Storm Prey

by Sandford, John

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “Jack him up,” Lucas said.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “I thought you might. Listen, we’re thinking we should leave a team behind, in case we stir something up. If you’ve got a guy...”

  THEY GOT LETTY off to school, and Sam went with the housekeeper to toddler playtime at the Episcopal Church, and Virgil, Lucas, Shrake, and Jenkins did the caravan down to the hospital. Jenkins would stay with Virgil and Weather, they decided, while Shrake and Lucas went over to Minneapolis, where they’d hook up with Marcy and one of her investigators, and Martin, the BCA gang investigator.

  Marcy showed up in her ass-busting outfit, lady-cop slacks with Spandex panels and shoes that looked like women’s flats, until a closer look revealed the Nike swoosh on the back and a wedge-shaped aluminum toe—pants and shoes that you could run and fight in. She had her gun clipped on her hip, under a green military-style sweater with nylon elbow patches, which complemented her dark hair and eyes.

  After everybody was introduced, with a certain amount of dog-sniffing—Lucas didn’t know Phil Dickens, the detective she’d brought along, and the Minneapolis cops hadn’t known Martin—they agreed that Lucas, Marcy, and Shrake would confront Joe Mack, while Dickens and Martin bracketed the front and back doors, close enough that they could be called for help, far enough away that they could watch the bar after Lucas, Marcy, and Shrake left, in case the Macks did something interesting ... like try to run.

  “We’re not expecting an arrest, unless he blurts something out,” Marcy said. “We’re hoping he reacts somehow. Does something that’ll give us something.”

  “Do we know where he is right now?” Shrake asked.

  “No. The first thing we need to do is nail down his location,” she said. “The bar doesn’t open until three o’clock, but Lucas gets the idea that he’s there quite a bit of the time. We check the bar first, then go on over to his apartment in Woodbury. The cops there know we might be coming.”

  THE SUN was climbing out of the deep well of winter, but it was still brutally cold. Old saying: As the days get longer, the cold gets stronger. Still, if Lucas pretended hard enough, he could smell the early edge of spring. Something, somewhere, was beginning to melt—probably, he thought, in Missouri. Just not here.

  The five of them went in four cars, Lucas and Shrake together, Marcy, Dickens, and Martin in separate cars, out of Minneapolis, through St. Paul, south on I-35E. They’d made the turn south when Lucas’s cell phone burped: Marcy, calling from her car.

  “What’s up?”

  “We got the lab report from your DNA people,” she said. “We got a match on Haines. He was the guy scratched by Peterson.”

  “Excellent. We’re tying it up,” Lucas said.

  “I’m going to use it on Mack,” she said.

  THE BAR in daylight looked like most crappy bars look in daylight: crappy. Purple paint and concrete block and dirty snow piles and neon signs; though it might be possible to believe that you were honky-tonkin’ if you only saw it at night; in daylight, it was clear that you were actually arm-pittin’.

  Martin and Dickens set up first, one watching the back of the bar, the other the front. Martin called Lucas and said Joe Mack’s van was parked in back, along with an SUV owned by a Harriet B. Brown and a fifteen-year-old Chevrolet owned by a guy named Lenert from Rochester.

  “I’m running Brown and we’re not coming up with much. She’s thirty-nine years old, blue eyes, a hundred twenty, five-six, lives down in Dakota County. Got a couple speeding tickets in three years. Lenert, I’ve got nothing.”

  Lucas passed the word to Marcy. “Good. Let’s go straight in.”

  They went straight in, parking in empty spaces on either side of the front door, and found the door open. A woman behind the bar called, “We’re not open yet,” and Marcy said, “We’re police. We’re here to talk to Joe Mack.”

  “Uh . . .” The woman’s eyes flicked toward the door to the back. Another man, who had been working on one of the game machines, stopped working to watch. Lucas asked, “Who are you?”

  He said, “Uh, Dan Lenert ... Mid-State Vending and Games.”

  “Okay.” Lucas turned back to the bartender. “We were here last night, we know the way.”

  Shrake asked, “Are you Harriet Brown?”

  “Honey Bee Brown,” she said. “I had my name changed. How’d you know that?”

  “Ran the plates on your car,” Shrake said. “You’re the bartender.”

  “Uh-huh. What’s going on?”

  Lucas was already behind the bar, headed for the door, Marcy a step behind him. “We’re investigating the Haines-Chapman murders.”

  “What?”

  No question that she was shocked. Lucas stopped and asked, “Did you know them well?”

  “Well, sure, but the last time I talked to them ... Christ, it was only a couple nights ago. They said they were going to Green Bay. They had a friend over there who had a job for them.”

  “Who was that?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. But they’re dead?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “God, the brothers are gonna be freaked,” she said.

  “They know,” Lucas said. “We told them last night.”

  “They know? They didn’t even tell me?”

  Lucas said, again, “I’m sorry.”

  Brown turned on her heel and pushed through the swinging door into the back, and Lucas looked at Shrake and Marcy, shrugged, and followed her.

  The back of the bar was cold, with the loading dock door open. A beer distributor’s truck was parked in the garage-door opening, and a heavyset man in a Budweiser shirt was moving kegs and cases in and out of the storage area on a dolly. They turned the corner, to the small office.

  The door was closed, but through the window they saw Joe Mack sitting inside, facing a skinhead on the other side of a desk. They were both looking up at Honey Bee Brown, who was screaming at Joe Mack. They could hear the screams, but couldn’t make out the words. Lucas said to Marcy, “That’s him behind the desk,” and he saw Mack look up, see them, and say to the skinhead, though he couldn’t hear the word, “Cops.”

  The skinhead turned to look at him—a prematurely bald twenty-five or so, Lucas thought, a white kid with ghetto eyes and work muscles, rather than gym muscles. His flat blue eyes looked at Lucas without fear or sympathy, and he shook his head and tapped some papers on the desk. Honey Bee started shouting again, but the skinhead said something that shut her up. She turned and stormed past them, tears running down her cheeks, saying, as she passed, “What a bunch of fuckin’ fuckers.”

  Marcy watched her go: “Must have one of those fuck-words-a-day calendars,” she said.

  Lucas knocked on the office door, and Joe Mack stood up and opened it.

  “We need to talk to you,” Lucas said. “Now.”

  “Just finishing up,” Joe Mack said. “I sold my van.”

  Lucas recognized the titling papers, and nodded. The skinhead asked Joe Mack, “We all done?”

  “Take it all down to the DMV, and it’s yours. Gotta get insurance right away, though. I’m calling my insurance company today and canceling mine.”

  “Do that, but I think my other insurance covers me for thirty days,” the skinhead said.

  “Don’t fuck it up. Throw some extra boxes if you got to,” Joe Mack said.

  The skinhead stood up and squeezed past Lucas. “Pardon me,” he said. His voice was toneless, nothing implied at all. He walked past the Budweiser guy, hopped off the ramp, jingling the keys Joe Mack had given him.

  “SO WHAT’S UP?” Joe Mack asked.

  The ramp was cold, so Lucas, Marcy, and Shrake squeezed into the small office and closed the door. Marcy took the visitor’s chair, while Lucas stood against the wall and Shrake against the door.

  Marcy identified herself, and then said, “You know these guys.” She waved at Lucas and Shrake. “So, Joe. We ta
lked to a bunch of people last night, and some lab people this morning, and a witness to the robbery at University Hospitals, and your name kept coming up. First of all, we identified Michael Haines with a DNA test as one of the men who robbed the hospital. We got a whole bunch of people to tell us that you and your brother are the people closest to Chapman and Haines, and that you and your brother are the most likely people around to move a big load of drugs out of the Cities down the Seed pipelines to the Angels on the West Coast or the Outlaws on the East Coast. And lastly, we’ve got a witness who saw you coming out of the parking garage at the hospitals, and who has identified you from a photo on your driver’s license. We know all about the haircut and the shave, and when you got them. We thought you might have something to say about that.”

  Joe Mack was staring at her with increasing fascination, and when she finished, sat with his mouth open for a few seconds, then said, “That’s bullshit.” But he said it with the peculiar downcast despondency that said he did do it; and that they all knew it.

  Lucas relaxed: almost done here. “Joe, this is a murder charge. But there’s a lot of other stuff going on. Somebody’s trying to kill the witness, but that won’t happen now. We’ve got her totally hidden and covered—and if you’re not in on that part, we can probably cut a deal with you. If you are in on that part... then, you know, you do the crime, you do the time.”

  There was a knock on the door, and Shrake leaned forward, away from the door, opened it a crack and said, “We’re having a private meeting here.” Honey Bee Brown got her face wedged in the crack of the door and said to Joe Mack, “You asshole, Shooter and Mikey are dead. What kind of bullshit deal is that? They were our friends, but you just don’t give a shit.” She started to cry.

  Joe Mack said to her, “Aw, Honey, I don’t know what the fuck is going on. These guys say Mike held up the hospital.”

  Shrake said, “Miss Brown, Honey Bee, we need to have some privacy here, we’re interviewing—”

  From behind them all, the Budweiser guy called, “Hey, Joe—you gotta sign the invoice. I’m running late.”

  Joe Mack said, “Oh, for Christ’s sakes,” and he said to Shrake and Lucas, “This’ll take one minute.” Honey Bee stepped back and Joe Mack stepped around the desk to where the Budweiser guy was waiting with a slate computer, and he said to Joe Mack, “Okay, we’ve got sixteen . . .”

  And Joe Mack was gone. He stepped past Lucas, cleared Shrake, and suddenly sprinted past the Budweiser guy through the crack of daylight between the back of the truck and the edge of the garage door and off the dock.

  The move was so unexpected that he was gone before the cops got out of the office, and then Lucas, going after him, crunched into Honey Bee and then the Budweiser guy, and Lucas and Honey Bee went down. Shrake, who was faster than Lucas anyway, was out the door, Marcy two steps behind him. Lucas scrambled to his feet and got through the door quick enough to see Joe Mack vault a fence that separated the back of the bar from a neighboring house, and disappear.

  Shrake was thirty or forty yards behind him, but running in boots and a heavy coat, and losing ground fast. Marcy was farther back. Shrake clambered over the fence and kept running, while Lucas swerved toward the street and ran past the surveillance car where Martin had just hit the ground and shouted, “Was that him?”

  “He’s running,” Lucas shouted. “Get in the car, get in the car . . .”

  As SOON AS the woman cop began to talk, Joe Mack began to panic, his heart up in his throat. They knew. They had a witness, they knew about the haircut, moving the drugs, the whole works. The minute he saw the daylight, the Budweiser guy standing there with the invoice in his hand, he bolted. He didn’t think about it, he ran.

  Joe Mack was fast. He’d been a sprinter in high school, and he wasn’t wearing heavy winter stuff—he was wearing the light jacket and gym shoes he wore in the back end of the bar, where it was on-and-off warm, with trucks coming and going.

  Now, on the run, he needed to get inside. If he didn’t, he’d freeze. He ran through a block of backyards, and then another, zigging and zagging around houses and garages and fences and parked boats and hedges, got tired, turned downhill to his left, made it across a street, and another one ... ran past a house, jumped a fence, collided with a birdfeeder, vaulted another fence in a right-angle turn, ran along a hedge and a garage.

  And there was Jill MacBride, getting into her minivan.

  Mack hit her in the back, and she screamed but he lifted her with brute strength across the driver’s seat, picked up the keys she’d used to open the van’s door, and shoved the keys in the ignition and slammed the door and screamed at her, “Shut up, shut up, shut up . . .” and backed out of the driveway. Ten seconds later, he was down the block and around the corner. In his rearview mirror, he saw a man sprint across the end of the street, running in the wrong direction.

  The woman was sobbing, and she cried, “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me,” and Joe Mack took a long breath and said, “I’m running from the cops. I’ve got a gun. Fuck with me and I’ll kill you in one second.” He didn’t have a gun, but he was scared enough that he sounded as though he might. MacBride stayed in the foot well.

  She was half upside down, her purse on the floor under Joe Mack’s feet. He picked it up, dug through it, stuck her wallet in his pocket. He’d need the money The van rolled up to a red light. He ignored it—no traffic coming—and made a left turn and headed west, then a right, and another left, and he was on Highway 13 headed west again, toward the airport.

  He had to think, but couldn’t seem to. He couldn’t go outside or he’d freeze. He saw the airport sign.

  THEY GOT a ticket and parked in the top of the parking structure. Joe Mack said, “Get out of there and get in the back.”

  MacBride clambered out of the foot well and between the two seats and into the back, and Joe Mack said, “Lay down,” and then, “I’m gonna go outside and make a call so you can’t hear it. If you stick your head up, or try to get out, I’ll chase you down and kill your ass. If you stay here, you’ll be okay. You understand what I’m telling you?”

  “Yes...”

  Joe Mack got out of the van and took his cell phone out of his pocket and called Lyle Mack. When Lyle answered, Joe said, “Jesus Christ, I’m in fuckin’ big trouble, man.”

  He told Lyle what had happened: “They know everything. They know about the haircut. They got me.”

  “So you kidnapped a fuckin’ woman, you fuckin’ idiot?” Lyle was screaming at him. “They might have been bullshitting you, but now they got you for kidnapping.”

  “I didn’t kidnap her. She’s right in the van, she’s right here, she’s fine, I’m gonna let her go,” Joe Mack said.

  “Don’t do a fuckin’ thing,” Lyle Mack said. “Stay right there and keep her with you. I’m gonna call Cappy and have him pick you up. Then I gotta call the cops.”

  “What for?”

  “To turn you in, you dumb shit. If I don’t turn you in, they’ll get me, too. I’ll call them and tell them you called me, but I won’t tell them where you’re at.”

  “What about me?”

  “Like you said the other day—you’re headed for Mexico. Or Panama. You’re gone, man.”

  LYLE MACK, hurrying, not thinking, dug his clean phone out of the pocket of his old army uniform in a back closet and called Caprice Garner. “I can do that, but it’ll cost you another five grand,” Cappy said, when Lyle Mack explained the situation. Cappy was out test-driving his new van.

  “Five grand. That’s fine. But I’m gonna have to owe it to you. We’ve got all that stuff we took out of the pharmacy, that’s worth way more than five grand. But you’ll have to be patient.”

  “Hey, I’ll wait,” Cappy said. “For a while, anyway.”

  “Deal,” Lyle Mack said. He put the clean phone in his pocket and called his lawyer on the house phone. They talked for two minutes, and then the lawyer said, “I don’t want to hear any more right now. Wait till the
thing has settled down, then come see me.”

  That didn’t help. He started to pace: he felt caged, like an animal. Joe Mack might have finished them off.

  JOE MACK sat in the van and talked with MacBride: “Look, I don’t want to hurt you, and I won’t. But the cops are ... framing me. I took off. I freaked out and grabbed you, which I know I shouldn’t have done, but now I’m in trouble for that.”

  “I won’t testify against you, if you let me go,” MacBride said.

  Joe Mack wasn’t the sharpest knife in the dishwasher, but he knew she was lying the moment the words were out of her mouth, and he almost laughed. “You’d turn me in the minute you got loose,” he said. “I know that, you know that ... when my buddy gets here, we’re heading for Canada. There’s good jobs up there, and they don’t care who you are. Just be a little bit patient, and then you can tell the cops whatever you want.”

  He told her about working in the bar, and how the cops were trying to frame him for holding up the hospital. “We did not do that,” he told her. “We did not. We got a good business, why’d we want to go around breaking into a hospital? But we’re in an unpopular group, you know? The Seed? Have you heard of us?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, we’re really called the Bad Seed of America, Inc. We’re a motorcycle club that got started in Milwaukee and Green Bay back, you know, a long time ago. My dad was a member . . .”

  He told her about riding with the Seed, and she told him about getting laid off by the West Metro Credit Union. “I’ve got a job interview tomorrow at Macy’s, in the credit department . . .” She had two daughters, she said, and was separated from her husband, but hoping to get back together after they worked out some issues. She was a sincere-sounding, dark-haired woman, and Joe Mack liked her well enough, though she was not really his style, too thin and small-breasted, with the beginnings of a satchel ass.