Storm Prey (11 page)

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.

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.