Storm Prey

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