Storm Prey

took a pistol out of his belt holster and put it in his side coat pocket. “Joe and Lyle,” he said.
    “Watch your back,” Lucas said.
    They got out, crunched around the bar to the front door. The air smelled of barbeque and auto exhaust from the highway, and they could hear the thump of a country song. Cold; lots of stars, but cold. Shrake said, “‘Bubba Shot the Jukebox.”’
    “Huh?”
    “That song. Mark Chesnutt.” He pulled the door open and held it, and Lucas led the way in.
    Just a run-down bar-type bar; fifteen booths and a dozen tables, a bar with a few stools, a jukebox, the odor of snowmelt and wet wool and beer and barbeque beef and tacos, a whiff of illegal cigarette smoke. Two waitresses, both with push-up bras under T-shirts—one of Barack Obama’s face done up as the Joker in the Batman movie, the other with the slogan “Ride It Like You Stole It”—were working the booths. A redheaded female bartender in a frilly white blouse was talking to a big man hunched over the bar.
    Lucas and Shrake didn’t look like the rest of the clientele. They had no facial hair, and they were wearing white-collar-worker winter coats, unbuttoned; like, unbuttoned so they could get at a gun. Every other male had some kind of hair on his face, and a parka hanging off a hook at the end of his booth. Talk dwindled as Lucas led the way to the bar, Shrake a couple of steps behind.
    “We’re with the state police,” Lucas said to the bartender. “We need to talk to the Mack brothers.”
    The bartender looked at the clock, then shook her head. “You missed them. They left here half an hour ago.”
    “I wonder why they left their cars in the parking lot?” Lucas asked. He leaned across the bar. “Go get them. And mention that we’ve blocked their cars in. And if we don’t talk to them now, we’ll talk to them downtown. This is just a friendly visit, but it could get pretty fuckin’ unfriendly if they want it that way.”
    She looked at Lucas for a minute, then at Shrake, said, “Asshole,” dropped her wet bar towel on Lucas’s hand, turned and walked through a door into the back.
    Lucas wiped his hand on his pant leg and said to a waitress, “Nice place.”
    She ignored him.
    The big man whom the bartender had been talking to asked, “What’s up?”
    “You know Mikey Haines or Shooter Chapman?” Lucas asked.
    “Maybe. I remember the names. Sort of. What’d they do?”
    “They got themselves shot in the head with a shotgun,” Lucas said. “Found the bodies this morning.”
    The big man’s face pulled together. “Are you shittin’ me?”
    “Do I look like I’m shittin’ you?”
    “Didn’t see anything on TV,” he said.
    “Didn’t make the evening news, but it’ll be on at ten,” Lucas said. He looked at a television set in the corner, which was showing a hockey game. “Took a while to identify them.”
    The big man finished his beer in one gulp, wiped his mouth on his sweatshirt sleeve, and said, “I gotta get out of here.”
    “Why?”
    “Look, I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’,” he said. “I really don’t. But if somebody’s startin’ a war, I don’t want to be sittin’ here suckin’ on a Budweiser.”
    Two more guys got out of a booth, pulling their coats on as they headed for the door. Shrake put out a hand. “Friends of Haines and Chapman?”
    “Never heard of them,” one said, and they were gone.
     
     
    A SHORT MAN, whom Lucas recognized as Lyle Mack, followed the bartender out of the back, an aggrieved look on his face. “Now what?”
    “We’re investigating the murders of Shooter Chapman and Mikey Haines,” Lucas said.
    Mack registered what looked everything in the world like shock. The bartender, eyes wide, put both hands to the sides of her face, her mouth open. Her lips working, no words coming out. If they were faking it, Lucas thought, they deserved Oscars.
    “What?” Mack got the first response out.
    “Is your brother around?” Lucas asked.
    “He’s in the can ... Uh, shit, come on back. We can talk in the office.”
    He turned and went through the door, heading into the back. Lucas and Shrake walked around the end of the bar past the bartender, who asked, “How were they killed? Are you sure they were murdered?”
    “They were shot with a shotgun and put in garbage bags and thrown under a bridge,” Shrake said. “If it wasn’t murder, it was a really weird accident.”
    They went through the door behind the bar, heard Lyle