Storm Prey

by Sandford, John

  So Arnold parked the car in a hurry, hustled inside, put on his insulated hunting boots and cold-weather hunting jacket, opened the gun safe and got out the Savage .223 with the nine-power variable scope. Back outside, he headed straight down the driveway, across the road, across Dornblicker’s field, over a hump and down toward the creek. The land sort of swole up, as Dornblicker said, before it dropped down to the creek, and the swole covered Arnold’s approach.

  He crawled the last few yards on his elbows and thighs, slithering over the snow. At the top, he lay still for a minute, then two, then carefully, slowly, pushed up. Four coyotes down by the creek; cold breeze in his face, so they couldn’t smell him. Maybe they found a roadkill deer, Arnold thought.

  He pushed the rifle forward. He was 130 yards out, but the coyotes were big animals compared to woodchucks. He eased off the safety, picked out the biggest mutt, let out a breath, squeezed ...

  BAP! The shot echoed across the freezing winter countryside, and three of the coyotes broke for the trees. One of them jumped, and fell.

  Arnold worked the bolt action, watching the tree line, looking for a second shot, but the coyotes were gone. He stood up, slung the gun over his shoulder, and walked down through the crunchy snow to look at the dead one.

  Thirty feet out, he saw the garbage bags and thought, Goddamnit. Every once in a while, somebody who didn’t want to pay garbage fees would throw sacks of garbage and trash in the roadside ditches. Half the time, it was full of hazardous waste—paint cans, old TVs, insecticide. Stuff you had to pay to get rid of.

  Ten feet out, as he was looking at the dead coyote, the muzzle of his gun on the mutt’s head, he saw the shoe.

  And then, through a hole in the second garbage bag, a single, frozen, blue eye, wide open.

  LUCAS WAS SITTING in the hospital cafeteria, reduced to reading a tattered copy of The Onion, nearly delirious with boredom, when, at three o’clock, Marcy Sherrill called and said, “I’m having carrot sticks and low-fat yogurt for my afternoon snack.”

  “I’m proud of you,” Lucas said. “Can I hang up now?”

  “No. I’ve got something that might interest you, out of Dakota County. A farmer down there found a couple fresh bodies in garbage bags under a bridge. Their wallets were gone, but one of them had an envelope in his pocket, a gas bill, with his name on it. Charles Chapman, aka ‘Shooter’ to his pals in the Seed. The Dakota deputies ID’d the other one as Michael Haines, Chapman’s housemate. Both of them are on the computer, both of them are members of the Seed. Both of them were wearing jeans, biker boots, and tan Carhartt work jackets.”

  Lucas hunched over the table, and Jenkins, across the table, perked up. “Man ... that’s interesting.”

  “They took the bodies up to St. Paul, and we called an ME’s investigator and asked him to take a peek at their legs. Their arms and faces had been ripped up by coyotes, but their legs were okay. Haines has three scratches down the back of his left leg, just above his Achilles tendon. They look like fingernail scratches.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Lucas said. “I’ll get Weather home, then I’ll head over to the office and talk to the gang guys. Goddamn, this could break it.”

  “But if two out of the three are dead . . .”

  “The other one, the one still alive, is a smart guy. He had to get rid of the other two for security reasons, after Peterson died. Maybe the smart guy knew what it meant when Haines got scratched. The assholes are getting onto DNA.”

  “The ME’s sending DNA samples over to your lab, if we could get them to hurry it up a little,” Marcy said. “The samples from Peterson’s fingernails are already there.”

  “Well, you know, they keep telling me that chemistry is chemistry, but I’ll call them,” Lucas said. “I’ll tell you what: shutting this down would be a load off my mind.”

  “I think we can shut it down,” Marcy said. She leaned on the we, meaning Minneapolis.

  “I’m not going to bullshit you, Marcy. We’ve got the gang guys and the files,” Lucas said. “I’m going to take a look, see what’s what, and go talk to whoever I need to talk to. This is my wife they’re screwing with.”

  Long silence. “Take it easy. Talk to me.”

  “You know me,” Lucas said.

  WEATHER HAD REOPENED the sutures in the twins’ heads, and the neurosurgeons got back to work, slowly, millimeter by millimeter, splitting the dura mater into separate sheets. By two in the afternoon, they were halfway done.

  “We’re showing some heart,” the anesthesiologist said.

  Maret stopped and peered at Sara.

  “Not Sara. It’s Ellen,” the anesthesiologist said.

  They got Seitz, the cardiologist, in. “Her blood pressure is too low,” he said, looking at the monitors. “Too low ... goddamn it, she’s gonna arrest.”

  Then things got quick: Seitz put some chemicals into her, steadying her heart, and avoided arrest, but then Sara started looking shaky.

  Seitz: “You’ve got to get out now. We’ve got to get her blood pressure up, but we can’t let Sara’s get too high. We need to get them in the ICU again.”

  Maret said, “If we could get another hour or two ...”

  The cardiologist shook his head. “We’d lose one or the other. They can’t tolerate any more of this.”

  “Damn. Everything else is going so well . . .” Maret said. He looked at a clock, then up at the observation wall.

  “Dr. Karkinnen ... how long will it take you to close?”

  Weather was in the front row, Jenkins two rows behind her. “Half hour.”

  “Scrub up, and we’ll back out.”

  THE BABIES looked like little pale meat loaves under her bloody gloves, faceless, masked and taped, the edges of the skin on their head drying and raggedy now, their personalities submerged. At times, it was like working on a couple of logs; and then they’d come back, and be children again. She moved fast, with Maret leaning on her elbow, pulling the kids together again. People in the room silent, watching, regretful. For every day they didn’t finish, death got closer, for one or the other or both.

  WHEN WEATHER had finished, and gotten back into her street clothes, she walked with Jenkins back out to the front lobby. Marcy Sherrill was waiting with Lucas. Marcy took mug shots of Haines and Chapman from her briefcase and passed them to Weather.

  “Is either one of these the guy you saw?”

  Weather shook her head. “I don’t think so. The guy had real thick hair, down on his shoulders, almost ... How’d you come up with these guys?”

  “Somebody murdered them. One of them has scratches on his leg; and they’re members of the Seed.”

  Weather shuddered. “They may be the guys who did the holdup, but I don’t think they’re the one I saw. Could have been the driver—all I saw of him was a beard.”

  Lucas said to Marcy: “This might not be bad: it means we’ve still got a handle on our third guy.”

  VIRGIL WAS SITTING on the front porch, in the cold, eating a Hostess cupcake, when they got home. Jenkins stopped at the curb behind a brown Cadillac and Lucas turned up the drive and took the truck straight into the garage.

  Jenkins came crunching up the driveway and asked Virgil, “Shrake inside?”

  “You know anybody else with a brown Cadillac?”

  “He got a deal on it,” Jenkins said.

  “I should hope.” Virgil finished the cupcake and led the way in. Lucas and Weather came in through the back, and they all met in the kitchen, where Shrake and Letty, Lucas and Weather’s fifteen-year-old daughter, were playing gin rummy at the breakfast table.

  Shrake was a big man, as big as Jenkins, in shirtsleeves, with a .40-cal Smith in a shoulder holster. He was staring fixedly at his cards, and Weather asked, “Who’s winning?”

  “Don’t bother us,” Letty said. “If he goes out, I’ve got to take off my bra.”

  Shrake jerked bolt upright, looked from Letty to Weather, mouth open, recovered and said, “Jesus Christ
. It’s dangerous just being around her.”

  “You got no idea,” Lucas said. “So listen up, guys, we got a break—”

  “What about me and my bra?” Letty asked.

  “That’s your problem,” Lucas said. “Now either shut up, or go away.”

  LUCAS LAID IT OUT: the Minneapolis cops were focusing on the hospital, but the BCA had the gang files. “So we’re on it. We’re cooperating, but I’m going after it full-time. Virgil, Jenkins, you guys stay with Weather. Shrake, I want you hanging around, keep loose. If something comes up, I’ll call you.”

  Weather said, “You don’t think this has anything to do with ... that other time? With the Seed?”

  Lucas shook his head: “That’s ancient history. Those guys were nuts, everybody knows it. Nope: this has to do with the hospital. They’ve got themselves in a crack now, and they’re trying to get out.”

  Virgil said, “You think somebody in the hospital was involved, an insider, right? Maybe Weather, or me, or somebody else, could talk up the idea that the Seed guys might be coming after him. Maybe break him out.”

  Letty said, “Put it on the ten-o’clock news.”

  Lucas shrugged: “We could try, but I don’t see anybody confessing. We’ve got three murders now. More likely somebody’d quit his job and head out. That’s something we could look for.”

  “Need to talk to other gang squads where the Seed and the Angels have branches,” Jenkins said. “See if anybody dumps a load of commercial pharmaceuticals on the street.”

  “That we can do,” Lucas said. “What else?”

  “Roust the Seed,” Shrake said. “Kick some ass. Keep an eye on Weather.”

  6

  THE BCA HEADQUARTERS was in a modern building out in a St. Paul residential area, the parking lot mostly empty at six o’clock on a cold winter night. Lucas let himself in, climbed the stairs to his office, dropped his coat, and walked down the hall. Frank Harris was sitting in his office, in the dark.

  “You asleep?” Lucas asked.

  “Thinking,” Harris said. “And my eyes are tired.”

  Lucas settled into a visitor’s chair. “You know the situation.”

  “Yeah, and I’ll give you everything we’ve got,” Harris said. He was a slim shadow, in a suit and tie, on the other side of the desk. “But I don’t like it. I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t your wife.”

  “I don’t need any inside sources. I don’t need any of your guys, I won’t give anything up. What I need is names: I’ll generate my own information,” Lucas said.

  “If you talk to a smart guy, and a few of them are pretty smart, they’ll get an idea of how deep our information is,” Harris said. He didn’t particularly like Lucas, and Lucas knew it, and knew why.

  Harris was a third-generation cop, had struggled to get out of a suburban police force and into the BCA, had hustled his way up through the ranks, lived on his seventy-five thousand dollars a year, married when he was twenty, had three kids. Lucas had parachuted into a top spot, helped by political muscle, and worse, was rich, drove a Porsche, once had a reputation as a serious womanizer, and still got more than his share of face time with the media.

  Now Lucas shook his head. “No. Two or three names—it’s nothing. Especially if I go in dumb, and thrash around. I swear to God, Frank, we’re not going to burn you. We just need a place to start.”

  “Well, don’t get hurt,” Harris said. He leaned forward and pushed a paper file across the desk. “Shred it when you finish reading it. If it got out, it’d be a goddamn disaster. If you need another copy later, I can print another one.”

  Lucas took the file and stood up. “Thanks, Frank. I owe you.”

  Sometimes, he thought, walking away, you do favors for people you don’t like, because you’re cops. Just the way it was.

  SHRAKE WAS SITTING in Lucas’s office, waiting, and Lucas shut the door behind himself, sat down and opened the file. Maybe two hundred pages, printed out in color: surveillance and source reports, photographs, mug shots and rap sheets. They covered the Hells Angels and Bad Seed, with miscellaneous stuff on the Outlaws, Banditos, and Mongols.

  Lucas cut the stack of paper roughly in half and pushed it across to Shrake. “Read. Mention anything that looks like anything—especially with the Seed.”

  THE ANGELS were the main biker gang in the Cities. The Seed didn’t have a clubhouse, but ran out of a bar called Cherries, south of the river, the reports said. The Seed had a working treaty with the Angels, and Angels members were welcome at Cherries. On the other hand, the report said, the Seed also had some alliances with the Outlaws in Illinois, and might then be a trusted communications link between the two bigger rival gangs.

  Money for the gangs came from drug dealing, fencing, and miscellaneous small-time street crime, although most of the members also had jobs, and membership turnover, outside a core group, was heavy.

  “The thing is, these guys are perfect for the hospital job,” Shrake said. He had rap sheets for the two dead Seed members, Haines and Chapman. “They fit physically, the clothes are right. The Seed has gang contacts both west with the Angels and east with the Outlaws, and they’ve always moved drugs: they’ve got the retail connections. Haines and Chapman both have robbery convictions; Haines did time in Wisconsin, Chapman in California. Haines has a crim-sex no-pros because the girl backed off, but he’s in the database, one, two, three DUIs, small amounts of marijuana ... Chapman has three assaults, one conviction, juvie record of assault, had a weapons charge that was dealt ... small amounts of dope. Assholes. Completely likely to hold up a pharmacy.”

  “That no-pros is why they killed Haines. Somebody knew he was in the database, and that after we processed Peterson, we’d have him,” Lucas said. “They were afraid he’d flip.”

  LUCAS FOUND a reference to the owners of Cherries, Lyle and Joseph Mack, brothers, who’d been patched in the Seed in the early nineties; and another reference to their father, Ike Mack, who’d been a Seed member in the sixties. A surveillance photo of Lyle Mack showed him sitting on the steps of a bar, surrounded by beer bottles, taken after the autumn river-run of 2006.

  “We need to talk to this guy—he’d know all the locals,” Lucas said, pushing the photo across the desk.

  Shrake picked it up. “Short and chubby. He wasn’t at the hospital.”

  “But he’d know Chapman and Haines, and I’ll bet we get the DNA back on Haines.”

  He thumbed through the rap sheets, found sheets for both the Macks. “Huh. Criminal possession of stolen goods. Two different busts for each of them, they dealt on all of them. Maybe involved in some sports betting, small-time bookies. Joe Mack has three DUIs over ten years. Looks like they’ve run a couple bars, one up by Hayward, another in Wausau. Showed up here about eight years ago, bought Cherries. They get a few complaints every year, noise, parking problems. Have some hookers going through, but not regular. Used to have a porno night ... More like dirtbags than hard guys. But they’re merchants. They buy and sell. They seem to be close to the center of the Seed.”

  He pushed a copy of a mug shot of Joe Mack across the desk: six years old, it showed a big man with a ponytail, clean-shaven.

  They continued reading, and a half hour on, Shrake said, “There are a hundred killers out at Stillwater who we could turn loose, and they’d never in their lives commit another crime. If we replaced them with a hundred of these guys, we’d have to find new jobs. You get these guys with ten offenses, mostly ratshit stuff, they deal on it, they walk. You know they did ten times that many that never got reported or they never got caught on.”

  “Just having a good time, Saturday night,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah. Murder, rape, robbery, assault, extortion, fighting, drugs, prostitution, criminal sexual assault, domestic assault, drunk driving, you name it,” Shrake said. “Makes my teeth hurt.”

  “You’ve never had a problem with a fight,” Lucas said.

  “Pretty big difference between a fight during an arrest and an
assault,” Shrake said.

  “You’re sounding self-righteous.”

  “Got me on that,” he said.

  They read for another half hour, trading sheets back and forth, putting down names, and then Lucas looked at his watch.

  “Getting to be prime time out at Cherries,” he said.

  CHERRIES LOOKED like a suburban split-level house, but larger, a frame building with a blacktopped parking lot out front and along the west side, and a loading dock with a dumpster in back. There were ten or twelve vehicles in the parking lot when they arrived, and only one was a sedan—the rest were SUVs, pickups, and Ford and Chevy commercial vans, every one with a trailer hitch. Snow was piled up on the perimeter of the lot, and Budweiser and Miller neons hung in the visible windows.

  Lucas pulled the Lexus around so the lights played off the tags of the two vehicles parked in front of the loading dock. Shrake checked the tag numbers against a list and said, “Yup. That’s them. Elvis is in the house.”

  Lucas pulled up tight in front of the two vehicles and parked. Shrake took a pistol out of his belt holster and put it in his side coat pocket. “Joe and Lyle,” he said.

  “Watch your back,” Lucas said.

  They got out, crunched around the bar to the front door. The air smelled of barbeque and auto exhaust from the highway, and they could hear the thump of a country song. Cold; lots of stars, but cold. Shrake said, “‘Bubba Shot the Jukebox.”’

  “Huh?”

  “That song. Mark Chesnutt.” He pulled the door open and held it, and Lucas led the way in.

  Just a run-down bar-type bar; fifteen booths and a dozen tables, a bar with a few stools, a jukebox, the odor of snowmelt and wet wool and beer and barbeque beef and tacos, a whiff of illegal cigarette smoke. Two waitresses, both with push-up bras under T-shirts—one of Barack Obama’s face done up as the Joker in the Batman movie, the other with the slogan “Ride It Like You Stole It”—were working the booths. A redheaded female bartender in a frilly white blouse was talking to a big man hunched over the bar.