Storm Prey

the word out on the Internet. Won’t be many guys going out there for their turnin’ wood, I can tell you.”
    Lucas said, “I understand you guys were talking to Shooter and Mike last week.”
    “Yeah. A friend called and told us about them being dead. He was down at the bar when you were there,” Donna Howard said. “I’ve never known anybody who was murdered.”
    “How well did you know them?”
    Howard shook his head. “I’ve known them since we were all kids, running around in the woods in Wisconsin. They never grew up. I rode with the Seed for a while, but you know, it gets to be a lot of bullshit. People hassling you, cops coming around. Some of the guys were enormous assholes. Ridin’ was fun, you know, impressing the squares and then ... you wonder why the hell you’re drunk all the time and living out of a shitty apartment. So I got a straight job and met Donna, and we eventually started the business. But we still go up to Cherries three or four times a year, talk with the older guys. That’s about it.”
    “So you wouldn’t know what they were up to.” Lucas let a little skepticism show in his voice.
    “No, we really don’t.” They sat silently for a moment, then Howard said, “They were always trying to hustle something up. Usually, it was like buying stuff from drug guys up in Minneapolis. Stolen stuff, computers and cameras and stuff. About a million iPods. They’d sell them to high school kids for ten bucks each.”
    “They’d done some time for robbery . . .”
    “Yeah, but they weren’t any good at it,” Howard said. “Fact is, Shooter was sort of a chicken, and Mikey was just dumb.”
    “Pulled off a pretty slick robbery up in the Cities,” Shrake said. “We think they’re the ones that knocked over that hospital pharmacy.”
    “Really?” Donna Howard looked surprised. “That doesn’t sound like them. They were more the Saturday-night liquor store guys.”
    “Didn’t a guy get killed?” Ron Howard asked.
    “Yeah, they kicked a guy, and it turned out he was on some blood thinner because of his heart,” Shrake said. “He bled to death internally. They got him to the emergency room, but the docs couldn’t stop it.”
    “God, that’s awful.” Donna Howard put her knuckles to her teeth. “I can’t believe they did that.”
    “Could have been accidental,” Lucas said. “The guy tried to sneak out a cell phone, and they kicked him a couple times. But, you know, you’re robbing a place, and somebody dies because of it, it’s murder.”
    Ron Howard grunted: “I can believe they did that. Kicked the guy. That’s just another screwup. I just can’t believe they thought of it—holding up a hospital. How much did they get?”
    Lucas said, “Nobody really knows. Street value, maybe anything up from half a million.”
    Howard laughed: “Man. Those guys were small-timers back in grade school. No way they pulled off a half-million-dollar robbery.”
    More questions, met with a general lack of information: the Howards, Lucas decided, really didn’t know much about Chapman and Haines. When they ran out of questions, Howard asked one.
    “Who told you about us? Had to be somebody at Cherries, right?”
    “We talked to quite a few people, looked at some records and stuff, your name was in there,” Lucas said.
    Howard looked at him for a moment, then down at his knuckles, which showed a small, damp cut, the kind woodworkers got. He said, “I’ll tell you what, Officer, you’re bullshitting me, right? I mean, I haven’t ridden with those guys for years, but here you are, real quick. Had to be Cherries.”
    Lucas shrugged. “What difference does it make?”
    “It pisses me off,” Howard said. “Those guys knew we’d gotten in trouble, so they sicced you on us. And they’re making chumps out of you. Anybody who knew us, and knew those guys, knew we didn’t have much to do with them. We’re just old acquaintances. We’d talk to them, but it was all old-time stuff. Everybody knows I’m straight.”
    “Did you see the artist’s sketch of what the pharmacy robber looked like? Should have been on the ten-o’clock news.”
    They both shook their heads. “Don’t watch the news anymore. It’s just too depressing.”
    “The third guy on the robbery, would have been a pal of Haines and Chapman. Big guy, lots of hair, beard.”
    “That’s about ninety percent of the Seed, right there,” Howard said.
    Donna Howard asked, “It’s not my place ... it