Storm Prey (13 page)

"So you wouldn't know what they were up to." Lucas let a little skepticism show in his voice.

"No, we really don't." They sat silently for a moment, then Howard said, "They were always trying to hustle something up. Usually, it was like buying stuff from drug guys up in Minneapolis. Stolen stuff, computers and cameras and stuff. About a million iPods. They'd sell them to high school kids for ten bucks each."

"They'd done some time for robbery . . ."

"Yeah, but they weren't any good at it," Howard said. "Fact is, Shooter was sort of a chicken, and Mikey was just dumb."

"Pulled off a pretty slick robbery up in the Cities," Shrake said. "We think they're the ones that knocked over that hospital pharmacy."

"Really?" Donna Howard looked surprised. "That doesn't sound like them. They were more the Saturday-night liquor store guys."

"Didn't a guy get killed?" Ron Howard asked.

"Yeah, they kicked a guy, and it turned out he was on some blood thinner because of his heart," Shrake said. "He bled to death internally. They got him to the emergency room, but the docs couldn't stop it."

"God, that's awful." Donna Howard put her knuckles to her teeth. "I can't believe they did that."

"Could have been accidental," Lucas said. "The guy tried to sneak out a cell phone, and they kicked him a couple times. But, you know, you're robbing a place, and somebody dies because of it, it's murder."

Ron Howard grunted: "I can believe they did that. Kicked the guy. That's just another screwup. I just can't believe they thought of it--holding up a hospital. How much did they get?"

Lucas said, "Nobody really knows. Street value, maybe anything up from half a million."

Howard laughed: "Man. Those guys were small-timers back in grade school. No way they pulled off a half-million-dollar robbery."

More questions, met with a general lack of information: the Howards, Lucas decided, really didn't know much about Chapman and Haines. When they ran out of questions, Howard asked one.

"Who told you about us? Had to be somebody at Cherries, right?"

"We talked to quite a few people, looked at some records and stuff, your name was in there," Lucas said.

Howard looked at him for a moment, then down at his knuckles, which showed a small, damp cut, the kind woodworkers got. He said, "I'll tell you what, Officer, you're bullshitting me, right? I mean, I haven't ridden with those guys for years, but here you are, real quick. Had to be Cherries."

Lucas shrugged. "What difference does it make?"

"It pisses me off," Howard said. "Those guys knew we'd gotten in trouble, so they sicced you on us. And they're making chumps out of you. Anybody who knew us, and knew those guys, knew we didn't have much to do with them. We're just old acquaintances. We'd talk to them, but it was all old-time stuff. Everybody knows I'm straight."

"Did you see the artist's sketch of what the pharmacy robber looked like? Should have been on the ten-o'clock news."

They both shook their heads. "Don't watch the news anymore. It's just too depressing."

"The third guy on the robbery, would have been a pal of Haines and Chapman. Big guy, lots of hair, beard."

"That's about ninety percent of the Seed, right there," Howard said.

Donna Howard asked, "It's not my place ... it wasn't the Macks, was it? The ones who gave you our name?"

"I really can't say, Mrs. Howard," Lucas said.

"Then I can't tell you what I was going to tell you," she said.

They all looked at each other, and Shrake started with, "Listen, there've been a bunch of murders, and you could get yourselves in serious shit--"

Lucas held up a hand, shutting him off. He said to Donna Howard, "The people who gave us your name said that if we let their name out, you'd tell the rest of the Seed members and that would be the end of them."

"Oh, bullshit," Ron Howard said. "We're not gonna get somebody killed because of this. Then we
would
be in trouble. All I want to do is keep the business going, and that's hard enough."

"Do not pass along what I'm going to tell you," Lucas said. "Or we'll be back in your faces."

"Who was it?" Donna asked.

"We spent some time interviewing the Macks, who ... described who was talking to whom last weekend."

"I knew it," Donna said to her husband. To Lucas: "It's the
Macks
who were closest to those two. The Macks. The word is, you steal something good around the Cities, the Macks will get rid of it for you. They're the whole ...
heart . . .
of everything that goes on there. If somebody at Cherries was in it with Shooter and Mikey, it was the Macks."

Ron Howard bobbed his head. "That's like it is," he said. "Shooter and Mikey practically lived at Cherries. And if somebody was stupid enough to kick a guy to death by accident, it probably was Mikey."

"And if you were looking for somebody who might dream up a deal like robbing a hospital, it'd be Lyle Mack," Donna Howard said. "He's always thought he was a big operator."

"How about Joe Mack?" Shrake asked.

"Joe ... is a little simple. He pretty much does what he's told. But he's not a mean guy. He wouldn't kick anybody to death," she said.

Now IT WAS LATE and bitterly cold and getting colder, but because Anthony Melicek lived only ten minutes from Lucas's house, across the river in Minneapolis, they decided to drop in, see what was what. See if another finger pointed at the Macks.

Melicek lived in an apartment in an old house not far from the Metrodome; the navigation system in the Lexus was pretty good, but the addresses were so cut up that Lucas took them down the street at ten miles an hour, looking for street numbers. They were getting close when Shrake said, suddenly, "Hey. Whoa. Stop. Back up."

"What?" Lucas looked over at him. Shrake was looking out the passenger-side window, back behind the truck.

"This guy we just passed. I want to look at him. He's right over there. Back up."

Lucas backed up a hundred feet, and Shrake popped the door and hurried across the street. There was little light, but Lucas saw him talking to a black man in what looked like jeans and a tight black jacket. There was a staggering tussle for a moment, and Lucas popped his door, ready to run over, but then Shrake yelled, "Open the back door. Open the back door."

He had the guy in an arm-bar and was hustling him across the street. As they came up, Lucas realized the man was not wearing a tight black jacket. He wasn't wearing anything at all above his waist.

"Jesus."

"Better get him to the ER," Shrake said. "He's fucked up."

Shrake was in the backseat with the man, who began shaking violently, and Lucas did a U-turn and Shrake took off his coat and put it on the man and said, "We need to move right along." And he said, "Sit up, take a deep breath, take a deep breath, come on, man, deep breath, now don't do that . . ."

"Ah, jeez, don't let him barf," Lucas said.

"Better hurry."

Hennepin General was ten or twelve blocks away, and Lucas ran all the lights going in, piled up to the ER and ran inside. A nurse looked up and asked, "What?" and Lucas said, "I'm with the BCA. We need a gurney in a hurry, we got a guy in bad shape out in my truck."

The ER people piled out and put the man on the gurney and a couple of docs came and took him away. Lucas left his name and office number, and told the nurse where he'd picked the guy up. Shrake added, "He's got some bad shit inside him. He didn't even know he wasn't wearing a coat."

THEY WERE BACK outside and Lucas said, "That's your good deed for the year."

"If he hadn't walked under that light ... he walked under 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 about bald," Lucas said.

"Then he got that way since the weekend," Melicek said. "Last time I saw him, he, well, he looked like that drawing."