Storm Prey

some bucks.”
    “I wish ...” Joe began. Then, “I’m not sure we oughta be doing this. This is like, remember that Walt Disney cartoon with the tar baby? It’s like we’re getting more stuck in the tar baby.”
    Lyle Mack took a quick circular pace, his jowls shaking, and he said, “Joe ... She saw ya, goddamnit. We gotta do something about it, while we got the chance.” He looked at Cappy: “By the way, I got a question. That goddamn shotgun, even cut down ... how you gonna manage that?”
    “Not using the shotgun,” Cappy said. He took a revolver from his pocket, wrapped in Saran Wrap, turned it sideways so the Macks could look at it. “Got it in Berdoo. Perfect bike gun. Can’t touch it, because I wiped it.”
    “What the hell is that?” Lyle Mack asked.
    “It’s the Judge,” Cappy said. “Three .410 shells with Four-O buckshot, that’s five pellets the size of a .38 in each shell. And two .45 Colts in the other two chambers. Gotta get close, but I won’t do it unless the barrel’s touching her window glass.”
    “Dude,” Lyle said, “you got the equipment.”
     
     
    As HE AND JOE went over to get the bike, Cappy thought about killing people for money. Well, what was the difference between that and killing a guy for his bike? Maybe that was when he crossed some kind of line—the first guy he killed, he did almost out of self-protection. Later on, he did it because it was interesting.
    He’d seen all kinds of killing on TV, ever since he could remember—crime movies and war movies, cop shows, people being killed every way you could think of. Machine-gunned and executed and shot with long-range rifles and stabbed and strangled and poisoned and electrocuted and beat with baseball bats, everything. Real airplanes flying into real buildings, guys blowing themselves up on the news.
    You’d always get some news chick telling you how bad you should feel about it, but Cappy didn’t feel much of anything, except interested, and neither, he thought, did the news chick. Or anybody else. It was entertainment, was what it was, and in real life, it was kind of more entertaining.
    Like riding a bike too fast: you didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. It was almost like he was killing people in a movie, except more. Like you see Bruce Willis cap somebody, that’s how much he felt it, times ten. Times a hundred. He liked rerunning it, when he’d pulled one off, but he liked rerunning Bruce Willis movies, too.
    The thing is, it was intense.
    But, Lyle Mack was right. How would you get in touch with the people who needed the work done? Maybe you could find some big Mafia guy and contract out for it. Have to think about it.
     
     
    “HERE WE GO,” Joe Mack said, as they turned down an alley. He pointed out the garage: “The white one with the red doors. I’ll drop you off right in front of it. Nobody can see us, unless they’re right in the alley. Got to get in and out quick, though.”
    Cappy nodded. “I can do that.” He reached under the seat and pulled out a Penney’s bag with the handgun in it. “See ya.”
    He seemed really calm, Joe Mack thought, as he dropped him. Joe Mack could hardly hold on to the steering wheel, and every time he closed his eyes, he saw the smiling faces of Mikey and Shooter, followed by a fade-in of the dead faces. It was creeping him out. He planned to drink a lot that night, so he’d get some sleep.
    In fact ...
    He fished a pint of bourbon out from under the seat and took a pull. Looked both ways for cops, and took another one.
     
     
    AT THREE O’CLOCK in the afternoon, the sun was already dipping toward the horizon. Weather came out of the parking garage, looked both ways, took a left, down toward the I-94 entrance. She’d take it only a mile or so to the Cretin Avenue exit, then head south.
    She was tired. She needed to get home and take a nap. The surgery she’d done hadn’t been difficult, but the stress around the operation was taking a toll that she really hadn’t expected. It wasn’t the work, it was the talk afterward. The fact was, they could go in and dissect the dura mater from Sara’s brain in a half hour or so; they could finish the bone cutting, take out the dura mater, leave it with Ellen, close up, and Ellen would be good.
    Sara would die. In medical papers, they would say that a patient was sacrificed so the other could live. Sacrificed. Nice. The idea of making that decision made her skin crawl. Separating the dura