Storm Prey Read Online Free PDF Page B

a piece of zombie flesh. She was a goodlookin’ woman, Lyle Mack thought, who ruined it all when she did something like that, and she did something like that all the time.
    “A fuckin’ hot fudge sundae,” he said, patiently. “Get me a hot fudge sundae. Put the hot fudge in the microwave so it’s really hot.”
    She shook her head, looked at her watch—it was five minutes after eight o’clock in the morning, a weird time for a hot fudge sundae, but she got up and wandered off to the front of the bar. Lyle Mack walked behind her, shut the door, and turned back to Joe.
    “You crazy fuckers,” he said, shaking his head. “You couldn’t have done worse if you’d shot a cop. You dumb sonsofbitches.”
    “That fuckin’ Mikey,” Joe Mack said. “And I don’t think sendin’ us to Eddie’s is gonna do much good. How many times have you heard about Shooter killing the colored dude out in California?”
    Lyle Mack shook a finger at him. “That’s why they aren’t going to Eddie’s.”
    “They aren’t?”
    “We got no choice, Joe. That old fart scratched Mikey,” Lyle Mack said. “That means the cops got DNA on him. You remember when Mikey fucked that high school chick over in Edina and the cops came and made him brush his gums? That was DNA. About two minutes from now, they’re going to come looking for him, and they’ll give us up bigger’n shit.”
    Joe Mack thought about that for a few seconds, then a frown slowly crawled over his face. “If you’re talking about killing them, I mean, fuck you. I’m not killing anybody,” Joe Mack said. “I mean, I couldn’t do it. I’d mess it up.”
    Lyle Mack was nodding. “Me and you both, Joe Mack. We gotta get hold of Cappy.”
    “Ah, man.” Joe thought about Cappy for a minute, and then thought about getting a drink.
    “Got no choice,” Lyle Mack said. He listened toward the front of the bar for a minute, then said, “Don’t tell Honey Bee about this. She likes those boys, and she’d get upset.”
    “What if Cappy ... I mean, Shooter and Mikey is his pals.”
    “I don’t think anybody is Cappy’s pals,” Lyle Mack said. “Cappy is his own pal.”
     
     
    OUT IN THE Trans Am, Haines said, “Hope Honey Bee’s got Home Box Office.”
    “Gotta stop at the house first,” Shooter said.
    “Lyle said—”
    “It’s Lyle that worries me,” Chapman said. “I could see him thinkin’. He’s worried about us.”
    “About us?” Haines didn’t understand.
    “About us givin’ him up. I could see his beady little eyes thinkin’ it over. So he sends us out to Honey Bee’s, which is so far out in the country a goddamn John Deere salesman couldn’t find us. Why is that? Maybe he wants to get us alone and do us.”
    “But he said we can’t be seen,” Haines whined. “He said we’re going to Eddie’s.”
    “Well, he’s sorta right about not bein’ seen, but we gotta take the chance,” Chapman said. “We gotta run by the house, grab the guns, and then we can take off. Turn the furnace down. If we was going to Eddie’s for a month, we’d at least turn the furnace down. Take the shit out of the refrigerator. Take us two minutes.”
    The chrome yellow Trans Am fishtailed around the corner; a great car, in the summer, but with its low-profile, high-performance rubber, a pig on ice.
     
     
    LUCAS FINISHED DRESSING, checked himself in the mirror: charcoal suit, white shirt, blue tie that vibrated with his eyes. Weather said, “And now, something occurred to me this very minute. When I was going in the parking ramp, a van was coming out really fast. We almost ran into each other.”
    “You weren’t driving too fast, were you?” Of course she was; he’d given her a three-day race-driving course at a track in Vegas, as a birthday present, and she’d kicked everybody’s ass.
    Weather ignored him. “The man in the passenger seat looked like a lumberjack or something. One of those tan canvas coats that lumberjacks wear. Long hair,