Storm Prey

the remote at the TV and the picture got sucked into a white dot. He scratched his head and said, “Well, now.”
    Honey Bee cracked her gum. “What’re we gonna do?”
    “Lay low,” Lyle Mack said. “Dump the dope at Dad’s farm. Put the guns in with the dope—they could be identified, too. Nobody touches anything for a month. You three ... no, Joe Mack, you better stay here. Honey Bee can give you a haircut. Cut it right down to a butch.”
    “Aw, no,” Joe Mack groaned.
    Lyle Mack rode over him: “Mikey and Shooter, you go out to Honey Bee’s. When Joe’s cleaned up, me’n him’ll come over. I think the three of you better get the hell over to Eddie’s. Hit a couple bars every night, let everybody see you, until nobody knows exactly when you got there, and then you can say you were over there a week before this shit happened.”
    “Man, it’s fuckin’ freezin’ over there,” Haines said. Eddie’s was in Green Bay.
    “It’s fuckin’ freezin’ here, and we can trust Eddie, and this shit wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t kicked that old man to death,” Lyle Mack said. “So shut up and go on over to Eddie’s. Wait until night. Get over to Honey Bee’s right now, until it’s dark. Don’t stop for no food, don’t get no beer, don’t let anybody see your faces. We don’t want anybody sayin’, ‘I saw him the day it happened.’”
    “What about, you know ...” Chapman glanced at the packs full of drugs. “This was supposed to pay us something.”
    Lyle Mack got to his feet, a short heavy man in a black fleece and jeans. He went out to the front of the bar and came back three minutes later with a thin pile of fifty-dollar bills. He cut the pile more or less in half and gave one stack each to Haines and Chapman. “You go on, now. That’s two thousand for each of you. It’ll keep you for a month, at Eddie’s. After we sell the shit, you’ll get the rest.”
    “Green Bay, dude,” Haines moaned.
    “Better’n Oak Park Heights,” Chapman said. Oak Park Heights was the state’s supermax prison.
    They all looked at each other for a moment, no sound other than a hum from a refrigeration unit, and Honey Bee’s gum-chewing, and then Lyle Mack said to Haines and Chapman, “So—take off. I’ll get over there soon as I can. You can get some pizzas from the freezer and take a couple cases of beer.”
    “Biggest score we ever did,” Haines said.
    “Yeah, but you had to go and fuck it up,” Lyle said.
     
     
    HAINES AND CHAPMAN got four pizzas and two cases of Miller, and shuffled out through the back, off the loading dock. Their 2002 Trans Am was leaning against a snowdrift, and Lyle Mack stood on tiptoe, looking out of the garage door windows, watching as the two got inside, still watching until the car turned the corner.
    Then he turned back to Joe Mack and Honey Bee and said, “Honey, go get me a hot fudge sundae.”
    “What?” Her jaw hung open, and he could see the wad of gum; it looked like a piece of zombie flesh. She was a goodlookin’ woman, Lyle Mack thought, who ruined it all when she did something like that, and she did something like that all the time.
    “A fuckin’ hot fudge sundae,” he said, patiently. “Get me a hot fudge sundae. Put the hot fudge in the microwave so it’s really hot.”
    She shook her head, looked at her watch—it was five minutes after eight o’clock in the morning, a weird time for a hot fudge sundae, but she got up and wandered off to the front of the bar. Lyle Mack walked behind her, shut the door, and turned back to Joe.
    “You crazy fuckers,” he said, shaking his head. “You couldn’t have done worse if you’d shot a cop. You dumb sonsofbitches.”
    “That fuckin’ Mikey,” Joe Mack said. “And I don’t think sendin’ us to Eddie’s is gonna do much good. How many times have you heard about Shooter killing the colored dude out in California?”
    Lyle Mack shook a finger at him. “That’s why they aren’t going to Eddie’s.”
    “They aren’t?”
    “We got no choice, Joe. That old fart scratched Mikey,” Lyle Mack said. “That means the cops got DNA on him. You remember when Mikey fucked that high school chick over in Edina and the cops came and made him brush his gums? That was DNA. About two minutes from now, they’re going to come looking for him, and they’ll give us up bigger’n shit.”
    Joe Mack thought about that for a few seconds, then a frown slowly crawled over his face. “If you’re