Storm Prey

halfway there. We gotta be in Brownsville tomorrow.”
    “Got to go back,” Joe Mack said. “I got business I gotta do.”
    “Man, the cops are looking for you all over.”
    “Eddie, goddamnit, I know who done it. If they’re dead, I know who done it.”
    Eddie exhaled, then said, “Look, do me a favor. Throw that fuckin’ phone out the window. We can use mine. We can get another one at Wal-Mart ... but throw it out the window before somebody pulls us over and shoots our asses.”
     
     
    JENKINS CAME IN from the front room: “Phone company says it came out of a cell on the Kansas Turnpike north of El Dorado ... so he’s still headed south, and pretty fast.”
    “Need to figure out where he got a car,” Lucas said. “We saw him selling his van to that skinhead. He must’ve had a way to get another car. We need to run it down.”
    “That bartender ... Honey Bee? She seemed pretty tight with the brothers,” Jenkins said. “Why don’t I pick her up, see what she has to say?”
    “Good idea,” Lucas said. “I’ll come with you.”
    “You know where you’re going?” Marcy asked. “And how’ll I get back to my car?”
    “Shrake can take you. And Honey Bee—there’ve gotta be employee records here somewhere, with her address,” Lucas said, looking around the office. “The thing is, we’ve got to stash her somewhere. If she knows anything, this guy, or these guys, will think about it, and go after her.”
     
     
    ON THE WAY SOUTH, to Honey Bee’s house, Lucas called Virgil at the hospital and told him what had happened, and about the powder on Lyle Mack’s body.
    “You think our guy at the hospital is taking out witnesses?” Virgil asked.
    “Don’t know. But we need to find him.”
    “We got nothing to work with, except that accent thing,” Virgil said. “I’m thinking about it, but I got nothing right now.”
    “How about the kids? Are they working?”
    “They’re meeting now. We’ll find out in a few minutes.”
     
     
    HONEY BEE WAS SHOVELING horseshit when the cops arrived. She heard the car, looked out through the crack between the door and the jamb, and saw the dark-haired detective, the one who’d been questioning Joe when he ran, walking toward her front door. He stopped, stooped, picked something up, looked at it, and put it in his pocket. What?
    For one second, she thought about hiding; or running: she had an image of herself riding across the back pasture and into the trees. A dream. Stupid.
    They’d be coming, and she licked her lips, and said to herself, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything.” Should she smile at them? Or look scared?
    She took a breath, saw the dark-haired man knocking on the door, took another breath and pushed open the barn door and called, “Hello?”
     
     
    HONEY BEE CAME walking across the driveway with a guilty look: that is, her face seemed to be searching for an appropriate expression, and not finding it. She was wearing a torn nylon parka, knee-high green-rubber barn boots, and rubber gloves, and said, “I was shoveling ... manure.”
    “I do that a lot,” Jenkins said.
    Lucas introduced himself and Jenkins, again, and then said, “I’m afraid we’ve got some fairly harsh news.”
    Her mouth dropped open, and she said, faintly, “Joe?”
    Lucas shook his head and said, “I’m sorry, but Lyle Mack was killed last night.”
    She froze, then slowly lifted her hands to the sides of her head, then broke and screamed, “Lyle? Lyle died? Oh, God ...” She sank to the ice-covered ground and began sobbing, and Lucas squatted next to her and said, “We know you were close friends. But we need to get you inside, now, and we need to talk about this. We think there are some reasons for you to be worried.”
    He wasn’t sure she’d heard him, or understood him. She continued sobbing, then looked up and cried, “You’re sure? Lyle?”
    Lucas said, “Yeah.” His eyes drifted away from her, and he picked up several pieces of straw from the ice, twirled them in his fingers, and put them in his pocket. “Yeah, it’s him.”
     
     
    THEY GOT her inside, and somewhere along the way she stuttered, “We thought we might get married someday,” and “Was it a heart attack? He always ate those goddamned hot fudge sundaes.”
    They sat her in the kitchen and Jenkins asked if he could make her some coffee or tea, and she said yes, and Jenkins got cups and Folgers instant and stuck them in the