Storm Prey

by Sandford, John

  And he dreamed of sitting up on a high roof in Bakersfield and looking out over the town, the roofscape, the palm trees and mountains, the hot dry wind in his face. Sitting up there, it felt like something might be possible. Then you’d smell the tar, and realize it wasn’t.

  And he dreamed of the men he’d killed, their faces when he pulled the trigger. The BMW had come from one of them. He’d put the shotgun to the man’s head as he signed the papers, whining and pleading and peeing himself, and when the papers were in Cappy’s pocket, boom! another one bites the dust. The Mojave was littered with their bones.

  He’d killed them without a flicker of a doubt, without a shred of pity, and enjoyed the nightly reruns ...

  SOMETIME IN THE early morning, the Minnesota cold got to him, and he stirred in his sleep. Eventually he surfaced, groaned and rolled over, the images of California dying like a match flame in a breeze. He’d kicked off the crappy acrylon blankets, and the winter had snuck through the ill-fitting windows, into the bed. He’d unconsciously pulled himself into a fetal position, and now the muscles of his back and neck cramped up like fists.

  He groaned again and rolled over and straightened out, his back muscles aching, pulled the blankets up to his chin, and listened: too quiet. Probably snowing again. Snow muffled the sounds of the highway, of the neighbors. He caught sight of the alarm clock. Nine o’clock. He’d been asleep since six, after a three-day run on methamphetamine and maybe a little cocaine, and work; they were all mixed up in his mind, and he couldn’t remember.

  He was still tired. Didn’t want to get up, but he swung his feet over the side of the bed, found the pack of Camels, lit one in the dim light that came through the window shade. Sat and smoked it down to his fingers, stubbed it out and trudged to the bathroom, the old cold floorboards flexing under his feet, the room smelling of tobacco and crumbling plaster and peeling wallpaper.

  THE ONLY bathroom light was a single bulb with a pull string. Cappy pulled on it, and looked at his face in the medicine cabinet mirror. Picked up some new lines, he thought. He was developing a dusty look, with a slash from the corner of his nose down toward his chin. Didn’t bother him; he wasn’t long for this world.

  Today was his birthday, he thought. One more year and he could legally buy a drink.

  He was twenty years old, on this cold winter morning in St. Paul Park.

  AFTER COMING BACK to Minnesota, he’d stopped in his home-town, looked around. Nothing there for him. He looked so different than he had in junior high, that it wasn’t likely that even his father would recognize him.

  But one guy had. A kid he’d grown up with, named John Loew. Loew had come into the SuperAmerica as Cappy was walking out. Cappy had recognized him, but kept going, and then Loew had stopped and turned and said, “Cap? Is that you?”

  Cap turned and nodded. “How ya doin’, John.”

  “Hey, man ... you really ...”

  Cappy gave him the skeleton grin. “Yeah?”

  “... look different. Like a movie guy or something. Where’ve you been?”

  “You know. LA, San Francisco, West Coast.”

  A woman got out of a Corolla and came walking over and asked, “John?”

  Loew said, “Carol. This is Cap Garner. We grew up together, went to school together.”

  The woman was Cappy’s age, but he could tell she was also about eighteen years younger: a woman that nothing had ever happened to, a little heavy, but not too; a little blond, but not too; a little hot, but not too. She looked at Cappy with utter disdain and said, “Hi, there.”

  Cappy nodded, threw his leg over the BMW, and asked Loew, “So what’re you doing? Working?”

  “Going to Mankato in business administration. Finance.” He shrugged, as if apologizing. “Carol and I are engaged.”

  Cappy pulled his tanker goggles over his eyes and said, “Glad it’s working for you, John.”

  John said, “Yeah, well,” and stepped toward the store. “Anyway...”

  “Have a good day,” Cappy said.

  Riding away, he thought, Isn’t that just how it is? This guy grew up next door, he’s going to college, he’s got a blond chick, he’s gonna get married, he’s gonna have kids, and not a single fuckin’ thing will ever happen to him. Except that he’ll get married and have kids. For some reason, that pissed him off. Some people go to college, some people go to work throwing boxes at UPS.

  MINNESOTA WAS GRINDING him down. Before the last cold front came through, he’d taken the BMW for a ride down the highway, and in fifteen minutes, even wearing full leathers, fleece and a face mask, he’d been frozen to the bike like a tongue to a water pump.

  He needed to ride, he needed to do something, but he had no money. None. His life couldn’t much be distinguished from life in a dungeon: work, a space for food and drugs, sleep, and work some more—with nothing at the end of it.

  He smeared shaving cream on his face and thought of California; or maybe Florida. He’d never been to Florida. Had been told that it was lusher and harder than California—meth as opposed to cocaine—with lots more old people.

  And he thought again about the liquor store. Big liquor store in Wisconsin, next to a supermarket. He’d been in just before closing on a Friday night, nobody else in the store, and he’d paid $12.50 for a bottle of bourbon, fake ID ready to go.

  They never even asked: he looked that old. But more interesting was that when he’d paid with a fifty, the checkout man had lifted the cash tray to slip the bill beneath it, and there’d been at least twenty bills under there, all fifties and hundreds. With the five, tens and twenties in the top, there had to be two thousand dollars in the register.

  Enough to get to Florida. Enough to start, anyway.

  He caught his eyes in the mirror and thought, Stupid. Every asshole in the world who wanted money, the first thing they thought of was a liquor store at closing time. They probably had cameras, guns, alarms, who knew what?

  No liquor stores, Cappy. Have to think of something else.

  Some other job.

  He was staring at himself, thinking about the bed, when the phone rang.

  He picked it up, and Lyle Mack asked, “That you, Cappy?”

  CAPPY SAT in the back of Cherries and looked at Lyle Mack and said, “So that fuckin’ Shooter told you I kill people.”

  “He made it pretty clear. Didn’t exactly say the words,” Lyle Mack said.

  “That could get you locked away in California,” Cappy said. “Maybe get you the needle.”

  “That’s exactly the reason we have a problem with Shooter. He talks,” Lyle Mack said.

  Cappy, his voice flat: “Ten thousand dollars?”

  “Five thousand each.”

  “Then what?” Cappy asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can’t just leave them laying out there,” Cappy said. He’d had some experience with the disposal issue.

  “We’ll ... dump them somewhere.”

  Cap sat staring at Lyle Mack for a long time, his flat crazy-man stare, until Mack began to get nervous, then said, “Fifteen.”

  “Aw, man, we don’t have a lot of cash,” Lyle Mack said. “C’mon, Cappy, we’re asking you as a brother.” Lyle Mack had never contracted for a murder, and he was jumpy as hell. Joe Mack sat next to him and kept rubbing his face, as though he couldn’t believe it.

  “Fifteen is the brother price,” Cap said. “I need a new van.”

  “You can’t get a new van for fifteen,” Joe Mack said.

  “Well, it’s not a new-new van, it’s new for me,” Cap said.

  Joe Mack leaned forward. “Tell you what. I’ll sign my van over to you. It’s worth that, Blue Book. Perfect condition. Dodge Grand Caravan Cargo, three years old, good rubber, twenty-eight thousand actual. It’s got XM radio and a drop ramp for bikes, it’s got nav. It’d be perfect for you.”

  “How’s the tranny?”

  “The tranny’s perfect. Never been a glitch,” Joe Mack said.

>   “I gotta Dodge; it’s been some trouble,” Cappy said. But he was thinking: Florida.

  “Everything got some trouble. But in vans, the Dodges is the best,” Joe Mack said.

  Cappy stared at Joe Mack, then said, “I’d want to look it up in the Blue Book.”

  “Be my guest,” Joe Mack said.

  “And two grand in cash. I gotta eat, too.”

  Lyle Mack, staring into Cappy’s pale blue eyes, realized what an insane little motherfucker he really was.

  THEN THEY got practical, and Lyle Mack called Honey Bee on her cell phone: “You still at Home Depot?”

  “Just got back in my car.”

  “I thought of a couple more things we need,” Lyle Mack said.

  “Run back and get some of those contractor clean-up bags, okay? Like big garbage bags, but really big. And some Scrubbing Bubbles, and, uh, you know, some of those rubber kitchen gloves.”

  “So when am I the goddamn maid around here?”

  “Well, you’re right there at the store, goddamnit, Honey Bee ...”

  THEY’D SENT Cappy down the street to wait at the Log Cabin Inn, and picked him up after Honey Bee got back. Honey Bee would open the bar: “You didn’t start the wienies. They’re still gonna be cold when we open.”

  Lyle Mack shook his head. “Honey Bee, I’m just so ... busy. You know we’ve got some trouble. Help me out, here.”

  When Lyle had gone out the back, and Joe Mack was getting his coat on, he tried to cheer her up by squeezing her butt, and giving her a little leg hump, but she wasn’t having it: “Get out of here. Go get busy.”

  HONEY BEE had a horse ranch thirty miles south of St. Paul, though as ranches went, it was on the small side—forty acres. But Honey Bee liked it, and so did her three horses. The Macks were not horse persons themselves; their attitude was, if God had meant people to ride horses, He wouldn’t have invented the Fat Bob.

  They rode out in Joe Mack’s van, so Cappy could hear it run, with the Macks in the front seats, and Cappy on a backseat with a shotgun that he’d brought from home. Joe Mack said to his brother, “I totally know where you’re coming from, you know, with this thing—but I gotta say, I kind of like these guys, when they’re not being assholes.”

  “But they’re assholes most of the time,” Lyle Mack said. “Now look at this. We have a perfect job, big money, no trouble, and now what? Now we’re looking at a murder. I mean, fuck me. Murder? And they keep lettin’ you know about that eggplant that Shooter killed out in California. You can’t sit down and have a beer without them hinting around about it. It’s gonna be the same thing here.”

  “You’re right about that,” Cappy grunted. The Macks had told him about the bind they were in; not because they wanted to, but because he said he needed to know. “I didn’t know him but two minutes when he started ranking me about it.”

  “So we shouldn’t have used them,” Joe Mack said.

  “Well, you’re right. You know? You’re right,” Lyle Mack said. “We made a mistake. There they were, handy. I shoulda gone, it shoulda just been me and you and the doc, but you know I’m no goddamn good in the morning.”

  They both thought about that—and the fact that Lyle Mack was too chicken to have gone in—and then Lyle Mack added, “We made a mistake, and now they’re going to have to pay for it. I gotta say, it’s not fair, you know, but what’re we going to do? They’ll flat turn us in, if they get in a pinch.”

  “Bother you?” Joe Mack asked Cappy.

  Cappy shook his head. “Don’t bother me none, long as I get the van.”

  THEY RODE along in silence for a while, looking at the winter countryside, then Lyle Mack said, over his shoulder to Cappy, “One thing I gotta tell you. If they’re sitting on the couch in the front room, it’s a purple couch, we gotta get them off it. We can’t shoot them on that couch. Honey Bee would have a fit. We need to get them up on their feet.”

  “Not on the couch,” Cappy said.

  “It’s velour, and it’s brand-new,” Lyle Mack said. “If we do them on the couch, the couch is toast. She’d be really, really pissed. She just got it from someplace like Pottery Barn. One of those big-time places.”

  “Okay.”

  Joe Mack asked, “What do you think about the van? Pretty nice, huh?”

  “It’s okay,” Cappy conceded. He looked in the back. With one rear seat folded, he could get the BMW in there, no problem.

  They were coming up to the turnoff, and as they came down off the blacktop onto the gravel road, Lyle Mack said, “Okay, listen, I got an idea.”

  HONEY BEE’s house wasn’t much, an early twentieth-century clapboard farmhouse with a front porch that was no longer square to the rest of the structure, and a round gravel driveway big enough to circle a pickup with a two-horse trailer. The barn was newer, red metal, with a loft for hay. A detached garage was straight ahead, an exercise ring off to the left.

  They pulled in, and the Macks climbed out of the van, opened the side door and took out the big bag of Home Depot stuff. Instead of walking up to the house, they walked back to the barn, talking loudly. Lyle Mack slipped on what might have been a big puddle of frozen horse urine—it was yellow, anyway, and ice—and they went to the barn door and Lyle Mack went inside while Joe Mack waited outside. Joe Mack said to Lyle’s back, “I’m gonna be sick. I think we oughta call it off.”

  “Gone too far,” Lyle Mack said. “Just hold on. It’s your ass we’re trying to save.”

  A minute later, Joe Mack said, “Ah, shit, they’re coming,” and Lyle Mack said, “Uh-huh.”

  Outside, Joe Mack called, “Lyle’s looking at one of the horses. Honey Bee’s worried that one of them got something.”

  Lyle Mack heard a reply, couldn’t quite make it out, and then, closer, heard Shooter Chapman say, “Horse’s supposed to be good eatin.’ I saw on TV that the French eat ’em.”

  “Yeah, the fuckin’ French,” Joe Mack said, friendly. His face was white with the stress, and he could feel the words clogging in his throat.

  Then Haines said something and Lyle Mack didn’t understand quite what it was, just that Chapman and Haines were walking up. He stepped outside and saw the two men coming up to the van with its open door, his brother frozen like a statue.

  Haines glanced at the open van as he passed and said, “Hey...”

  Cappy was right there with the shotgun. He shot Haines in the face and, without looking or waiting or flinching, pumped once and shot Chapman.

  Both men went straight down. Cappy stepped out of the van, pumped again, stepped close, carefully, kicked Chapman’s foot, looked for a reaction, got none, kicked Haines. Then they all looked around, like they were sniffing the wind: looking for witnesses, listening for cars. Nothing.

  “They’re gone,” Cappy said. “No couch, no problem.”

  “Okay,” Lyle Mack said. His heart was beating so hard that he thought it might jump out of his chest. Chapman and Haines looked like big fat bloody dead dolls, crumpled on the beaten-down driveway snow. Shooter might have looked surprised, but the surprise part of his face was missing, so it was hard to tell. Mikey had a hand in his pocket and Lyle Mack could see the butt of a pistol in his fist. Joe was leaning against the barn, with a stream of spit streaming out of his mouth.

  “Look at this,” Lyle Mack said to Joe Mack. “They got guns. I bet the motherfuckers were going to kill us. Can you believe that? Can you believe it?”

  “Well, yeah,” Joe Mack said, spitting again. “They were probably thinking the same way we were.”

  They looked at the bodies for a few more seconds, and then Lyle Mack said, “Well, I’ll get the garbage bags. We won’t need the Scrubbing Bubbles. See if there’s a shovel in the barn, we should scrape up any ice that’s got blood on it.”

  Joe Mack went into the barn and found a No. 5 grain scoop, which would be okay for the snow, and scraped it away, though it was hard work; the blood just kept coming. Lyle fished the wallets out of the two men’s pockets, retrieve
d the money he’d given to Chapman, and passed it to Cappy. “Your two thousand. It’s my money, not theirs. I loaned it to them this morning.”

  Cappy nodded and took a drag on his Camel. Lyle said, “And don’t go throwing that Camel on the ground. You always see in cop shows where somebody finds a cigarette butt.”

  Cappy nodded again, and Joe and Lyle put on the gloves and together rolled the dead men into the contractor’s bags, while Cappy sat in the van door and watched. When they hoisted the bodies into the back of the van, thought Joe Mack, they looked exactly like dead men in garbage bags.

  “Don’t want to go driving around like this,” Cappy said.

  “No, we don’t,” Lyle Mack said. “I know a place we can dump them. I got lost one day, driving around. Way back in the sticks. Won’t find them until spring, or maybe never.”

  To his brother: “Joe Mack, you take their car, drop it off at the Target by their house.”

  They scraped up the last bit of blood, wiped the grain scoop with a horse towel, and threw the towel in another bag, along with the rubber gloves. “Burn that when we get back to the bar,” Lyle Mack said. “Take no chances.”

  “How far to the dump-off spot?” Cappy asked.

  “Eight or nine miles. Back road, nobody goes there. We can put them under this little bridge. Hardly have to get out of the van. No cops, no stops.”

  “What about the woman that saw me?” Joe Mack asked.

  “We gotta talk about that,” Lyle Mack said. He looked at Cappy.

  “What woman?” Cappy asked.

  3

  SAME TIME, SAME STATION, doing it all over again.

  Weather slept less well, with the anxiety of the prior day weighing her down. Again she got up in the dark, dressed, spoke quietly with Lucas, and went down to a quick breakfast and the car. Driving down the vacant night streets, to University, along University to the hospital complex. Nothing in her mind but the babies.