Lyle Mack said, "Listen… we're bar owners. We make money at it. These guys are customers, but they're not good friends or nothing. They always come in together, they hang together. And you know, they bullshit with the guys, but they were partners. They hung with each other."
"They gay?" Shrake asked.
Joe Mack snorted. "I don't think so. They were Seed. Seed don't take gays."
"No gays, no sex perverts of any kind," Lyle Mack said.
"When was the last time they were in?"
The two brothers looked at each other, and then Lyle Mack said, "Could have been Saturday. I'm pretty sure they were here on Saturday night."
"Did they seem nervous, or worried, or scared?" Lucas asked. "Were they hanging with anyone new?"
Lyle Mack exhaled, looked at his brother, back at Lucas, and said, "Listen, if we, you know… if we talk to you, this gets out, we're done. The place gets wrecked, we get the shit beat out of us, or killed."
"We don't talk," Lucas said.
"If the information is good," Shrake added. "If it's not good, we might talk."
Lyle Mack said, "Saturday night, they were hanging with Anthony Melicek and Ron Howard. Drank a few beers. They were on the Deer Hunter for a couple hours."
"The Deer Hunter?" Shrake asked
"Game machine," Joe Mack said.
"Where do we find these guys?" Lucas asked. He was writing their names in his notebook.
"I don't know," Lyle Mack said. "You've probably got their addresses. Or Ron's, anyway. He's on probation, some kind of thing with his old lady."
"You mean, he beat her up," Lucas said.
"No, no. I mean he and his old lady are on probation," Lyle Mack said. "I'm not sure exactly what they did, but they might have been selling stuff."
"Stolen stuff."
"Maybe. If you tell anybody we told you this…"
"Who else did they hang with?"
"Man, they hung with each other…" THEY HAD two names, and not much more; and assured the brothers that they would hang around in the parking lot, talking to customers coming and going, so that Melicek and Howard wouldn't know where their names had come from.
Lucas stood up, took a card out of his wallet, and dropped it on the desk. "If you hear anything, it would behoove you to call me. No motorcycle big-shot bullshit, burning the card or any of that; just a quiet call. Nobody will know, and it might be useful to you sometime, to have a guy you can call. If you know what I mean."
SHRAKE LED the way out, Lucas a step behind; when they'd gone through the door into the front, Lyle Mack said to Joe, "We're in a lot of fuckin' trouble, Joe."
Joe Mack said, "We oughta get out of here."
"Can't," Lyle Mack said. "If it was only a robbery, we might get out of town. Murder, they'd come after us. Come after you. We gotta find that chick and shut her up." THERE WERE still fifteen or twenty people in the bar, but in clusters now, four and five together. From behind the bar, Lucas called, "Can I have your attention? Anybody here know Mikey Haines or Shooter Chapman?"
Dead silence.
"I know some of you must be their friends, if they had any friends," Lucas said. "Somebody took them out and blew their faces mostly off, with a shotgun, and I would like any opinions anybody's got about that."
More silence, then one voice, "We got no opinions."
Shrake said, "If you get home and find out you got an opinion, about who may be executing Seeds, you call the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and ask for Agent Shrake. S-h-r-a-k-e. Shrake."
"The reason you should do that is, being a tough guy is just fine, but if somebody's shooting you in the back of the head with a shotgun, from an ambush, like they did with Shooter and Mikey, tough isn't good enough," Lucas said. "So you got any ideas, it might be your own life you're saving." THEY DID SPEND fifteen minutes in the parking lot, grabbing people as they came and went-mostly went-but got no more names.
"Can't talk to us in public," Shrake said. "Gang law."
"Talk about the cold shoulder," Lucas said. "My shoulder's frozen all the way down to my ass."
"Let's go. Look up those other two guys," Shrake said. "We can come back if we need to."
Lucas looked back at the club. Lyle Mack was staring out a window at them, his head visible from the neck up, like a bust of Beethoven, or somebody.
Tony Soprano, maybe. BACK IN THE CAR, Shrake got on his phone and got addresses for Anthony Melicek and Ron Howard, the two men named by Mack as friends of Chapman and Haines. Howard lived in Cottage Grove, a suburb to the southeast, and he was on probation, for theft. Melicek lived in the opposite direction, on the edge of downtown Minneapolis, not far from the Metrodome.
"Howard," Lucas said. He punched Howard's address into the SUV's navigation system, and they headed east. As they drove, Shrake called around until he found Howard's probation officer, a woman named Melanie. They talked for a few minutes, and Shrake rang off.
"She says Howard and his wife got caught stealing eight hundred and sixty board-feet of walnut and cherry from a wood specialty place in Shakopee. Got caught loading it onto their pickup. She says there was an argument about money he'd given them for some wood, and he told the cops he was just taking what he was owed. She said he was probably right about what he was owed, but he broke through a back door, so there it was. They both got probation. He had some arrests six or eight years back when he was running with the Seed, drugs, firearms, did some county-jail time over in Wisconsin. She says he's not a problem."
"Good. I'm not in the mood for a big deal."
"Neither am I." A minute later: "I wish Weather wasn't involved. I mean… you know."
"Yeah, and she won't budge, either," Lucas said. "She'll be over at the hospital every day. Marcy's not getting anywhere inside the hospital. I might have to go over there with my nutcracker."
"I've done hospitals before," Shrake said. "You know what the problem is? Doctors. No offense, you know, about Weather being a doctor…"
"S'okay."
"They're so sure they know everything. They were the smartest kids in high school, which is how they got in premed, and they were the smartest guys in premed, which is how they got in med school, and then they get this big piece of paper that says, 'Yup, you're the smartest,' and they truly believe that shit. They will tell you everything you need to know about your job. They never answer questions-they'll tell you that you don't need to know that answer. You need to know the answer to something else."
"Hey, I live with one," Lucas said. "And she's a surgeon. They're worse than everybody but the shrinks."
"And you gotta shrink for your best friend…"
"Almost intolerable," Lucas said. "Goddamn Weather, if I didn't love her, I'd choke the shit out of her about twice a day."
"To say nothing of your goofy daughter," Shrake said. "No offense again, but she really does scare me. Sometimes, she acts like a forty-five-year-old narc."
Lucas laughed and said, "The sad thing is, I've never been happier."
"Well, that's nice," Shrake said. "I mean, that really is. That makes one."
"One what?"
"Happy cop." HOWARD LIVED in a rambler-style single-story house halfway down a hillside, brown fiberglass siding with a two-car garage on one end; bright light was shining through the three windows in the garage door. A pickup and an old Camry were parked in the driveway.
Lucas looked at the dashboard clock: ten-forty-five. Not too late. Shrake had taken the pistol out of his pocket and put it back in its holster, and now took it back out and stuck it in the pocket. "Better safe," he said.
Lucas rang the doorbell, and a moment later a woman came to the door and peeked out behind a chain. "Who is it?"
"We're with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension… state police," Lucas said. "We're talking to people who knew Mike Haines and Shooter Chapman."
"Oh… jeez. Just a minute." She pushed the door closed and the chain rattled, and she said, "Ron's in the shop. We thought somebody might come by."