Storm Prey

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