"Five grand. That's fine. But I'm gonna have to owe it to you. We've got all that stuff we took out of the pharmacy, that's worth way more than five grand. But you'll have to be patient."

"Hey, I'll wait," Cappy said. "For a while, anyway."

"Deal," Lyle Mack said. He put the clean phone in his pocket and called his lawyer on the house phone. They talked for two minutes, and then the lawyer said, "I don't want to hear any more right now. Wait till the thing has settled down, then come see me."

That didn't help. He started to pace: he felt caged, like an animal. Joe Mack might have finished them off. JOE MACK sat in the van and talked with MacBride: "Look, I don't want to hurt you, and I won't. But the cops are… framing me. I took off. I freaked out and grabbed you, which I know I shouldn't have done, but now I'm in trouble for that."

"I won't testify against you, if you let me go," MacBride said.

Joe Mack wasn't the sharpest knife in the dishwasher, but he knew she was lying the moment the words were out of her mouth, and he almost laughed. "You'd turn me in the minute you got loose," he said. "I know that, you know that… when my buddy gets here, we're heading for Canada. There's good jobs up there, and they don't care who you are. Just be a little bit patient, and then you can tell the cops whatever you want."

He told her about working in the bar, and how the cops were trying to frame him for holding up the hospital. "We did not do that," he told her. "We did not. We got a good business, why'd we want to go around breaking into a hospital? But we're in an unpopular group, you know? The Seed? Have you heard of us?"

She shook her head.

"Well, we're really called the Bad Seed of America, Inc. We're a motorcycle club that got started in Milwaukee and Green Bay back, you know, a long time ago. My dad was a member…"

He told her about riding with the Seed, and she told him about getting laid off by the West Metro Credit Union. "I've got a job interview tomorrow at Macy's, in the credit department…" She had two daughters, she said, and was separated from her husband, but hoping to get back together after they worked out some issues. She was a sincere-sounding, dark-haired woman, and Joe Mack liked her well enough, though she was not really his style, too thin and small-breasted, with the beginnings of a satchel ass.

"I was just going to pick up Stacy when… you know. They're going to wonder what happened to me…" CAPPY GARNER parked in the green ramp and took the elevator down, walked through the underground plaza, found the blue ramp, and went up to the top level, pulled on a watch cap, turned up his collar, walked across the open top level, his hands thrust in the pockets of his new navy pea jacket. Joe Mack saw him coming and said to MacBride, "Here's my buddy. Now you stay down and everything will be okay. He can be a badass, so you don't want to see his face."

"I'll stay down," she promised.

Joe Mack got out of the van and Cappy came up and asked, "She inside there?"

"Yeah, but I made her stay down, so she couldn't see your face."

Cappy looked around the deck. "Don't see any cameras."

"No, but they'll figure out who done it anyway. She'll tell them."

"No, she won't," Cappy said. "Lyle says we get rid of her."

Joe Mack was taken aback. "What?"

"Get rid of her. Doesn't nobody but her know you grabbed her, so if we get rid of her, you're in the clear."

"Well, Jesus, we can't just… I mean, she's a nice lady."

"Little shit's gotta fall in everybody's life," Cappy said. He grabbed the van's side door to pull it back.

"Come on, Cappy," Joe Mack said. "Don't…"

"Already got a contract," he said. He pulled the door back. MacBride was lying on her stomach, and she looked at him, startled, and then asked, "Who are you?"

"I'm Cappy," Cappy said. He crawled into the van and pulled the door most of the way shut. Joe Mack, outside, shouted, "Goddamnit, Cappy… "

Cappy crawled over to her and she tried to crawl away, seized with desperation, and Cappy grabbed her left arm and yanked her halfway over on her back, but she struggled to get back on her stomach. He hit her once, hard, in the back of the head, and her face bounced off the floor, and the next time, when he yanked her over, she turned, and he lurched over her hips, one knee on each side. He tried to reach for her throat, but she cut at him with her nails, and he hit her again, on the side of the head, dazing her, and then got his thumbs under her chin.

He'd never strangled anybody, and thought there couldn't be too much to it, but she bucked and fought him, and his thumbs kept slipping off her windpipe; she tried to claw him again and he lost patience, hit her in the forehead, then caught her arms and pinned them with his legs, and went back into her throat, with his thumbs, and squeezed…

She was a thin woman, with no fat to protect her neck, and he felt something pop and her eyes widened and she stopped struggling and began to shake, and then her eyes rolled away. JOE MACK thought Cappy would shoot her or something, but after a second, heard MacBride start to scream, the scream suddenly cut off. Mack ran a few dozen yards away from the van, stopped, looked back at it, paced this way, then that, then ran back and pulled the door open. Cappy was sitting astride MacBride, strangling her. His hands were bleeding, where she'd scratched him, but she was all done with that. Her eyes had rolled up in her head, and her body had gone into a dead-shake. Cappy was riding her like a horse, a strange, stretched grin on his face, teeth showing. He held her until she was gone, then looked at Mack with his pale eyes, smiled, and said, "See, nothing to it."

"You're not going to kill me, are you?" Joe Mack asked.

"Why would I do that?"

"I thought maybe, you know, Lyle said something."

Cappy shook his head. "Nope. Didn't say nothing to me."

Joe Mack looked at MacBride's body and thought, Man, she looks really dead. She really was dead. A few minutes ago, she'd been talking about her daughters.

"We gotta go," Cappy said. "I'm parked in the Green Ramp."

"Where're we going?" Joe Mack asked, as they headed for the elevators.

"You're going over to that horse place, to start with. Hide out there for a few days."

Joe Mack said, "I don't know-Honey Bee was pretty pissed about Mikey and Shooter."

"Yeah, but she can't talk about it, because she was in on the hospital stickup. That's murder for her, too. So you hide out there, let your hair grow a little bit, maybe put on a mustache, and we'll clean up this witness woman, and then, you know… head for the border."

"Yeah… yeah." Joe walked along for a minute, then said, "Excuse me. I gotta puke."

8

LUCAS, MARCY, and the others circled through the neighborhood, on foot and by car, looking for Joe Mack, confused for a few minutes about exactly which town they were in. They finally settled on Mendota Heights and they got a couple of Mendota Heights cars out, but there were only a half-dozen cops on duty. The chief, whose name was Mark Grace, was a little pissed about the ruckus, until Lucas explained that they'd thought it'd be a routine interview.

"We were putting some pressure on the guy. We didn't think he'd do anything that stupid," Lucas said. It sounded lame in his own ears. "We sorta fucked up, but not really."

"Yeah, yeah," Grace said. "I guess it happens. The question is, is he holed up in somebody's house?"

"We don't know," Marcy said. "He got lost in those houses back there, and he could have gone anywhere."

"But not too far-he didn't have a coat," Lucas said.

"You look for tracks?"

"Yeah, but there are a lot of tracks. When we lost sight of him-"