Lucas and Shrake didn’t look like the rest of the clientele. They had no facial hair, and they were wearing white-collar-worker winter coats, unbuttoned; like, unbuttoned so they could get at a gun. Every other male had some kind of hair on his face, and a parka hanging off a hook at the end of his booth. Talk dwindled as Lucas led the way to the bar, Shrake a couple of steps behind.
“We’re with the state police,” Lucas said to the bartender. “We need to talk to the Mack brothers.”
The bartender looked at the clock, then shook her head. “You missed them. They left here half an hour ago.”
“I wonder why they left their cars in the parking lot?” Lucas asked. He leaned across the bar. “Go get them. And mention that we’ve blocked their cars in. And if we don’t talk to them now, we’ll talk to them downtown. This is just a friendly visit, but it could get pretty fuckin’ unfriendly if they want it that way.”
She looked at Lucas for a minute, then at Shrake, said, “Asshole,” dropped her wet bar towel on Lucas’s hand, turned and walked through a door into the back.
Lucas wiped his hand on his pant leg and said to a waitress, “Nice place.”
She ignored him.
The big man whom the bartender had been talking to asked, “What’s up?”
“You know Mikey Haines or Shooter Chapman?” Lucas asked.
“Maybe. I remember the names. Sort of. What’d they do?”
“They got themselves shot in the head with a shotgun,” Lucas said. “Found the bodies this morning.”
The big man’s face pulled together. “Are you shittin’ me?”
“Do I look like I’m shittin’ you?”
“Didn’t see anything on TV,” he said.
“Didn’t make the evening news, but it’ll be on at ten,” Lucas said. He looked at a television set in the corner, which was showing a hockey game. “Took a while to identify them.”
The big man finished his beer in one gulp, wiped his mouth on his sweatshirt sleeve, and said, “I gotta get out of here.”
“Why?”
“Look, I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’,” he said. “I really don’t. But if somebody’s startin’ a war, I don’t want to be sittin’ here suckin’ on a Budweiser.”
Two more guys got out of a booth, pulling their coats on as they headed for the door. Shrake put out a hand. “Friends of Haines and Chapman?”
“Never heard of them,” one said, and they were gone.
A SHORT MAN, whom Lucas recognized as Lyle Mack, followed the bartender out of the back, an aggrieved look on his face. “Now what?”
“We’re investigating the murders of Shooter Chapman and Mikey Haines,” Lucas said.
Mack registered what looked everything in the world like shock. The bartender, eyes wide, put both hands to the sides of her face, her mouth open. Her lips working, no words coming out. If they were faking it, Lucas thought, they deserved Oscars.
“What?” Mack got the first response out.
“Is your brother around?” Lucas asked.
“He’s in the can ... Uh, shit, come on back. We can talk in the office.”
He turned and went through the door, heading into the back. Lucas and Shrake walked around the end of the bar past the bartender, who asked, “How were they killed? Are you sure they were murdered?”
“They were shot with a shotgun and put in garbage bags and thrown under a bridge,” Shrake said. “If it wasn’t murder, it was a really weird accident.”
They went through the door behind the bar, heard Lyle Mack yelling at his brother, up a set of stairs. “The cops are here—they say Shooter and Mikey been killed. Come on out of there.”
And he turned back and said, “Come on to the office.”
The office was a small plywood room attached to the loading dock; one chair behind a desk and two chairs in front of it, two filing cabinets, an old computer, and a new multitask print-fax-copy-scan machine.
Mack took the desk seat and Lucas sat down while Shrake leaned in the doorway. “You know them?” Lucas asked.
“Sure. They’re members of the club,” Mack said. “I bet the fuckin’ Mongols had something to do with this. We’re okay with everybody else.”
“You know any Mongols? They’re pretty thin around here,” Shrake said.
“Well, who else ... ?”
“Lyle, don’t give us any shit. I’ve had some dealings with the Seed in the past, and people got killed, and I’ve got very little patience with you guys,” Lucas said. “You push dope and you used to do a little strong-arm robbery and you ran a couple massage parlors and I know all that shit. So what I want to know is, were Haines and Chapman hustling meth or coke? Who were they selling it to? Did they owe somebody? Were they scared?”
Shrake stepped back and let another man through the doorway, Joe Mack, who had a lean, pale-white face and lantern jaw, with a black do-rag on his close-cropped head. If he’d had a gold hoop earring, Lucas thought, he could have played Long John Silver.
“They’re dead?” Joe Mack asked. His eyelids were half-closed, and he smelled of alcohol.
Lyle nodded at Lucas and said, “This guy is giving me a lot of shit. He thinks they were dealing dope.”
Joe Mack registered astonishment so profound that Lucas almost laughed, and Shrake did. He said, “Dope?” as though it were inconceivable.
“Let me ‘splain something to you guys,” Shrake said. “This is a double murder, at least, and maybe a triple. We think they were the guys who knocked over the pharmacy at University Hospitals three days ago, and kicked the pharmacist to death.”
Lyle Mack: “No . . .”
“And you’re bullshitting us, right now, is what you’re doing,” Shrake continued. “That’s accessory after the fact on three murder-ones, which is just as good as doing it yourselves. We’ll shake it all out, and you’ll go to prison ... if you keep bullshitting us.”
Lyle Mack shook his head: “All right. Shooter and Mikey could be assholes. We know that. But we don’t know anybody who’d kill them for it.”
“The Mongols would,” Joe Mack said to his brother.
“Aw, for Christ’s sakes, forget the Mongols,” Lucas said. “We’re gonna prove Haines did the pharmacy, by tomorrow. Then we’re gonna come back here with a flamethrower, if we don’t get some cooperation. This is their club. This is where they hung out, where their friends were. So: Who were they running with? They hang out with any hospital people? What?”
Lyle Mack said, “Listen . . . we’re bar owners. We make money at it. These guys are customers, but they’re not good friends or nothing. They always come in together, they hang together. And you know, they bullshit with the guys, but they were partners. They hung with each other.”
“They gay?” Shrake asked.
Joe Mack snorted. “I don’t think so. They were Seed. Seed don’t take gays.”
“No gays, no sex perverts of any kind,” Lyle Mack said.
“When was the last time they were in?”
The two brothers looked at each other, and then Lyle Mack said, “Could have been Saturday. I’m pretty sure they were here on Saturday night.”
“Did they seem nervous, or worried, or scared?” Lucas asked. “Were they hanging with anyone new?”
Lyle Mack exhaled, looked at his brother, back at Lucas, and said, “Listen, if we, you know ... if we talk to you, this gets out, we’re done. The place gets wrecked, we get the shit beat out of us, or killed.”
“We don’t talk,” Lucas said.
“If the information is good,” Shrake added. “If it’s not good, we might talk.”
Lyle Mack said, “Saturday night, they were hanging with Anthony Melicek and Ron Howard. Drank a few beers. They were on the Deer Hunter for a couple hours.”
“The Deer Hunter?” Shrake asked
“Game machine,” Joe Mack said.
“Where do we find these guys?” Lucas asked. He was writing their names in his notebook.
“I don’t k
now,” Lyle Mack said. “You’ve probably got their addresses. Or Ron’s, anyway. He’s on probation, some kind of thing with his old lady.”
“You mean, he beat her up,” Lucas said.
“No, no. I mean he and his old lady are on probation,” Lyle Mack said. “I’m not sure exactly what they did, but they might have been selling stuff.”
“Stolen stuff.”
“Maybe. If you tell anybody we told you this ...”
“Who else did they hang with?”
“Man, they hung with each other . . .”
THEY HAD two names, and not much more; and assured the brothers that they would hang around in the parking lot, talking to customers coming and going, so that Melicek and Howard wouldn’t know where their names had come from.
Lucas stood up, took a card out of his wallet, and dropped it on the desk. “If you hear anything, it would behoove you to call me. No motorcycle big-shot bullshit, burning the card or any of that; just a quiet call. Nobody will know, and it might be useful to you sometime, to have a guy you can call. If you know what I mean.”
SHRAKE LED the way out, Lucas a step behind; when they’d gone through the door into the front, Lyle Mack said to Joe, “We’re in a lot of fuckin’ trouble, Joe.”
Joe Mack said, “We oughta get out of here.”
“Can’t,” Lyle Mack said. “If it was only a robbery, we might get out of town. Murder, they’d come after us. Come after you. We gotta find that chick and shut her up.”
THERE WERE still fifteen or twenty people in the bar, but in clusters now, four and five together. From behind the bar, Lucas called, “Can I have your attention? Anybody here know Mikey Haines or Shooter Chapman?”
Dead silence.
“I know some of you must be their friends, if they had any friends,” Lucas said. “Somebody took them out and blew their faces mostly off, with a shotgun, and I would like any opinions anybody’s got about that.”
More silence, then one voice, “We got no opinions.”
Shrake said, “If you get home and find out you got an opinion, about who may be executing Seeds, you call the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and ask for Agent Shrake. S-h-r-a-k-e. Shrake.”
“The reason you should do that is, being a tough guy is just fine, but if somebody’s shooting you in the back of the head with a shotgun, from an ambush, like they did with Shooter and Mikey, tough isn’t good enough,” Lucas said. “So you got any ideas, it might be your own life you’re saving.”
THEY DID SPEND fifteen minutes in the parking lot, grabbing people as they came and went—mostly went—but got no more names.
“Can’t talk to us in public,” Shrake said. “Gang law.”
“Talk about the cold shoulder,” Lucas said. “My shoulder’s frozen all the way down to my ass.”
“Let’s go. Look up those other two guys,” Shrake said. “We can come back if we need to.”
Lucas looked back at the club. Lyle Mack was staring out a window at them, his head visible from the neck up, like a bust of Beethoven, or somebody.
Tony Soprano, maybe.
BACK IN THE CAR, Shrake got on his phone and got addresses for Anthony Melicek and Ron Howard, the two men named by Mack as friends of Chapman and Haines. Howard lived in Cottage Grove, a suburb to the southeast, and he was on probation, for theft. Melicek lived in the opposite direction, on the edge of downtown Minneapolis, not far from the Metrodome.
“Howard,” Lucas said. He punched Howard’s address into the SUV’s navigation system, and they headed east. As they drove, Shrake called around until he found Howard’s probation officer, a woman named Melanie. They talked for a few minutes, and Shrake rang off.
“She says Howard and his wife got caught stealing eight hundred and sixty board-feet of walnut and cherry from a wood specialty place in Shakopee. Got caught loading it onto their pickup. She says there was an argument about money he’d given them for some wood, and he told the cops he was just taking what he was owed. She said he was probably right about what he was owed, but he broke through a back door, so there it was. They both got probation. He had some arrests six or eight years back when he was running with the Seed, drugs, firearms, did some county-jail time over in Wisconsin. She says he’s not a problem.”
“Good. I’m not in the mood for a big deal.”
“Neither am I.” A minute later: “I wish Weather wasn’t involved. I mean ... you know.”
“Yeah, and she won’t budge, either,” Lucas said. “She’ll be over at the hospital every day. Marcy’s not getting anywhere inside the hospital. I might have to go over there with my nutcracker.”
“I’ve done hospitals before,” Shrake said. “You know what the problem is? Doctors. No offense, you know, about Weather being a doctor ...”
“S’okay.”
“They’re so sure they know everything. They were the smartest kids in high school, which is how they got in premed, and they were the smartest guys in premed, which is how they got in med school, and then they get this big piece of paper that says, ‘Yup, you’re the smartest,’ and they truly believe that shit. They will tell you everything you need to know about your job. They never answer questions—they’ll tell you that you don’t need to know that answer. You need to know the answer to something else.”
“Hey, I live with one,” Lucas said. “And she’s a surgeon. They’re worse than everybody but the shrinks.”
“And you gotta shrink for your best friend . . .”
“Almost intolerable,” Lucas said. “Goddamn Weather, if I didn’t love her, I’d choke the shit out of her about twice a day.”
“To say nothing of your goofy daughter,” Shrake said. “No offense again, but she really does scare me. Sometimes, she acts like a forty-five-year-old narc.”
Lucas laughed and said, “The sad thing is, I’ve never been happier.”
“Well, that’s nice,” Shrake said. “I mean, that really is. That makes one.”
“One what?”
“Happy cop.”
HOWARD LIVED in a rambler-style single-story house halfway down a hillside, brown fiberglass siding with a two-car garage on one end; bright light was shining through the three windows in the garage door. A pickup and an old Camry were parked in the driveway.
Lucas looked at the dashboard clock: ten-forty-five. Not too late. Shrake had taken the pistol out of his pocket and put it back in its holster, and now took it back out and stuck it in the pocket. “Better safe,” he said.
Lucas rang the doorbell, and a moment later a woman came to the door and peeked out behind a chain. “Who is it?”
“We’re with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension ... state police,” Lucas said. “We’re talking to people who knew Mike Haines and Shooter Chapman.”
“Oh . . . jeez. Just a minute.” She pushed the door closed and the chain rattled, and she said, “Ron’s in the shop. We thought somebody might come by.”
“You’re Mrs. Howard?”
“Yes. Donna.” She was using the female nicey-nice voice, submissive, scared by cops. She looked pleasant enough, a round woman with brown hair and dark eyes and a prominent mole by the corner of her mouth. Lucas smiled at her and stepped inside, carefully shuffled his feet on the mat inside the door and she said, “Oh, don’t worry about that. He’s this way . . .”
He followed her through the small kitchen, past a dining table and through a garage door. The garage had been converted into a woodshop, with a table saw, band saw, drill press, and lathe fixed to the floor, and a long workbench with wood-cutting tools along the far wall. Howard was working over the lathe, wearing goggles and earmuffs; his back was turned to them. The air smelled of fresh-cut wood, and a stack of wooden bowls sat along one wall of the shop.
Donna Howard flipped a switch on the wall, a quick on-and-off, and a light flickered and Howard backed away from the machine and turned around, saw them, hit a kill switch. He pulled off the goggles and headset as the machine wound down; he was holding a nasty-looking chise
l. He saw them check it out and hastily put it aside. “Police?”
THEY SAT in the Howards’ small living room. Howard started right out with an explanation of the burglary they’d been convicted of. “I hadn’t been in trouble for years, since I was a kid. But I gave those assholes twelve hundred dollars for the wood I needed, and they kept putting me off. If I don’t produce, I don’t eat. They wouldn’t give me the money back, either, said they’d already ordered the stuff and the supplier was having problems and all of that. Bullshit. So I made the mistake. Two mistakes—I took Donna with me.”
“The judge knew all that, so he went easy,” Donna Howard said.
“Did you ever get your money back?” Shrake asked.
“Yeah ... but the lawyer cost us two thousand, and we were lucky to get off that easy. Tell you what, soon as it was settled, I put the word out on the Internet. Won’t be many guys going out there for their turnin’ wood, I can tell you.”
Lucas said, “I understand you guys were talking to Shooter and Mike last week.”
“Yeah. A friend called and told us about them being dead. He was down at the bar when you were there,” Donna Howard said. “I’ve never known anybody who was murdered.”
“How well did you know them?”
Howard shook his head. “I’ve known them since we were all kids, running around in the woods in Wisconsin. They never grew up. I rode with the Seed for a while, but you know, it gets to be a lot of bullshit. People hassling you, cops coming around. Some of the guys were enormous assholes. Ridin’ was fun, you know, impressing the squares and then ... you wonder why the hell you’re drunk all the time and living out of a shitty apartment. So I got a straight job and met Donna, and we eventually started the business. But we still go up to Cherries three or four times a year, talk with the older guys. That’s about it.”
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