Storm Prey

because there was no point of both of us getting in the shit. He said ‘go ahead.”’
    “Where are you?” Lucas said. “We’re coming to see you.”
    “I’m on my way to the bar. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
    Lucas got off the phone and told the chief that it’d be good to keep a car or two roaming around, but that he believed Joe Mack was gone.
     
     
    SHRAKE AND THE BACKUP COPS went to Joe Mack’s address, while Marcy and Lucas waited at the bar for Lyle Mack. While they waited, they pushed on Honey Bee.
    “When you came back there, you said to Joe Mack, ‘They were our friends,’ or something like that,” Lucas said to her. “It sounds like you thought Joe had something to do with them being dead.”
    Honey Bee had had a little time to think about it, and she said, “No, I don’t think Joe ... Listen, they were friends of mine. They were friends of Joe and Lyle. They came here every night, and when they had the money, they were good tippers. Good guys. I couldn’t believe those assholes didn’t tell me they were dead. Like they were nobodies. Like they didn’t care, it was like a bigger deal to pay the Budweiser guy.”
    “So why’d he run?” Marcy asked.
    “I don’t know—I don’t know what you guys said to him. You must’ve scared him,” she said. “Joe’s a good guy, but he’s not smart. Lyle’s always taken care of him. I think you must’ve said something that panicked him.”
    “We told him we thought he helped rob the hospital,” Lucas said.
    Honey Bee flipped her hands in the air. “Well, that would have done it. Listen, the one thing Joe knows for sure is that cops frame people. He says he was framed twice, already.”
    She’d thought about it, but she overdramatized her answers, giving them the odor of lies. Lucas smelled it, and so did Marcy.
    Lucas said, “As far as we know, there were no women involved in the robbery at the hospital. If you know something about that, and you’re lying to us, you could go to jail as an accessory after the fact to a triple murder. That’s thirty years, Honey Bee, and I’m not fooling around. This is a bad thing.”
    “I’m not lying,” she said, with her best earnest, honest face. But she was.
    Quick test: Lucas asked, “When did Joe get the haircut and shave?”
    She hadn’t seen it coming, and she said, “Uh . . .” and she looked from one of them to the other, and finally went with the truth. “Couple days ago, I guess. Listen, I don’t know why. He does that every once in a while.”
     
     
    LYLE MACK came steaming through the door, looked at the three of them and said, “What happened? What happened? What’d you say to Joe? He’s so scared he’s peeing his pants. For Christ’s sakes, Joe’s a little retarded. What’d you tell him?”
    Mack was scared. They all sat in the front of the bar, in the stink of the weenie machine, arguing about what Joe Mack was up to, and Lyle Mack insisted that his brother had nothing to do with any holdup. He rapped his knuckles on the table. “He doesn’t do that shit. We got a good business here. And Joe Mack is not a violent guy. He doesn’t like violence.”
    “Hey, we got his records,” Marcy said.
    “They don’t tell the whole story.”
    “Oh, horseshit,” Marcy said. “And we understand you’re a branch of eBay.”
    “Hey. That’s a lie. Anybody tell you that, send them to me. I’ll set them straight.”
    “So where’s he going?” Lucas asked. “Joe?”
    Lyle Mack shook his head: “I don’t know. LA, maybe. Mexico? He’s a good mechanic, I suppose he could head up to Alaska or Canada.”
    “Has he got a passport?”
    “Yup. He does. But he doesn’t carry it. And if you’ve got cops over at his apartment, then he’s not going to get it. But you know LA—if he wants to go to Mexico, he can. You can buy real passports on the street corner for a thousand bucks.”
    “What about Joe’s haircut and shave?” Lucas asked. “You must have asked him what all that was about.”
    “I don’t know what that was all about,” Lyle Mack said. “Time for a change, I guess.”
    “Right.”

    LUCAS TOOK a call bounced off the BCA office from Grace, the Mendota Heights chief of police.
    He said, “We got a call from a preschool teacher. One of the kids’ moms was supposed to pick her up two hours ago, and they haven’t been able to find her. Doesn’t answer her cell, nobody home. Supposed to be super-responsible ... and her house is three