Lyle Mack said, “I didn’t think of that.”
Joe Mack said, “You know, maybe we’re not smart enough to pull this off. Maybe we oughta run on down to Mexico for a couple years.”
Lyle Mack looked around at the bar: “But what’d we do with Cherries?”
Joe Mack said, “I don’t know. Once, you said, we maybe should sell it to Honey Bee. On paper. You know, to keep our names out of it. Maybe—”
“Aw, man. We gotta do better’n that.” Lyle cocked an ear to the front room, where “Long Haired Country Boy” was booming out of the jukebox. “How could we leave this?”
A SNOW FLURRY had just crossed the Mississippi when Virgil showed up. He got out of his truck and a squad car pulled to the side of the street and two cops rolled out, and Lucas stuck his head through the front door and yelled, “He’s good.”
The cops waved and moved on. Virgil, watching them go, said, “Heavy.”
Virgil was a tall man, nearly as tall as Lucas, but wiry, with shoulder-length blond hair like a surfer’s. Lucas, on the other hand, was heavy through the shoulders, and dark.
Virgil lifted a duffel bag out of the truck and came up, and Lucas stepped out on the porch. “They sent a guy after her on a Yamaha sport bike,” he said. “St. Paul found it ditched off Snelling Avenue. He picked her up right at the hospital, so they must have a spotter inside. He had a handgun that fires .410 shells. The idea was to pull up beside her and put the barrel one inch from the window and blow her out the other side of the car.”
“Who’s the owner of the bike?”
“A guy ... Dick Morris. St. Paul checked him out. He says the bike was stolen from his garage while he was at work, and the St. Paul guys believe him. He’s pretty straight, a business guy—he seemed pretty scared when he found out what was going on. He rides with a couple clubs, lots of people knew about his bike.”
“The shooter who came after Weather would have to be a good rider,” Virgil said. “Good rider with a good bike gun, who knew what he was doing.”
Lucas said, “I think so.”
“You had some trouble with the Seed,” Virgil said. “Weather was involved.”
“A long time ago,” Lucas said. “And this gun came out of California.”
“Still.”
Lucas thought about it, and then said, “It’s the robbery. I doubt they even know who she is. Still, could be a Seed guy with the gun. They’ve got some kind of deal with the Angels, they’ve been coming across the river.”
The Bad Seed was a Wisconsin club, originally out of Green Bay and Milwaukee; the Angels dominated the Twin Cities.
“All those guys are getting old, they’re merging,” Virgil said. “I’ve seen Banditos over on the West Side, riding with their colors.”
“Hmm. Don’t think we need to bother Weather about it,” Lucas said. And, “You got your gun?”
Virgil smiled. “I knew you were going to ask.” He patted his side. “Right here, boss. And I got a twelve-gauge in the truck. I’ll get it later.”
As they went back inside, Lucas asked, “You know what she did? After she saw the gun?”
“What?”
“Tried to run his ass down,” Lucas said.
“Semper fi,” Virgil said.
INSIDE, LUCAS introduced Virgil to Marcy Sherrill, who’d stopped to talk about the attempt on Weather. “She’s a deputy chief over in Minneapolis,” Lucas said.
They shook hands and Virgil said, “Yeah, we met a few years ago—the Yellow Peril thing,” Virgil said. “Don’t know if you remember. I was working with Jim Locke, before he retired.”
“I remember,” Marcy said. “Jeez, that must have been six or eight years ago.”
Lucas said, “I don’t remember—”
“I think that was after you got kicked off the force, and before you came back,” Marcy said. “Some asshole ...”
“Louis Barney,” Virgil said.
“Yeah—Louis X. Barney ... He stole a bunch of five-gallon cans of methanol from some race-car guy’s garage. He told the judge that he just thought it was alcohol. And he figures what the heck, the winos wouldn’t know any different. He blended it with pineapple juice and started selling it on the street. We had four people go blind, and two people die, before we caught him.”
Virgil: “Wonder if he’s out yet?”
“He got twenty years ... but I think that was under the old two-thirds rule ... so not yet, but he’s getting close.”
“Pretty stiff, for a semi-accident,” Lucas said.
“The judge didn’t believe him,” Marcy said. “Barney was a drunk himself, but he didn’t drink any of it.”
WEATHER CAME IN, carrying a coffeepot, followed by the housekeeper with a tray full of cookies, and Weather kissed Virgil on the forehead and messed up his hair, and said, “Your nose looks fine.” And to Marcy: “The last time I saw him, he had this big aluminum thing on his nose. From a fight.”
“I read about it,” Marcy said. “The buried car thing.”
“How you doin’?” Virgil asked Weather.
“I’ve been thinking about it, and thinking about it, and thinking about it,” Weather said. “You know what? I can’t think about it. I’ve got too much to think about already, with this operation. So I’m not going to pay any attention to it. I’m going to let you guys take care of me.”
“Good plan,” Marcy said. “If they come again, we’ll get one. Could break it for us.”
“They spotted her in the hospital. Somebody in the hospital set it up,” Lucas said.
“I think so,” Marcy said. “We’re putting hammerlocks on everybody. We’re pushing it—we’ve pulled people off about everything else.”
“So there’s no reason for me to jump in,” Lucas said.
She smiled at him. “Nope. No reason at all.”
As THEY were shutting down for the night, with the kids asleep and the housekeeper in her apartment, Weather already gone back to the bedroom, Virgil was jacking triple-ought shells into his twelve-gauge and he said to Lucas, “There is a good reason for you to jump in. You’re the second smartest cop in Minnesota. They can always use more of that.”
“I’m always a little sensitive around Marcy,” Lucas said. “She used to work for me, you know.”
Virgil snorted. He knew about their history.
“Hey...”
“The point remains,” Virgil said. “Never hurts to have a little more IQ on the job. Fortunately, you got me.”
IN THE WINTER, Weather slept in a variety of ankle-length flannel nightgowns, and on really cold nights, she wore socks, even though it was no colder in the bedroom on really cold nights than on halfway-cold nights. When Lucas got back to the bedroom, she was wearing a man’s wife-beater undershirt that clung to her body and was low-cut enough to show the rim of her nipples at the top; and white bikini underpants.
Lucas said, “Oh, God. I’m so tired, too.”
“Poor baby,” she said. “Let me help you with your shirt.”
Another thing that Lucas liked about Weather, right from the start, was that when it came to sex, she knew what she wanted, and how to get it, and one thing she didn’t want was excuses. So they rolled across the bed, talking and sometimes laughing, stroking this, pulling on that, and Weather wound up on top, straddling his hips, and said, like she might say to an overanxious horse, “Steady, boy,” and “Whoa, slow down,” and “Easy, there,” and she rode up and down and up and down, chewing her lower lip, still wearing the shirt, but now rolled up above her breasts, moving like she wanted to, until she got to the orgasm part, and then she made a sound like a tiny steam whistle from a miniature paddle-wheel boat, urgently signaling a need for more firewood, Ooo, Ooo, Ooo, Ooooooo ...
Then, after a few moments of lying with her head on his chest, with some aftershocks, she said, “Okay, go ahead. Pay no attention if I look at my watch.”
“You’re in no shape to read a watch, even if you were wearing one,” Lucas said, rolling her onto her
back. “Brace yourself, Bridget ...”
When they were done, she asked, “You think it’s a bad sign when you’re funny when you’re having sex?”
“Depends on what you’re laughing at,” Lucas said. “That wouldn’t apply to myself, of course.”
“I’m serious.”
“I’m too screwed to be serious. So, why don’t you shut up? Or, tell me something.”
“What?” In the dark, turning toward him.
“Are you really not scared?”
“Background scared. But I’m not going to dodge. I’m going to do what I do.”
“Not gonna fight it, not going to play us.”
“No. I’m going to think about the twins, I’m going to take care of them, I’m going to put everything else out of my mind, and I’m going to let you guys take care of me.”
CAPPY WAS asleep when he heard the knock on the door. He came awake in a rush, startled—nobody ever knocked for him, or even knew where he lived. It didn’t sound like a cop’s knock—or what he thought a cop’s knock would sound like. He looked at the clock: after eleven.
Another knock.
He rolled out of bed, went to the door, left the chain on, opened it, and peeked out. Joe Mack was standing in the hallway with a sack.
“Got a sack for you,” he said. More bourbon breath.
Cappy looked at him for a moment, then closed the door far enough to take off the chain, opened the door and backed up. Joe Mack stepped inside, looked like he might say something like, “Nice place,” but the place was such a shithole that the comment would have been absurd, so he swallowed it and instead said, “Here.”
He thrust the bag at Cappy, and Cappy took it, felt the weight, knew what it was.
He took it out: a Taurus Judge.
“Where’d you get it?”
“Up here, they got anything you want in the way of guns, if you look around. This was stole from over in Minneapolis. So it’s hot, but if the cops chase you down, you say you bought it from a guy on Hennepin Avenue, you know, for self-defense, because you live in such a dangerous place.”
Cappy nodded, asked, “You want a smoke?”
Joe said, “Nah, I gotta run. Got stuff to do.” He left, leaving behind a cloud of alcohol breath.
The boy had it bad, Cappy thought. He got back in bed with the gun, happy, turned the cylinder, popping out the shells, dropped them on the floor, slipped the gun under his pillow. He lay awake for a few minutes, listening to the zzzzz of the electric clock, then drifted away, the hard lump under his head, relaxed and comfortable as a woolly sheep.
4
JOE MACK LEANED close to Lyle Mack and muttered, “Will you look at the tits on the—”
“Shut up, for Christ’s sake. And stop fuckin’ staring at them,” Lyle Mack said. “You’ll freak them out.”
“They’re freakin’ me out.” And Joe Mack couldn’t stop staring.
Joe and Lyle Mack were out of their comfort zone, wandering through the University of Minnesota’s student union, baby blondes all over the place, sweaters and wool slacks, rosy cheeks. They were ... dewy, with tits. But it wasn’t just that: it was that there were so many of them.
Joe Mack had never done dewy. Ever. Or, as far as he could remember, ever been on a college campus.
LIKE TROLLS in a sorority house, the Macks traipsed through the first floor and down to the basement food court, where they found Barakat sitting in a corner, nursing a cappuccino. He was wearing a white dress shirt, buttoned to the top, and a scowl, and he shivered occasionally, though his forehead was shiny with sweat. An Arctic-level parka was sitting on a bench seat beside him.
Lyle Mack pulled up a chair and leaned forward and said, “This wasn’t necessary.”
Barakat leaned toward him and pitched his voice down, and snarled at them. “I’m going to tell you a one-minute story. My father, my family, is Christian, in Lebanon. This means nothing to you Americans, but to us, it meant that we had to struggle in a sea of Palestinians and Syrians who hate us. We had to defend ourselves.”
Lyle Mack said, “Yeah, yeah ...”
Barakat wagged a finger at him. “Listen: I know about your silly fucking motorcycle gangs. Your Seed. Sometimes you kill one person, or two persons, these Outlaws. When I was five years old, in Lebanon, there was fighting in Beirut. Our people took a company of Hezbollah, from the basement of a department store. They gave up, or we would have burned them to death with gasoline from a tank truck, so they gave up. Huh? You understand? They surrendered. They thought, a few days in a prison camp until a cease-fire. So we, the Christians, took them out three at a time, shot them in the heads, threw them in a hole. Sixteen men. I sat on my roof eating Armenian apricots and watched. My father, my uncles, my cousins. It was like directing traffic: stand over here, stand over there, bang-bang-bang. You know what I did? I ate the apricots and laughed.
“We are here in the United States now, and start businesses. This and that. Some hard businesses. I have called my cousins, and I have told them that I have some business trouble, and that if I disappear, or if I am killed, you will kill the brothers Joe Mack and Lyle Mack from Cherries Bar. You got that? They understand business trouble; and they will do it. I told them, be safe, do it any way you can, but if you can, make it hard for them. One of my uncles, Timor, claims he once got the entire skin off a Hezbollah fighter before the man died, using nothing but a straight razor as a skinning knife. I don’t know if I believe he succeeded, but I believe he tried to do it.”
They sat staring for a minute, then Barakat said, “I deeply hope you believe me, because it is true. Because you stupidly killed this man in the hospital, I think that you might try to eliminate me as a witness against you. Do not do it. I promise you, there are worse things than prison.”
Lyle Mack’s eyes were popping out. He said, “You’re telling us that somebody else knows about the job? Maybe a whole bunch of people?”
“No, no. They don’t know why they will kill you, only that they must,” Barakat said, shaking a finger at them. “For the family.”
“Ah, crap, Al, we weren’t gonna hurt you,” Lyle Mack said, leaning back in the booth, putting on his best Bible-salesman’s smile. “I mean, you’re in as deep as we are, so we don’t have to worry about you talking. If the cops crack this, we’d all go inside for the rest of our lives.”
“Yes. Well, I didn’t take the chance.” Barakat leaned forward again. “Now: I would not sell the merchandise here. In Minneapolis. The police will be looking for it everywhere, I am thinking.”
“Let us worry about that,” Lyle Mack said. “First of all, we’ve squirreled it away—”
“Squirreled? What is this?”
“We’ve hidden it. Really good. Second of all, we have clubs all over the country. We’ll repackage the good stuff in a couple months, when the heat’s died down. Move it along to three or four different places, tell them to take care when they push it out on the street. Nobody’ll know where it came from. It’s not a problem.”
Barakat stared at them for a moment, then leaned back, his eyes dark, and asked, “Where’s my payment?”
Lyle Mack tipped his head at Joe Mack, who glanced around, then produced what looked like a brown-bag lunch and pushed it across the table. Barakat hefted it and said, “That’s no kilo.”
“It’s a half,” Lyle Mack said. “We’ve got nothing so far, except some shit we’re afraid to move. Soon as we move it, you’ll get the other half.”
“The deal was—”
“The deal was that we’d hit the place, clean it out, start selling it two days later and pay you off,” Lyle Mack said. “But I don’t have thirty K sitting on a shelf, and this whole fucked-up guy, the guy who died, this has changed everything. Don’t worry: we want to keep you happy. But it’ll be a while. Maybe a couple months. No longer.”
“Two months,” Barakat said. “All right, two months.” He stuffed the bag in his parka pocket, then said, “Here is something else for you to th
ink about. Sometimes, you get hurt, you motorcycle people. And you do not want to go to the hospital, because then the police will know. I am one very good emergency room specialist. I can help you—and your friends, people you recommend—and nobody has to know about it. Think about that. I am of more value alive.”
“You’re really worried,” Lyle Mack said.
“Of course I’m worried,” Barakat said. “You killed this man out of stupidity. You could kill me out of stupidity. Or because you think you’re being smart. I don’t want your mistakes to kill me.”
“Don’t know if I’d care to get operated on by a guy with a fuckin’ orangutan on his back,” Joe Mack said.
Barakat’s eyes flicked to Lyle Mack, then back to Joe Mack. “Orangutan?”
“Really big monkey,” Joe Mack said.
Barakat shook his head: “What? Monkey?”
“Forget it,” Lyle Mack said. “It’s an old American joke.” He stood up, jerked a thumb at Joe Mack, who pushed away from the table and stood.
“See you around, Doc,” Joe Mack said. “Try to ... relax.”
“Wait, wait,” Barakat said. “What about the woman?”
“Just keep cool,” Joe Mack said. “We’re working on that.”
“But what happened? I haven’t heard anything,” Barakat said.
“You did just fine. The deal wasn’t quite right, and our man called it off,” Lyle Mack lied. “We’re thinking over some other possibilities. So stand by, and we’ll get back to you.”
“I don’t want to have anything to do with it, anymore. You people . . .” He flicked a hand that said, You people are flies.
Lyle Mack jabbed a finger at him: “You might have to. She got a good look at Joe. If they pull his picture, she could bite us on the ass. We need her tracked; we’ll get back to you on that.”
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