still rode in his belt. He looked back, once; there was nobody behind him, but he could see a thin trail of blood, winding down through the corn to where he lay.

Lucas lay on his back on the long grass next to the cistern, catching his breath. The cops who'd pulled him out were walking away, coiling the tow rope. Peterson hurried up. "Another chopper's coming. Be here in a minute."

Lucas sat up. He was soaked to the waist, and cold. "How's the kid?"

Peterson shook his head. "I don't know. She's not good, but I've seen worse that made it. Are you all right?"

"I'm tired," Lucas said. A chopper was coming in, and cops were down at the road, waving it in. He could see two other cops, walking along the road, and more were forming around the edges of the field.

Lucas pulled on his shoes and jacket, and said to Peterson, "Tell your people I'm going into the field. I'm only going in a few feet."

"He's got a shotgun," Peterson objected.

"Tell them," Lucas said.

"Look, there's no point…"

"He's not waiting for us to do something," Lucas said, looking out over the field. "I know how his head works, and he's running. He won't set up an ambush and go down shooting. He'll always try to get out."

"We'll have a couple more choppers here in a few minutes, knock down that field…"

"I just want a peek," Lucas said, walking away from the house, toward the fence where Mail had gone over. "Tell your guys."

Lucas crossed the fence line, his city shoes filling with plant debris. Sand burr hung from his damp socks, cutting at his ankles. Just inside the field, the sweet smell of maturing corn caught him; the fat ears hung off the stalks, dried silk like brown stains at the top of the ears. He worked slowly along the weedy margin until he saw the fresh foot-cuts in the soft gray dirt.

He slipped his pistol out, stooped, turned, and duckwalked into the field. And here was a flash of blood, more scuffs in the dirt, more blood. Mail was hurt. Lucas stopped, listened, heard a few leaves rustling in the light wind, the sound of car engines, distant sirens, the beat of a chopper. A ladybug crawled up a corn leaf, and he duck-walked a little further into the field, following the sights of his.45.

At knee-level, the cornfield was incredibly dense, and Lucas could see almost nothing, except straight up. Mail's track went straight into the field; Lucas followed it for two minutes, and then the trail turned sharply to the right and disappeared down a corn row. Lucas couldn't see anything at all up ahead. Mail was apparently shifting between rows; following him would be suicidal.

Lucas stood up and looked in the new direction the trail had taken. From where he was, he could see the phone poles along the road. Moving slowly, carefully, he worked his way back to the edge of the field, and recrossed the fence.

Peterson was waiting. When he saw Lucas coming back, he put a handset to his face, said something, and then, to Lucas: "See anything?"

"Not much," Lucas said. "He might be tending down toward the road."

"We'll have ten guys there in five minutes, but there's no way he could get across," Peterson said. "I'm more worried about that damn bean field. We don't have enough people down there-if he could get into one of those rows, he could crawl a good way."

"He's hurt," Lucas said. "There's quite a bit of blood. Manette and the kid both stabbed him, and it could be bad."

"We can always hope the sonofabitch dies," Peterson said. "That'd be some kind of justice, anyway."

Mail reached the end of the field. The nearest cops were standing on top of a squad car three hundred yards away, but he could hear sirens, all the sirens in the world. In a few minutes, they'd be elbow-to-elbow.