Storm prey

16

CAPPY AND BARAKAT nosed Barakat's car down the snow-covered track to the boat landing, talking about the van problem. Cappy said, "I'll take the California plates off my old van and put them on the new one. When I get to Florida, I'll sell the new van on the street, and buy a legit one."

"How will you sell it on the street? Do you know somebody…"

"I'll hook up with some bikers. They can take care of it. Everybody needs a van."

A few trucks had been down to the boat landing since the last snow, and there was a packed turnaround spot at the end. The water on the Wisconsin side was partly open, from the heat put in at the Prairie Island nuclear plant a mile or so upstream.

Nobody out there at dawn. They got out, looked across the rim of ice to the open water, and Cappy walked out until he was ten feet from the edge.

"What do you think?" Barakat called. He was afraid of ice.

"Looks okay to me."

"Is it deep?"

"It looks deep," Cappy said.

"You can try it," Barakat said, "but let me get the car turned around, so we can get out fast."

They got the car turned around, pointed back toward the highway a quarter-mile away, and then Cappy got one of the grenades out of the back.

"You're sure you know about this?" he asked Barakat.

"One hundred percent," Barakat said. "As long as you don't let the handle fly off, you're perfectly safe."

"Safe."

"Perfectly. When you throw it, throw it like one of your baseball players."

They walked to the ice together. Barakat stopped at the edge, and Cappy asked, "Won't the water put it out?"

"I don't think so. It's not like a match."

They both looked at the grenade, which Barakat said looked like a pomegranate, but Cappy didn't know what a pomegranate was, so they agreed on tomato, and Cappy said, "Pull the pin…"

"Throw the handle and everything," Barakat said. "Like a baseball."

"All right. Here goes." Cappy gripped the grenade around the handle and yanked the pin out. Stood there for a moment.

Barakat said, "Throw it. Throw it."

Cappy threw it, but it was heavier than he thought, hit the edge of the ice, skidded, and slipped over the edge into the water. Barakat started running away, and he called, "Run."

Cappy was running when the grenade blew. It wasn't too loud, but loud enough, and kicked up a twenty-foot plume of water. "Jesus," Cappy shouted. "Let's get the fuck outa here."

Laughing, they ran back to the car and drove away. LATER, AT BARAKAT'S HOUSE, they were playing basketball, not because they wanted to, but because they couldn't help it. Too much cocaine: too cold to go out. Plus, a basketball game on TV, the volume on 84, and the Eagles on the iTunes, volume at 11. The ball was a wad of two sheets of typing paper, the basket was purely virtual-a blank spot above a door. The idea was to hit the blank spot with a shot, which was too easy unless they stayed right in each other's faces, and after a couple of points, it turned into war, a raucous fight to get the paper wad in the air, the two of them tumbling over chairs, tables, an ottoman, Cappy blowing a nosebleed, spraying blood around the room, Barakat driving down the lane between the couch and an easy chair…

When they quit, Cappy was leading 18 to 14, but he collapsed first, flat on the carpet, and groaned, and laughed, and said, "I'm fucked," and he also thought it might have been the best twenty minutes of his life, except for those nights roaring up the 15; the best night with somebody.

Barakat said, breathing hard, "I will tell you something, Cappy. This is serious. I know how I can get out from all this police business."

"Yeah?"

"Yes. I thought of it now, one minute ago. There is this man, from my town in Lebanon, his name is Shaheen."

"Shaheen."

"Shaheen. He is nothing, but he thinks he is a big man. He is another doctor, but he is not so much. But." His heart was pounding from the game, and the cocaine, and he stopped to take a half-dozen deep breaths.

"But," Cappy said, prompting him.

"Shaheen has an accent. More accent than I. And he is nothing. I am thinking, if Shaheen dies, and if in his room there are some drugs from the hospital, what do we think?"

"We think he is the man the cops are looking for, inside?"

"That's what we think," Barakat said.

They breathed together for a while, then Barakat asked, "You have a girlfriend?"

"No. Nope. Not so much."

"Are you a virgin?"

"Nope. 'Course not."

"Hah. I know a place in Minneapolis," Barakat said. "These girls."

Cappy rolled up on his side. "Hookers?"

"That's too bad," Barakat laughed. "One of them, she told me that she was a therapist."

"I don't know what that is, exactly," Cappy said.

"Like a doctor… like a psychiatrist. You know, to give you mental help."

"I could use some mental help."

"These girls, they like cocaine. They like amphetamine. They like marijuana, but we don't have marijuana. They like money."

"Don't have much money," Cappy said.

"There is this American song," Barakat said. "I don't know it, but one part says, 'The candy man don't pay for pussy."'

"Yeah?"

"We got some candy," Barakat said. He staggered to his feet. "We got lots of candy."

"What about Shaheen?" Cappy asked.

"Girls first. Then Shaheen," Barakat said. CAPRICE GARNER'S old man had beat him like a bass drum from the time he was a baby until he was fourteen, when he ran to California, thinking to become a beach bum or a movie star. He got as far as Bakersfield and a job as a roofer, a skinny kid with a thousand-yard stare and bad scars on his face, back, and soul, and then he fell drunk off a roof one spring morning and broke both of his legs.

With no medical insurance, he took what he could get, the legs fixed at a charity hospital, sweating out the summer in a concrete-block apartment with both legs in casts, no air-conditioning. The guy next door was a biker, took pity on him, brought him beer, crackers, cheddar cheese, and summer sausage. Back on the job, and still under the influence of the biker, Cap saved his money and bought a used Harley Softail and a window air conditioner.

Did the biker thing.

Let his hair grow down to his shoulders. Bought a high-end leather jacket and chaps at a Harley rally. Pierced an ear for a silver-skull earring, pierced a lip for a steel ring, bought himself a rich selection of do-rags. Got a tattoo on his back, ten inches across, a motorcycle wheel with the words Razzle-Dazzle.

Took some shit because of his youth. Had one guy who kept talking about taking Caprice into the desert and gang-fucking him, to break him in, the guy said. The guy laughed about it, but Caprice thought there might be something underlying it, so he killed him.

Went to his house with a street gun, and when the guy answered the doorbell, shot him in the heart and ran away in the night, the guy's girlfriend screaming from the kitchen.

Nobody figured that one out. But he was riding as an indie, and anybody might try to ride over an indie. He did the reasonable thing and got himself the Judge.

People who pissed him off tended to disappear, and bikers got careful when they were around him. Nobody knew, but they knew. He encountered Shooter Chapman, a fellow Minnesotan, in a friendship ride for cancer or heart health or kidneys or some shit like that, where the old guys all had flags on the backs of their trikes. BY THE TIME he was old enough to be invited into a gang, he no longer wanted it: the brotherhood, the drinking, the ranking, the rules. He likedbeing alone. He could trust being alone. He dumped the Harley after he'd killed the man for his BMW, and the new long-distance ride, with the German name, set him further apart from the gangs.

Then one day he glanced at himself in a Burger King mirror, saw a piece of yellow cheese stuck to his lip ring.

He was a fuckin' joke, he thought, staring into the mirror. He needed to hone his act, he needed to get down to what he was.

He traded the high-end leathers for a fifties jacket that he found in Hollywood, black leather so old and sand-worn and sweat-soaked that it had turned brown. Got rid of the earring and the lip ring. Shaved his head. Threw away his do-rags. Bought a pair of Vietnam-era military goggles with round lenses and olive-drab canvas straps that made him look like a frog. Liked the look.

He got it so stripped down, so plain, so wicked, so weathered that when he walked into a biker place, everybody stopped talking to look at him. They knew he was out there, the place they talked about going, but never really did. He liked that, too.

Like the day a bunch of Angels rode into LA from San Bernardino, then hooked north up the PCH toward Santa Barbara, riding like a bunch of old women on their Harleys, graybeards with old fat chicks, Arrive Alive, Drive 55, and he'd blown their doors off, riding one-handed through the pack like a fuckin' guided missile at 110. He'd replayed that scene in his mind any number of hundreds of times…

When the roofing business went in the tank with the rest of the economy, and some bones turned up in the Mojave and got written about in the newspapers, Cappy moved back to Minnesota, looked up Shooter.

Shooter introduced him to the gang at Cherries, and got him a job throwing boxes at UPS. The good thing about UPS was, you worked all night, had a full twelve hours to drink and ride, catch four hours of sleep, and then, with a little help from your friend methamphetamine, the next shift.

With all that, Cappy…

Had never been laid. HE KNEW how it was done; he'd even seen it done, live and in color, on a table in the Dome Bar in Bakersfield, among the bottles of Heinz catsup and 57 sauce and the clatter of silverware. It hadn't been pretty, but it held his attention. BARAKAT TOOK HIM to a bar called Trouble on the west side of Minneapolis, out on Highway 55, Cappy filled with cocaine and trepidation. Barakat drifted through a crowd unnaturally large for the crappy kind of bar it was, black light and brass poles, and hooked them up with three women named Star, Michellay, and Jamilayah. There was talk of money, but Barakat flashed the Ziploc and they were out of there, across the street to the Shangri-La Motel, where the three women lived in adjoining rooms.

Star and Jamilayah, one white, one black, were all over Barakat, and Michellay, a thin blonde with a knife-edge nose and narrow lips, hung on Cappy's arm, which made him feel thick in the chest.

Like this was it.

And this was it, and it didn't take long, listening to Britney on the Wave CD, doing lines off the dresser top, playing grabass through the three rooms, and then they were on the beds, Barakat with his two, and Cappy with Michellay, who slipped him out of his pants like an eel out of its skin,

And heck,

Everything went Pretty Damn Well. BARAKAT, walking through the rooms, waving his erection around, laughing, "Look at this, you bitches, look at this one," and Cappy drinking out of a tap, bent over the sink, and Jammy goosing him, and him almost going through the mirror, then chasing her down, the black woman screaming, Cappy rolling on top of her and bang.

It went Pretty Damn Well again. LIKE RIDING out of Bakersfield, up into the hills and down the other side and out into the Mojave, screaming through the night with the wind in his face…

And they left at four o'clock in the morning, and Cappy leaned his head against the dashboard and said, "I think I just fucked a spook."

"About six times, my man," Barakat crowed, slapping him on the back. "You were wondrous."

"She was like… pink inside," Cappy said. They headed back into town, and Cappy felt a surge of gratitude toward Barakat. He hadn't known if it would ever happen, because women, generally, didn't care for him. He'd accepted that: there was something in him that cut them.

Now, he knew, you just had to find the right women. SHAHEEN WAS a more intricate situation, and Barakat more sober about it: "I have known him for a long time. He is nothing, but still, I have known him. I would like to do this quietly. No guns. We have to come and go, leave him behind…"

As an emergency room physician, Barakat had seen all kinds of trauma. After considering it, he decided that the best solution would be a blow to the head with something heavy. "When he is down, then we can finish him. The main thing, we attract no attention. With what the woman saw, Karkinnen, we don't want somebody describing me."

Shaheen lived in an anonymous tan-stucco apartment building in south Minneapolis. Barakat and Cappy left the van on the street and walked back to it, in the night, and Barakat said, "His light's on."

"He have a girlfriend?"

"Shaheen? No. There's a girl back home that he's supposed to marry, fixed by his father. But he's told me he doesn't care for her."

"Don't care about that-I just wondered if he had one, if she's up there."

"What are your ideas for this?" Barakat asked. "To be quiet about it."

"Got no ideas," Cappy said. "Just be simple and do it." THE APARTMENT building had an interior door that was supposed to be locked, but Barakat pulled on it, hard, and the lock popped and they went through.

"How'd you know about that?" Cappy asked.

"Lock has been broken for two years," Barakat said. "Nobody uses their key anymore." SHAHEEN PEEKED around the door to see who it was, then let them in. "Now what? Has something happened?"

"We came to tell you that nothing has happened, everything is okay," Barakat said. "The police have found the people who did it, and they were killed."

"The police killed them? I didn't hear…"

And they got into it, talking in circles about the people who'd robbed the hospital. Cappy had come lounging in the door behind Barakat. Shaheen glanced at him and then turned to his talk with Barakat, glancing sideways at Cappy from time to time, but not asking who he was, or what he was doing with Barakat.

Shaheen's apartment was furnished in Poor Student, with ramshackle bookcases holding dozens of texts, piles of medical papers. A couch faced two old easy chairs, with a glass-topped coffee table between them, and, to one side, a wooden desk with a computer, printer, and more piles of paper. A bar separated a kitchenette from the living room. There were two interior doors, both open, one leading to a bathroom, the other to a bedroom. They could see the toilet stool in one and the end of a bed in the other.

Shaheen smoked. A large glass ashtray sat on the dining bar; as they talked, they moved past it, toward the circle of the couch and chairs. Cappy picked up the ashtray. Shaheen's back was to him and he lifted it in one hand, a question. Barakat gave him a tiny nod, and Cappy stepped toward Shaheen, who started to turn, and slammed it into his head, an inch behind his ear.

Shaheen went down as though shot. Barakat put his hands on his hips and said, "You know, I hate to see this."

"A little late to stop now," Cappy said.

"Oh, we can't stop." He knelt down and pushed a finger into Shaheen's neck. "Still alive," he said.

Cappy said, "Here," and he knelt beside the supine man, pinched his nose, put his hand over Shaheen's mouth, and pressed. Shaheen was profoundly unconscious, and never resisted. After a moment, he began to tremble and shake, and then he died.

Barakat checked again and said, "Well, that's that. Good-bye, Addie." Then he rolled him, fished his wallet out of his pocket, and took out a wad of cash. "He doesn't trust banks-there may be some more around, maybe in the refrigerator."

They found an envelope with $1,100 under an ice-cube tray; Cappy probed the bedroom, but found nothing more. Barakat had brought with him a dozen sample boxes of Viagra, distributed through hospitals and doctors' offices, two boxes of Tamiflu, and three bottles of stimulants.

They wiped them, then handled them with Shaheen's dead but still sweaty hands, and then put them in a shoe box under Shaheen's bed. The stimulants had the hospital's name on them.

"Now, we go away," Barakat said. They wiped the ashtray and touched the doorknob only with a paper towel, careful not to wipe it, and were gone.

"The thing about this is, this solves several long-term problems I have had," Barakat said, as they walked back down the sidewalk to the car. "I never liked Addle. He was always trying to climb out of his place. Also, he spied on me for my father."

"Hope he didn't tell your old man about the hospital."

"He didn't know about the hospital for sure. He thought I did it, but he wasn't sure. And now, it's not a problem," Barakat said. "You hungry?"

Cappy nodded. "I could use a bite… Man, like that spook was all pink down there, you know? I didn't know that about them."

He didn't think about Shaheen, because Shaheen was now irrelevant.