Shrake asked, "Are you Harriet Brown?"
"Honey Bee Brown," she said. "I had my name changed. How'd you know that?"
"Ran the plates on your car," Shrake said. "You're the bartender."
"Uh-huh. What's going on?"
Lucas was already behind the bar, headed for the door, Marcy a step behind him. "We're investigating the Haines-Chapman murders."
"What?"
No question that she was shocked. Lucas stopped and asked, "Did you know them well?"
"Well, sure, but the last time I talked to them… Christ, it was only a couple nights ago. They said they were going to Green Bay. They had a friend over there who had a job for them."
"Who was that?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. But they're dead?"
"Yes. I'm sorry."
"God, the brothers are gonna be freaked," she said.
"They know," Lucas said. "We told them last night."
"They know? They didn't even tell me?"
Lucas said, again, "I'm sorry."
Brown turned on her heel and pushed through the swinging door into the back, and Lucas looked at Shrake and Marcy, shrugged, and followed her.
The back of the bar was cold, with the loading dock door open. A beer distributor's truck was parked in the garage-door opening, and a heavyset man in a Budweiser shirt was moving kegs and cases in and out of the storage area on a dolly. They turned the corner, to the small office.
The door was closed, but through the window they saw Joe Mack sitting inside, facing a skinhead on the other side of a desk. They were both looking up at Honey Bee Brown, who was screaming at Joe Mack. They could hear the screams, but couldn't make out the words. Lucas said to Marcy, "That's him behind the desk," and he saw Mack look up, see them, and say to the skinhead, though he couldn't hear the word, "Cops."
The skinhead turned to look at him-a prematurely bald twenty-five or so, Lucas thought, a white kid with ghetto eyes and work muscles, rather than gym muscles. His flat blue eyes looked at Lucas without fear or sympathy, and he shook his head and tapped some papers on the desk. Honey Bee started shouting again, but the skinhead said something that shut her up. She turned and stormed past them, tears running down her cheeks, saying, as she passed, "What a bunch of fuckin' fuckers."
Marcy watched her go: "Must have one of those fuck-words-a-day calendars," she said.
Lucas knocked on the office door, and Joe Mack stood up and opened it.
"We need to talk to you," Lucas said. "Now."
"Just finishing up," Joe Mack said. "I sold my van."
Lucas recognized the titling papers, and nodded. The skinhead asked Joe Mack, "We all done?"
"Take it all down to the DMV, and it's yours. Gotta get insurance right away, though. I'm calling my insurance company today and canceling mine."
"Do that, but I think my other insurance covers me for thirty days," the skinhead said.
"Don't fuck it up. Throw some extra boxes if you got to," Joe Mack said.
The skinhead stood up and squeezed past Lucas. "Pardon me," he said. His voice was toneless, nothing implied at all. He walked past the Budweiser guy, hopped off the ramp, jingling the keys Joe Mack had given him. "SO WHAT'S UP?" Joe Mack asked.
The ramp was cold, so Lucas, Marcy, and Shrake squeezed into the small office and closed the door. Marcy took the visitor's chair, while Lucas stood against the wall and Shrake against the door.
Marcy identified herself, and then said, "You know these guys." She waved at Lucas and Shrake. "So, Joe. We talked to a bunch of people last night, and some lab people this morning, and a witness to the robbery at University Hospitals, and your name kept coming up. First of all, we identified Michael Haines with a DNA test as one of the men who robbed the hospital. We got a whole bunch of people to tell us that you and your brother are the people closest to Chapman and Haines, and that you and your brother are the most likely people around to move a big load of drugs out of the Cities down the Seed pipelines to the Angels on the West Coast or the Outlaws on the East Coast. And lastly, we've got a witness who saw you coming out of the parking garage at the hospitals, and who has identified you from a photo on your driver's license. We know all about the haircut and the shave, and when you got them. We thought you might have something to say about that."
Joe Mack was staring at her with increasing fascination, and when she finished, sat with his mouth open for a few seconds, then said, "That's bullshit." But he said it with the peculiar downcast despondency that said he did do it; and that they all knew it.
Lucas relaxed: almost done here. "Joe, this is a murder charge. But there's a lot of other stuff going on. Somebody's trying to kill the witness, but that won't happen now. We've got her totally hidden and covered-and if you're not in on that part, we can probably cut a deal with you. If you are in on that part… then, you know, you do the crime, you do the time."
There was a knock on the door, and Shrake leaned forward, away from the door, opened it a crack and said, "We're having a private meeting here." Honey Bee Brown got her face wedged in the crack of the door and said to Joe Mack, "You asshole, Shooter and Mikey are dead. What kind of bullshit deal is that? They were our friends, but you just don't give a shit." She started to cry.
Joe Mack said to her, "Aw, Honey, I don't know what the fuck is going on. These guys say Mike held up the hospital."
Shrake said, "Miss Brown, Honey Bee, we need to have some privacy here, we're interviewing-"
From behind them all, the Budweiser guy called, "Hey, Joe-you gotta sign the invoice. I'm running late."
Joe Mack said, "Oh, for Christ's sakes," and he said to Shrake and Lucas, "This'll take one minute." Honey Bee stepped back and Joe Mack stepped around the desk to where the Budweiser guy was waiting with a slate computer, and he said to Joe Mack, "Okay, we've got sixteen…"
And Joe Mack was gone. He stepped past Lucas, cleared Shrake, and suddenly sprinted past the Budweiser guy through the crack of daylight between the back of the truck and the edge of the garage door and off the dock.
The move was so unexpected that he was gone before the cops got out of the office, and then Lucas, going after him, crunched into Honey Bee and then the Budweiser guy, and Lucas and Honey Bee went down. Shrake, who was faster than Lucas anyway, was out the door, Marcy two steps behind him. Lucas scrambled to his feet and got through the door quick enough to see Joe Mack vault a fence that separated the back of the bar from a neighboring house, and disappear.
Shrake was thirty or forty yards behind him, but running in boots and a heavy coat, and losing ground fast. Marcy was farther back. Shrake clambered over the fence and kept running, while Lucas swerved toward the street and ran past the surveillance car where Martin had just hit the ground and shouted, "Was that him?"
"He's running," Lucas shouted. "Get in the car, get in the car…" As SOON AS the woman cop began to talk, Joe Mack began to panic, his heart up in his throat. They knew. They had a witness, they knew about the haircut, moving the drugs, the whole works. The minute he saw the daylight, the Budweiser guy standing there with the invoice in his hand, he bolted. He didn't think about it, he ran.
Joe Mack was fast. He'd been a sprinter in high school, and he wasn't wearing heavy winter stuff-he was wearing the light jacket and gym shoes he wore in the back end of the bar, where it was on-and-off warm, with trucks coming and going.
Now, on the run, he needed to get inside. If he didn't, he'd freeze. He ran through a block of backyards, and then another, zigging and zagging around houses and garages and fences and parked boats and hedges, got tired, turned downhill to his left, made it across a street, and another one… ran past a house, jumped a fence, collided with a birdfeeder, vaulted another fence in a right-angle turn, ran along a hedge and a garage.
And there was Jill MacBride, getting into her minivan.
Mack hit her in the back, and she screamed but he lifted her with brute strength across the driver's seat, picked up the keys she'd used to open the van's door, and shoved the keys in the ignition and slammed the door and screamed at her, "Shut up, shut up, shut up…" and backed out of the driveway. Ten seconds later, he was down the block and around the corner. In his rearview mirror, he saw a man sprint across the end of the street, running in the wrong direction.