John Sandford - Storm prey

"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.