Storm Prey

Ron’s, anyway. He’s on probation, some kind of thing with his old lady.”
    “You mean, he beat her up,” Lucas said.
    “No, no. I mean he and his old lady are on probation,” Lyle Mack said. “I’m not sure exactly what they did, but they might have been selling stuff.”
    “Stolen stuff.”
    “Maybe. If you tell anybody we told you this ...”
    “Who else did they hang with?”
    “Man, they hung with each other . . .”
     
     
    THEY HAD two names, and not much more; and assured the brothers that they would hang around in the parking lot, talking to customers coming and going, so that Melicek and Howard wouldn’t know where their names had come from.
    Lucas stood up, took a card out of his wallet, and dropped it on the desk. “If you hear anything, it would behoove you to call me. No motorcycle big-shot bullshit, burning the card or any of that; just a quiet call. Nobody will know, and it might be useful to you sometime, to have a guy you can call. If you know what I mean.”
     
     
     
     
     
     
    SHRAKE LED the way out, Lucas a step behind; when they’d gone through the door into the front, Lyle Mack said to Joe, “We’re in a lot of fuckin’ trouble, Joe.”
    Joe Mack said, “We oughta get out of here.”
    “Can’t,” Lyle Mack said. “If it was only a robbery, we might get out of town. Murder, they’d come after us. Come after you. We gotta find that chick and shut her up.”

    THERE WERE still fifteen or twenty people in the bar, but in clusters now, four and five together. From behind the bar, Lucas called, “Can I have your attention? Anybody here know Mikey Haines or Shooter Chapman?”
    Dead silence.
    “I know some of you must be their friends, if they had any friends,” Lucas said. “Somebody took them out and blew their faces mostly off, with a shotgun, and I would like any opinions anybody’s got about that.”
    More silence, then one voice, “We got no opinions.”
    Shrake said, “If you get home and find out you got an opinion, about who may be executing Seeds, you call the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and ask for Agent Shrake. S-h-r-a-k-e. Shrake.”
    “The reason you should do that is, being a tough guy is just fine, but if somebody’s shooting you in the back of the head with a shotgun, from an ambush, like they did with Shooter and Mikey, tough isn’t good enough,” Lucas said. “So you got any ideas, it might be your own life you’re saving.”
     
     
    THEY DID SPEND fifteen minutes in the parking lot, grabbing people as they came and went—mostly went—but got no more names.
     
     
    “Can’t talk to us in public,” Shrake said. “Gang law.”
    “Talk about the cold shoulder,” Lucas said. “My shoulder’s frozen all the way down to my ass.”
    “Let’s go. Look up those other two guys,” Shrake said. “We can come back if we need to.”
    Lucas looked back at the club. Lyle Mack was staring out a window at them, his head visible from the neck up, like a bust of Beethoven, or somebody.
    Tony Soprano, maybe.
     
     
    BACK IN THE CAR, Shrake got on his phone and got addresses for Anthony Melicek and Ron Howard, the two men named by Mack as friends of Chapman and Haines. Howard lived in Cottage Grove, a suburb to the southeast, and he was on probation, for theft. Melicek lived in the opposite direction, on the edge of downtown Minneapolis, not far from the Metrodome.
    “Howard,” Lucas said. He punched Howard’s address into the SUV’s navigation system, and they headed east. As they drove, Shrake called around until he found Howard’s probation officer, a woman named Melanie. They talked for a few minutes, and Shrake rang off.
    “She says Howard and his wife got caught stealing eight hundred and sixty board-feet of walnut and cherry from a wood specialty place in Shakopee. Got caught loading it onto their pickup. She says there was an argument about money he’d given them for some wood, and he told the cops he was just taking what he was owed. She said he was probably right about what he was owed, but he broke through a back door, so there it was. They both got probation. He had some arrests six or eight years back when he was running with the Seed, drugs, firearms, did some county-jail time over in Wisconsin. She says he’s not a problem.”
    “Good. I’m not in the mood for a big deal.”
    “Neither am I.” A minute later: “I wish Weather wasn’t involved. I mean ... you know.”
    “Yeah, and she won’t budge, either,”