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“That dude that died, it was like totally a freak accident. They said so on TV, he was on some meds that made him bleed. Wasn’t me. I kicked him a little.”
    “Punted the shit out of him,” said Joe Mack, passing back the pressure.
    “The old fuck scratched me,” Haines said. “He was hanging on.”
    “That was after you kicked him,” Joe Mack said.
    Lyle Mack asked, “How bad you hurt?”
    “Aw, just bled a little, it don’t show,” Mikey said.
    “Let me see,” Lyle Mack said.
    Mikey pulled up his pant leg. “Nothing,” he said. He looked like he’d been scraped with a screwdriver, a long thin scratch with some dried blood.
    The TV went back to the morning show where some crazy woman was talking about making decorations for Martin Luther King Day from found art, which seemed to consist of beer-can pull-tabs and bottle caps. They all watched for a minute, then Joe Mack said, “She’s gotta be on something bad. You couldn’t do that, normal.”
    Lyle Mack pointed the remote at the TV and the picture got sucked into a white dot. He scratched his head and said, “Well, now.”
    Honey Bee cracked her gum. “What’re we gonna do?”
    “Lay low,” Lyle Mack said. “Dump the dope at Dad’s farm. Put the guns in with the dope—they could be identified, too. Nobody touches anything for a month. You three ... no, Joe Mack, you better stay here. Honey Bee can give you a haircut. Cut it right down to a butch.”
    “Aw, no,” Joe Mack groaned.
    Lyle Mack rode over him: “Mikey and Shooter, you go out to Honey Bee’s. When Joe’s cleaned up, me’n him’ll come over. I think the three of you better get the hell over to Eddie’s. Hit a couple bars every night, let everybody see you, until nobody knows exactly when you got there, and then you can say you were over there a week before this shit happened.”
    “Man, it’s fuckin’ freezin’ over there,” Haines said. Eddie’s was in Green Bay.
    “It’s fuckin’ freezin’ here, and we can trust Eddie, and this shit wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t kicked that old man to death,” Lyle Mack said. “So shut up and go on over to Eddie’s. Wait until night. Get over to Honey Bee’s right now, until it’s dark. Don’t stop for no food, don’t get no beer, don’t let anybody see your faces. We don’t want anybody sayin’, ‘I saw him the day it happened.’”
    “What about, you know ...” Chapman glanced at the packs full of drugs. “This was supposed to pay us something.”
    Lyle Mack got to his feet, a short heavy man in a black fleece and jeans. He went out to the front of the bar and came back three minutes later with a thin pile of fifty-dollar bills. He cut the pile more or less in half and gave one stack each to Haines and Chapman. “You go on, now. That’s two thousand for each of you. It’ll keep you for a month, at Eddie’s. After we sell the shit, you’ll get the rest.”
    “Green Bay, dude,” Haines moaned.
    “Better’n Oak Park Heights,” Chapman said. Oak Park Heights was the state’s supermax prison.
    They all looked at each other for a moment, no sound other than a hum from a refrigeration unit, and Honey Bee’s gum-chewing, and then Lyle Mack said to Haines and Chapman, “So—take off. I’ll get over there soon as I can. You can get some pizzas from the freezer and take a couple cases of beer.”
    “Biggest score we ever did,” Haines said.
    “Yeah, but you had to go and fuck it up,” Lyle said.
     
     
    HAINES AND CHAPMAN got four pizzas and two cases of Miller, and shuffled out through the back, off the loading dock. Their 2002 Trans Am was leaning against a snowdrift, and Lyle Mack stood on tiptoe, looking out of the garage door windows, watching as the two got inside, still watching until the car turned the corner.
    Then he turned back to Joe Mack and Honey Bee and said, “Honey, go get me a hot fudge sundae.”
    “What?” Her jaw hung open, and he could see the wad of gum; it looked like