"Okay. Be cool. Did you get the cash out of the circuit breaker?"
She nodded at the phone. "Yes. I put it in a safe-deposit box at US Bank. Seventeen thousand dollars. Don't go to the bar. The cops are tearing the place apart."
"Okay. Now listen. Sit tight. Cooperate, but don't tell them I'm coming back, and don't tell them about this phone. Eddie's got a lawyer pal in Wisconsin who's done a lot of work for the Seed. He's gonna sign one-third of the bar over to you, make it look like you owned it for a couple years, and he's going to make a will for Lyle that leaves half of his share to you, and half to me. So we'll be half owners, but you gotta run it, okay?"
She sniffed. "Okay."
"I'll be back late tonight or tomorrow. We're coming, Honey Bee." BARAKAT TOOK the call from Joe Mack, who asked, "Have you seen Cappy?"
"I can get in touch," Barakat said.
"Tell him that the cops are looking for him. They might know about the van, too. He either better dump it, or dump the plates."
"Where are you?"
"On my way to Mexico. I ain't coming back, Al. Everybody's dead, and I don't know what's going on. I'm just heading out."
The dummy, being clever.
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.