Storm Prey

said. “As long as you don’t let the handle fly off, you’re perfectly safe.”
    “Safe.”
    “Perfectly. When you throw it, throw it like one of your baseball players.”
    They walked to the ice together. Barakat stopped at the edge, and Cappy asked, “Won’t the water put it out?”
    “I don’t think so. It’s not like a match.”
    They both looked at the grenade, which Barakat said looked like a pomegranate, but Cappy didn’t know what a pomegranate was, so they agreed on tomato, and Cappy said, “Pull the pin ...”
    “Throw the handle and everything,” Barakat said. “Like a baseball.”
    “All right. Here goes.” Cappy gripped the grenade around the handle and yanked the pin out. Stood there for a moment.
    Barakat said, “Throw it. Throw it.”
    Cappy threw it, but it was heavier than he thought, hit the edge of the ice, skidded, and slipped over the edge into the water. Barakat started running away, and he called, “Run.”
    Cappy was running when the grenade blew. It wasn’t too loud, but loud enough, and kicked up a twenty-foot plume of water. “Jesus,” Cappy shouted. “Let’s get the fuck outa here.”
    Laughing, they ran back to the car and drove away.
     
     
    LATER, AT BARAKAT’S HOUSE, they were playing basketball, not because they wanted to, but because they couldn’t help it. Too much cocaine: too cold to go out. Plus, a basketball game on TV, the volume on 84, and the Eagles on the iTunes, volume at 11. The ball was a wad of two sheets of typing paper, the basket was purely virtual—a blank spot above a door. The idea was to hit the blank spot with a shot, which was too easy unless they stayed right in each other’s faces, and after a couple of points, it turned into war, a raucous fight to get the paper wad in the air, the two of them tumbling over chairs, tables, an ottoman, Cappy blowing a nosebleed, spraying blood around the room, Barakat driving down the lane between the couch and an easy chair ...
    When they quit, Cappy was leading 18 to 14, but he collapsed first, flat on the carpet, and groaned, and laughed, and said, “I’m fucked,” and he also thought it might have been the best twenty minutes of his life, except for those nights roaring up the 15; the best night with somebody.
    Barakat said, breathing hard, “I will tell you something, Cappy. This is serious. I know how I can get out from all this police business.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yes. I thought of it now, one minute ago. There is this man, from my town in Lebanon, his name is Shaheen.”
    “Shaheen.”
    “Shaheen. He is nothing, but he thinks he is a big man. He is another doctor, but he is not so much. But.” His heart was pounding from the game, and the cocaine, and he stopped to take a half-dozen deep breaths.
    “But,” Cappy said, prompting him.
    “Shaheen has an accent. More accent than I. And he is nothing. I am thinking, if Shaheen dies, and if in his room there are some drugs from the hospital, what do we think?”
    “We think he is the man the cops are looking for, inside?”
    “That’s what we think,” Barakat said.
    They breathed together for a while, then Barakat asked, “You have a girlfriend?”
    “No. Nope. Not so much.”
    “Are you a virgin?”
    “Nope. ’Course not.”
    “Hah. I know a place in Minneapolis,” Barakat said. “These girls.”
    Cappy rolled up on his side. “Hookers?”
    “That’s too bad,” Barakat laughed. “One of them, she told me that she was a therapist.”
    “I don’t know what that is, exactly,” Cappy said.
    “Like a doctor ... like a psychiatrist. You know, to give you mental help.”
    “I could use some mental help.”
    “These girls, they like cocaine. They like amphetamine. They like marijuana, but we don’t have marijuana. They like money.”
    “Don’t have much money,” Cappy said.
    “There is this American song,” Barakat said. “I don’t know it, but one part says, ‘The candy man don’t pay for pussy.”’
    “Yeah?”
    “We got some candy,” Barakat said. He staggered to his feet. “We got lots of candy.”
    “What about Shaheen?” Cappy asked.
    “Girls first. Then Shaheen,” Barakat said.
     
     
    CAPRICE GARNER’S old man had beat him like a bass drum from the time he was a baby until he was fourteen, when he ran to California, thinking to become a beach bum or a movie star. He got as far as Bakersfield and a job as a roofer, a skinny kid with a thousand-yard stare and bad scars on his face, back, and