Storm Prey

Clark had given him up for a sentence reduction. “He’s not a popular guy. Every time Clark gets a new TV, somebody’d shoot it full of WD40 and it’d be ruined. The prison guys turned the cell around, so the set’s on the back wall, but he’s already lost three of them, and he’s got no money, no family or friends on the outside to get him one.”
    “He needs a TV,” Shrake said.
    “He’s pretty desperate,” Tote said. “The last time they had a lockdown, all he had in his cell was an old AARP magazine and a picture dictionary. Didn’t even have anything with which to ... entertain himself.”
    “No stroke books,” Shrake said.
     
     
    LUCAS WAS friendly with the head of the department of corrections, who hooked him up with an assistant warden at Stillwater.
    “If anybody sees him talking to you, he’ll have bigger problems than he already has,” the warden said. “But come on; I’ll figure out something.”
    Lucas and Del went together, a half-hour ride, checked in, and got with the assistant warden, whose name was Jon Orff. Orff came down to the entry hall to get them, led them back through a maze of offices.
    “I had the guy who’s in charge of disciplinary action pull him off the job,” Orff said. “He’s down in an isolation unit. Should be okay.”
    They rattled down through the prison, through security gates, to isolation, a bunch of human-sized metal lunch boxes. Orff had the guard pop the electronic lock and they went in. Clark, a heavy, soft-looking man with a small brown mustache, was lying on the bunk, feet crossed, staring at the ceiling. He sat up when they came in.
    “Now what?” he asked. He had one uncontrolled eye that would wander toward the outside edge of his eye socket, then pop back to the center.
    “We’re cops,” Lucas said. “We need to talk to you about some friends of yours.”
    “Ah, man, they’re gonna break my arms out there,” he said.
    “That’s why we were careful about putting you in here. And you’ll stay for a couple days,” Orff said.
    “What do I get?” Clark asked. His eye wandered off.
    “I’ll leave two hundred fifty dollars with Jon, earmarked for a TV,” Lucas said.
    Clark brightened, but then tried to frown. “That’s it?”
    “That’s it,” Lucas said. “We’re not asking you to talk about anybody in here. We want to know about the Mack brothers.”
    “I’m gonna have to have something more,” Clark said.
    “There is no more,” Del said. “We’re buying this TV out of our own pockets. The courts aren’t involved, the prosecutors, nobody. We can’t do a thing for you, except the TV”
    “How about some lunch money, some—”
    “Nothing,” Lucas said. He looked at his watch. “If you pick out a cheap TV, you can have the rest of the two-fifty. Start talking, or we start walking. We don’t have time to screw around.”
    Clark scratched his mustache, arched his eyebrows, and said, “Be a hardass. Okay. I don’t know what I can tell you ...”
    “How well do you know the Macks?”
    “Pretty good. We used to hang together, years ago. When they were just getting started with Cherries. I’d still go by a couple nights a week, when I was in the Cities.”
    “Joe Mack is on the run, on a kidnap-murder,” Del said. “Who’d put him up? Who’d hide him?”
    “You know about his dad over in Wisconsin ...”
    “Yeah, Ike. We’re headed that way.”
    “You know ... murder-kidnap doesn’t sound like Joe. Was he high on something?”
    “Not as far as we know. He did it cold—strangled a woman. Mother of two little daughters.”
    “Jeez. That really doesn’t sound like Joe. You sure you got the right guy?”
    “Yes. He flipped out,” Lucas said. “Look, you haven’t earned a TV set yet.”
    “A guy named Phil Lighter, who lives west of here, somewhere,” Clark said. “West of Stillwater. He drives for a limo service over in Minneapolis.”
    “How are they connected?” Del asked.
    “Old friends. Go back to school. This one time, some school-kids found a dead wolf with his tail cut off, and they called the game wardens, and somebody said Phil had been driving round with a bushy tail on his car, and they went looking for him,” Clark said. His eye wandered off, he blinked, and it popped back. “The story was, Phil went down and hid out with Joe for the rest of the winter and spring. By the summer, when he went back home, the wardens, you know, they’d given it up. They didn’t have any real