Storm Prey

that light and I thought, Man, that’s skin,” Shrake said. “I kind of didn’t believe it, but I had to look.”
    “I’ll put you in for something. A medal, or something. Or we could get the guys to chip in, buy you one of those family packs of Cheetos.”
    “I’m countin’ on ya,” Shrake said.

    MELICEK CAME to the door in a pair of yellowed Jockey shorts, a brown T-shirt, and red velvet bedroom slippers. He was a short, fat man with a receding hairline and a brush mustache. A cigarette hung from his lower lip, and he was scratching his stomach. He looked at Lucas and Shrake and said, “Just what I needed. Makes my day complete.”
    He stepped back, a mute invitation, and Lucas followed him in, Shrake a step behind. Melicek had one room, plus a bathroom with an old cast-iron tub visible through an open door. A bed was stuck along one wall, an easy chair next to it, facing a flat-panel TV There were two kitchen chairs at a table next to a refrigerator; there was no stove, but a microwave sat on a sink counter. The place smelled like pizza, tobacco, marijuana, bananas, and wallpaper mold. A single window looked out over a porch roof to the street.
    “Mike Haines and Shooter Chapman,” Lucas said.
    “That figures. The dumb shits finally got themselves shot by somebody, huh?” He took the easy chair, and pointed the cops at the kitchen chairs.
    “Smoke a little dope, there, Mr. Melicek?” Shrake asked.
    “Yeah, but not enough to worry guys like you,” he said. “I don’t know anything about what Mike and Shooter were doing. I talked to them last week, we had a couple beers.”
    “You still run with the Seed?”
    “Not right at the moment. Me and my ex-wife used our home equity loan to buy new bikes. Then everything went in the toilet, and U.S. Bank got the house and the bikes, and my ex-best friend got the wife. Maybe U.S. Bank is starting a gang. They got enough bikes.”
    “What do you do for a living?” Shrake asked.
    Melicek snorted. “What does it look like? Nothin’. I was doing assembly until that shut down, then the unemployment ran out, so now I’m on welfare.”
    They thought about the perils of negotiating a capitalist economy for a moment, then Lucas said, “Three guys went into the University Hospitals and robbed the pharmacy, got away with maybe a half-million in drugs. Mike and Shooter were two of them. What we’re asking around is, who is smart enough to figure out how to do that, and also mean enough to shoot his own pals?”
    Melicek tilted his head and said, “The same guy who is smart enough to figure out I talked to you guys, and mean enough to come over here and kill my ass.”
    “We’re talking to a lot of people—in fact, we got your name from other members of the Seed, who said you were friendly with Haines and Chapman.”
    “Well, I didn’t do it,” Melicek said. “If I had a half-million in drugs, you think I’d live in a shithole like this for one more minute?”
    “Maybe ... if you were being smart about it,” Shrake said.
    “If I was that smart, I wouldn’t be living in a shithole like this in the first place,” Melicek said. He squinted at Lucas: “Who’d you talk to about me?”
    Lucas shook his head.
    “It was that fucker Lincoln, wasn’t it?”
    Lucas took out his notebook, wrote, “Lincoln,” and said, “Thank you.”
    “Hey, I didn’t tell you anything . . .”
    They pushed him, not getting much more than “Lincoln,” and finally Lucas asked, “What exactly is your relationship to the Macks?”
    “I’m one of their beer drinkers,” he said.
    “You think the Macks could have had anything to do with the robbery?”
    Melicek opened his mouth to answer, thought better of it, and shut his mouth again.
    “I take that as a big ‘yes,’” Lucas said.
    “I’m a little pissed about Mikey and Shooter. They weren’t bad guys, you know, under it all,” Melicek said. He was leading up to something.
    “Come on, spit it out,” Lucas said. “You know you want to.”
    “You know that picture the cops put out on the robbery? To the TV stations?” Melicek asked. “They say the witness saw him?”
    “Yeah?”
    “It sorta looks ... not exactly, but if you talked to them, you oughta know as good as I do ... it sorta looks like Joe Mack. At least, to me it does.”
    Shrake and Lucas looked at each other, then Lucas said, “The guy we met, who said he was Joe Mack, had a skinhead cut and a clean shave.”
    “What?”
    “Just