He smeared shaving cream on his face and thought of California; or maybe Florida. He’d never been to Florida. Had been told that it was lusher and harder than California—meth as opposed to cocaine—with lots more old people.
And he thought again about the liquor store. Big liquor store in Wisconsin, next to a supermarket. He’d been in just before closing on a Friday night, nobody else in the store, and he’d paid $12.50 for a bottle of bourbon, fake ID ready to go.
They never even asked: he looked that old. But more interesting was that when he’d paid with a fifty, the checkout man had lifted the cash tray to slip the bill beneath it, and there’d been at least twenty bills under there, all fifties and hundreds. With the five, tens and twenties in the top, there had to be two thousand dollars in the register.
Enough to get to Florida. Enough to start, anyway.
He caught his eyes in the mirror and thought, Stupid. Every asshole in the world who wanted money, the first thing they thought of was a liquor store at closing time. They probably had cameras, guns, alarms, who knew what?
No liquor stores, Cappy. Have to think of something else.
Some other job.
He was staring at himself, thinking about the bed, when the phone rang.
He picked it up, and Lyle Mack asked, “That you, Cappy?”
CAPPY SAT in the back of Cherries and looked at Lyle Mack and said, “So that fuckin’ Shooter told you I kill people.”
“He made it pretty clear. Didn’t exactly say the words,” Lyle Mack said.
“That could get you locked away in California,” Cappy said. “Maybe get you the needle.”
“That’s exactly the reason we have a problem with Shooter. He talks,” Lyle Mack said.
Cappy, his voice flat: “Ten thousand dollars?”
“Five thousand each.”
“Then what?” Cappy asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t just leave them laying out there,” Cappy said. He’d had some experience with the disposal issue.
“We’ll ... dump them somewhere.”
Cap sat staring at Lyle Mack for a long time, his flat crazy-man stare, until Mack began to get nervous, then said, “Fifteen.”
“Aw, man, we don’t have a lot of cash,” Lyle Mack said. “C’mon, Cappy, we’re asking you as a brother.” Lyle Mack had never contracted for a murder, and he was jumpy as hell. Joe Mack sat next to him and kept rubbing his face, as though he couldn’t believe it.
“Fifteen is the brother price,” Cap said. “I need a new van.”
“You can’t get a new van for fifteen,” Joe Mack said.
“Well, it’s not a new-new van, it’s new for me,” Cap said.
Joe Mack leaned forward. “Tell you what. I’ll sign my van over to you. It’s worth that, Blue Book. Perfect condition. Dodge Grand Caravan Cargo, three years old, good rubber, twenty-eight thousand actual. It’s got XM radio and a drop ramp for bikes, it’s got nav. It’d be perfect for you.”
“How’s the tranny?”
“The tranny’s perfect. Never been a glitch,” Joe Mack said.
“I gotta Dodge; it’s been some trouble,” Cappy said. But he was thinking: Florida.
“Everything got some trouble. But in vans, the Dodges is the best,” Joe Mack said.
Cappy stared at Joe Mack, then said, “I’d want to look it up in the Blue Book.”
“Be my guest,” Joe Mack said.
“And two grand in cash. I gotta eat, too.”
Lyle Mack, staring into Cappy’s pale blue eyes, realized what an insane little motherfucker he really was.
THEN THEY got practical, and Lyle Mack called Honey Bee on her cell phone: “You still at Home Depot?”
“Just got back in my car.”
“I thought of a couple more things we need,” Lyle Mack said.
“Run back and get some of those contractor clean-up bags, okay? Like big garbage bags, but really big. And some Scrubbing Bubbles, and, uh, you know, some of those rubber kitchen gloves.”
“So when am I the goddamn maid around here?”
“Well, you’re right there at the store, goddamnit, Honey Bee ...”
THEY’D SENT Cappy down the street to wait at the Log Cabin Inn, and picked him up after Honey Bee got back. Honey Bee would open the bar: “You didn’t start the wienies. They’re still gonna be cold when we open.”
Lyle Mack shook his head. “Honey Bee, I’m just so ... busy. You know we’ve got some trouble. Help me out, here.”
When Lyle had gone out the back, and Joe Mack was getting his coat on, he tried to cheer her up by squeezing her butt, and giving her a little leg hump, but she wasn’t having it: “Get out of here. Go get busy.”
HONEY BEE had a horse ranch thirty miles south of St. Paul, though as ranches went, it was on the small side—forty acres. But Honey Bee liked it, and so did her three horses. The Macks were not horse persons themselves; their attitude was, if God had meant people to ride horses, He wouldn’t have invented the Fat Bob.
They rode out in Joe Mack’s van, so Cappy could hear it run, with the Macks in the front seats, and Cappy on a backseat with a shotgun that he’d brought from home. Joe Mack said to his brother, “I totally know where you’re coming from, you know, with this thing—but I gotta say, I kind of like these guys, when they’re not being assholes.”
“But they’re assholes most of the time,” Lyle Mack said. “Now look at this. We have a perfect job, big money, no trouble, and now what? Now we’re looking at a murder. I mean, fuck me. Murder? And they keep lettin’ you know about that eggplant that Shooter killed out in California. You can’t sit down and have a beer without them hinting around about it. It’s gonna be the same thing here.”
“You’re right about that,” Cappy grunted. The Macks had told him about the bind they were in; not because they wanted to, but because he said he needed to know. “I didn’t know him but two minutes when he started ranking me about it.”
“So we shouldn’t have used them,” Joe Mack said.
“Well, you’re right. You know? You’re right,” Lyle Mack said. “We made a mistake. There they were, handy. I shoulda gone, it shoulda just been me and you and the doc, but you know I’m no goddamn good in the morning.”
They both thought about that—and the fact that Lyle Mack was too chicken to have gone in—and then Lyle Mack added, “We made a mistake, and now they’re going to have to pay for it. I gotta say, it’s not fair, you know, but what’re we going to do? They’ll flat turn us in, if they get in a pinch.”
“Bother you?” Joe Mack asked Cappy.
Cappy shook his head. “Don’t bother me none, long as I get the van.”
THEY RODE along in silence for a while, looking at the winter countryside, then Lyle Mack said, over his shoulder to Cappy, “One thing I gotta tell you. If they’re sitting on the couch in the front room, it’s a purple couch, we gotta get them off it. We can’t shoot them on that couch. Honey Bee would have a fit. We need to get them up on their feet.”
“Not on the couch,” Cappy said.
“It’s velour, and it’s brand-new,” Lyle Mack said. “If we do them on the couch, the couch is toast. She’d be really, really pissed. She just got it from someplace like Pottery Barn. One of those big-time places.”
“Okay.”
Joe Mack asked, “What do you think about the van? Pretty nice, huh?”
“It’s okay,” Cappy conceded. He looked in the back. With one rear seat folded, he could get the BMW in there, no problem.
They were coming up to the turnoff, and as they came down off the blacktop onto the gravel road, Lyle Mack said, “Okay, listen, I got an idea.”
HONEY BEE’s house wasn’t much, an early twentieth-century clapboard farmhouse with a front porch that was no longer square to the rest of the structure, and a round gravel driveway big enough to circle a pickup with a two-horse trailer. The barn was newer, red metal, with a loft for hay. A detached garage was straight ahead
, an exercise ring off to the left.
They pulled in, and the Macks climbed out of the van, opened the side door and took out the big bag of Home Depot stuff. Instead of walking up to the house, they walked back to the barn, talking loudly. Lyle Mack slipped on what might have been a big puddle of frozen horse urine—it was yellow, anyway, and ice—and they went to the barn door and Lyle Mack went inside while Joe Mack waited outside. Joe Mack said to Lyle’s back, “I’m gonna be sick. I think we oughta call it off.”
“Gone too far,” Lyle Mack said. “Just hold on. It’s your ass we’re trying to save.”
A minute later, Joe Mack said, “Ah, shit, they’re coming,” and Lyle Mack said, “Uh-huh.”
Outside, Joe Mack called, “Lyle’s looking at one of the horses. Honey Bee’s worried that one of them got something.”
Lyle Mack heard a reply, couldn’t quite make it out, and then, closer, heard Shooter Chapman say, “Horse’s supposed to be good eatin.’ I saw on TV that the French eat ’em.”
“Yeah, the fuckin’ French,” Joe Mack said, friendly. His face was white with the stress, and he could feel the words clogging in his throat.
Then Haines said something and Lyle Mack didn’t understand quite what it was, just that Chapman and Haines were walking up. He stepped outside and saw the two men coming up to the van with its open door, his brother frozen like a statue.
Haines glanced at the open van as he passed and said, “Hey...”
Cappy was right there with the shotgun. He shot Haines in the face and, without looking or waiting or flinching, pumped once and shot Chapman.
Both men went straight down. Cappy stepped out of the van, pumped again, stepped close, carefully, kicked Chapman’s foot, looked for a reaction, got none, kicked Haines. Then they all looked around, like they were sniffing the wind: looking for witnesses, listening for cars. Nothing.
“They’re gone,” Cappy said. “No couch, no problem.”
“Okay,” Lyle Mack said. His heart was beating so hard that he thought it might jump out of his chest. Chapman and Haines looked like big fat bloody dead dolls, crumpled on the beaten-down driveway snow. Shooter might have looked surprised, but the surprise part of his face was missing, so it was hard to tell. Mikey had a hand in his pocket and Lyle Mack could see the butt of a pistol in his fist. Joe was leaning against the barn, with a stream of spit streaming out of his mouth.
“Look at this,” Lyle Mack said to Joe Mack. “They got guns. I bet the motherfuckers were going to kill us. Can you believe that? Can you believe it?”
“Well, yeah,” Joe Mack said, spitting again. “They were probably thinking the same way we were.”
They looked at the bodies for a few more seconds, and then Lyle Mack said, “Well, I’ll get the garbage bags. We won’t need the Scrubbing Bubbles. See if there’s a shovel in the barn, we should scrape up any ice that’s got blood on it.”
Joe Mack went into the barn and found a No. 5 grain scoop, which would be okay for the snow, and scraped it away, though it was hard work; the blood just kept coming. Lyle fished the wallets out of the two men’s pockets, retrieved the money he’d given to Chapman, and passed it to Cappy. “Your two thousand. It’s my money, not theirs. I loaned it to them this morning.”
Cappy nodded and took a drag on his Camel. Lyle said, “And don’t go throwing that Camel on the ground. You always see in cop shows where somebody finds a cigarette butt.”
Cappy nodded again, and Joe and Lyle put on the gloves and together rolled the dead men into the contractor’s bags, while Cappy sat in the van door and watched. When they hoisted the bodies into the back of the van, thought Joe Mack, they looked exactly like dead men in garbage bags.
“Don’t want to go driving around like this,” Cappy said.
“No, we don’t,” Lyle Mack said. “I know a place we can dump them. I got lost one day, driving around. Way back in the sticks. Won’t find them until spring, or maybe never.”
To his brother: “Joe Mack, you take their car, drop it off at the Target by their house.”
They scraped up the last bit of blood, wiped the grain scoop with a horse towel, and threw the towel in another bag, along with the rubber gloves. “Burn that when we get back to the bar,” Lyle Mack said. “Take no chances.”
“How far to the dump-off spot?” Cappy asked.
“Eight or nine miles. Back road, nobody goes there. We can put them under this little bridge. Hardly have to get out of the van. No cops, no stops.”
“What about the woman that saw me?” Joe Mack asked.
“We gotta talk about that,” Lyle Mack said. He looked at Cappy.
“What woman?” Cappy asked.
3
SAME TIME, SAME STATION, doing it all over again.
Weather slept less well, with the anxiety of the prior day weighing her down. Again she got up in the dark, dressed, spoke quietly with Lucas, and went down to a quick breakfast and the car. Driving down the vacant night streets, to University, along University to the hospital complex. Nothing in her mind but the babies.
Alain Barakat waited for her, one flight up from the security door he’d opened the morning before, freezing in his parka, smoking. The place was a nightmare; dark, brutally cold. Barakat had grown up in the north of Lebanon, with beaches and palm trees. That he should wind up in this place ...
When he finished here, one more year, he would move to Paris. He’d gone online and found that his American medical certificate was good in France, though there would be some paperwork. Paris. Or maybe LA.
Only one good thing about Minneapolis: he could still get Gauloises, smuggled down from Canada. No: two good things.
The cocaine.
He took a long drag and thought about going back inside. Fuck this. He had nothing to do with anybody being dead.
BUT OF COURSE he did. The whole thing had been his idea. He’d seen a chance to steal a pharmacy key, and he’d taken it, without even knowing why at that moment. Or maybe he’d known why, but not how ...
Barakat had started with cocaine at the Sorbonne, buying it from a fellow student who was working his way through college. He’d tried other stuff, uppers, downers, a little marijuana, a peyote button once, but none of it did it for him: the idea wasn’t less control, it was more control.
That’s what you got from the cocaine.
It had helped him through med school, but after that, in Miami, getting cocaine had not been a problem. Once in Minneapolis, for his residency, he’d asked around, found a guy who was recommended as a source for decent marijuana, the imported stuff down from Canada. A guy like that knew where to get cocaine.
So he bought his coke from a dealer named Lonnie, and then from a redneck named Rick, who took over Lonnie’s route when Lonnie moved to Birmingham. Then Rick got hurt in a motorcycle accident, hurt really bad, and Barakat went stone cold sober for a week and a half, and it almost killed him.
One day Joe Mack showed up on his porch with a free baggie of blow.
Like the cocaine Welcome Wagon.
“Our friend Rick said you were one of his best guys, but he’s gonna be out of it for a while ...”
At that point, Barakat was spending eight hundred dollars a week on cocaine, with no way to get more money. He hung at eight hundred, until one late night he was waiting at the pharmacy window, the key already in hand, and thought, They’ve got no protection, and I know the guys who could take it away from them.
It all seemed so simple. And it should have been.
NOW HERE he was, freezing his ass off, trying to set up an assassination. Not simple anymore. Not uninteresting, though, if only he’d been working with a competent crew. The whole concept of crime was interesting: the strong taking from the weak, the smart from the stupid. A game, with interesting stakes ... if only he hadn’t been working with the Macks.
At twenty minutes after five o’clock, a black Audi convertible rolled up the ramp, headlights bouncing when its tires bumped over expansion joints. The c
ar swooped into a reserved parking place in the physicians’ area. Five seconds later, a short blond woman got out and started toward the exit door opposite Barakat.
Had to be her—the same woman he’d seen in the elevator. He let the door close: he couldn’t allow her to see him again. Even being in the same part of the building, where she might see him by accident, could trip off a memory.
He waited, nervous, stressed, sweating in the freezing cold, and when she’d gone through the door, went after her. And as he went, the thought crossed his mind: fix it now. Take her. She was a small woman in a deserted building, he could break her neck, who’d know what happened?
Just a thought, but it stayed with him. He might catch her at the elevators ... but when he got there, she was gone. A little feather of disappointment trickled across his heart, his gut. He could have done it.
So now, the question remained. Who was she, and where was she going?
She was early for most docs. They wouldn’t normally arrive until sometime after six. On the other hand, the Frenchman’s surgical team was supposed to start separating the twins ...
He went that way.
THIRTY PEOPLE milled in the hallway outside the special operating theater. Like most of the other docs, he’d found an excuse to look the place over—the special double operating table, the intricate anesthesia setup, the newly painted, sign-posted floor, an attempt to better choreograph the movements of the massive operating team, to keep the sterile and the non-steriles separate, even as they walked among each other.
He saw the blond woman, still in her long winter coat, talking to Gabriel Maret, the Frenchman. Maret was listening closely. She had to be somebody important.
Barakat was an emergency room doc, not on the team, or anything close to it, and all the team members knew each other, so he couldn’t risk joining the crowd. What he could do, though, was climb into the small observation theater above the OR. If you wanted a seat, all you had to do was get there early. One of the team members would be narrating the surgical procedures for the observers. The woman, if she were central to the work, would be introduced.