Storm Prey

Lucas said. “She’ll be over at the hospital every day. Marcy’s not getting anywhere inside the hospital. I might have to go over there with my nutcracker.”
    “I’ve done hospitals before,” Shrake said. “You know what the problem is? Doctors. No offense, you know, about Weather being a doctor ...”
    “S’okay.”
    “They’re so sure they know everything. They were the smartest kids in high school, which is how they got in premed, and they were the smartest guys in premed, which is how they got in med school, and then they get this big piece of paper that says, ‘Yup, you’re the smartest,’ and they truly believe that shit. They will tell you everything you need to know about your job. They never answer questions—they’ll tell you that you don’t need to know that answer. You need to know the answer to something else.”
    “Hey, I live with one,” Lucas said. “And she’s a surgeon. They’re worse than everybody but the shrinks.”
    “And you gotta shrink for your best friend . . .”
    “Almost intolerable,” Lucas said. “Goddamn Weather, if I didn’t love her, I’d choke the shit out of her about twice a day.”
    “To say nothing of your goofy daughter,” Shrake said. “No offense again, but she really does scare me. Sometimes, she acts like a forty-five-year-old narc.”
    Lucas laughed and said, “The sad thing is, I’ve never been happier.”
    “Well, that’s nice,” Shrake said. “I mean, that really is. That makes one.”
    “One what?”
    “Happy cop.”
     
     
    HOWARD LIVED in a rambler-style single-story house halfway down a hillside, brown fiberglass siding with a two-car garage on one end; bright light was shining through the three windows in the garage door. A pickup and an old Camry were parked in the driveway.
    Lucas looked at the dashboard clock: ten-forty-five. Not too late. Shrake had taken the pistol out of his pocket and put it back in its holster, and now took it back out and stuck it in the pocket. “Better safe,” he said.
    Lucas rang the doorbell, and a moment later a woman came to the door and peeked out behind a chain. “Who is it?”
    “We’re with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension ... state police,” Lucas said. “We’re talking to people who knew Mike Haines and Shooter Chapman.”
    “Oh . . . jeez. Just a minute.” She pushed the door closed and the chain rattled, and she said, “Ron’s in the shop. We thought somebody might come by.”
    “You’re Mrs. Howard?”
    “Yes. Donna.” She was using the female nicey-nice voice, submissive, scared by cops. She looked pleasant enough, a round woman with brown hair and dark eyes and a prominent mole by the corner of her mouth. Lucas smiled at her and stepped inside, carefully shuffled his feet on the mat inside the door and she said, “Oh, don’t worry about that. He’s this way . . .”
    He followed her through the small kitchen, past a dining table and through a garage door. The garage had been converted into a woodshop, with a table saw, band saw, drill press, and lathe fixed to the floor, and a long workbench with wood-cutting tools along the far wall. Howard was working over the lathe, wearing goggles and earmuffs; his back was turned to them. The air smelled of fresh-cut wood, and a stack of wooden bowls sat along one wall of the shop.
    Donna Howard flipped a switch on the wall, a quick on-and-off, and a light flickered and Howard backed away from the machine and turned around, saw them, hit a kill switch. He pulled off the goggles and headset as the machine wound down; he was holding a nasty-looking chisel. He saw them check it out and hastily put it aside. “Police?”
     
     
    THEY SAT in the Howards’ small living room. Howard started right out with an explanation of the burglary they’d been convicted of. “I hadn’t been in trouble for years, since I was a kid. But I gave those assholes twelve hundred dollars for the wood I needed, and they kept putting me off. If I don’t produce, I don’t eat. They wouldn’t give me the money back, either, said they’d already ordered the stuff and the supplier was having problems and all of that. Bullshit. So I made the mistake. Two mistakes—I took Donna with me.”
    “The judge knew all that, so he went easy,” Donna Howard said.
    “Did you ever get your money back?” Shrake asked.
    “Yeah ... but the lawyer cost us two thousand, and we were lucky to get off that easy. Tell you what, soon as it was settled, I put