Storm Prey (6 page)

THEY RODE along in silence for a while, looking at the winter countryside, then Lyle Mack said, over his shoulder to Cappy, "One thing I gotta tell you. If they're sitting on the couch in the front room, it's a purple couch, we gotta get them off it. We can't shoot them on that couch. Honey Bee would have a fit. We need to get them up on their feet."

"Not on the couch," Cappy said.

"It's velour, and it's brand-new," Lyle Mack said. "If we do them on the couch, the couch is toast. She'd be really, really pissed. She just got it from someplace like Pottery Barn. One of those big-time places."

"Okay."

Joe Mack asked, "What do you think about the van? Pretty nice, huh?"

"It's okay," Cappy conceded. He looked in the back. With one rear seat folded, he could get the BMW in there, no problem.

They were coming up to the turnoff, and as they came down off the blacktop onto the gravel road, Lyle Mack said, "Okay, listen, I got an idea."

HONEY BEE's house wasn't much, an early twentieth-century clapboard farmhouse with a front porch that was no longer square to the rest of the structure, and a round gravel driveway big enough to circle a pickup with a two-horse trailer. The barn was newer, red metal, with a loft for hay. A detached garage was straight ahead, an exercise ring off to the left.

They pulled in, and the Macks climbed out of the van, opened the side door and took out the big bag of Home Depot stuff. Instead of walking up to the house, they walked back to the barn, talking loudly. Lyle Mack slipped on what might have been a big puddle of frozen horse urine--it was yellow, anyway, and ice--and they went to the barn door and Lyle Mack went inside while Joe Mack waited outside. Joe Mack said to Lyle's back, "I'm gonna be sick. I think we oughta call it off."

"Gone too far," Lyle Mack said. "Just hold on. It's your ass we're trying to save."

A minute later, Joe Mack said, "Ah, shit, they're coming," and Lyle Mack said, "Uh-huh."

Outside, Joe Mack called, "Lyle's looking at one of the horses. Honey Bee's worried that one of them got something."

Lyle Mack heard a reply, couldn't quite make it out, and then, closer, heard Shooter Chapman say, "Horse's supposed to be good eatin.' I saw on TV that the French eat 'em."

"Yeah, the fuckin' French," Joe Mack said, friendly. His face was white with the stress, and he could feel the words clogging in his throat.

Then Haines said something and Lyle Mack didn't understand quite what it was, just that Chapman and Haines were walking up. He stepped outside and saw the two men coming up to the van with its open door, his brother frozen like a statue.

Haines glanced at the open van as he passed and said, "Hey..."

Cappy was right there with the shotgun. He shot Haines in the face and, without looking or waiting or flinching, pumped once and shot Chapman.

Both men went straight down. Cappy stepped out of the van, pumped again, stepped close, carefully, kicked Chapman's foot, looked for a reaction, got none, kicked Haines. Then they all looked around, like they were sniffing the wind: looking for witnesses, listening for cars. Nothing.

"They're gone," Cappy said. "No couch, no problem."

"Okay," Lyle Mack said. His heart was beating so hard that he thought it might jump out of his chest. Chapman and Haines looked like big fat bloody dead dolls, crumpled on the beaten-down driveway snow. Shooter might have looked surprised, but the surprise part of his face was missing, so it was hard to tell. Mikey had a hand in his pocket and Lyle Mack could see the butt of a pistol in his fist. Joe was leaning against the barn, with a stream of spit streaming out of his mouth.

"Look at this," Lyle Mack said to Joe Mack. "They got guns. I bet the motherfuckers were going to kill us. Can you believe that? Can you believe it?"

"Well, yeah," Joe Mack said, spitting again. "They were probably thinking the same way we were."

They looked at the bodies for a few more seconds, and then Lyle Mack said, "Well, I'll get the garbage bags. We won't need the Scrubbing Bubbles. See if there's a shovel in the barn, we should scrape up any ice that's got blood on it."

Joe Mack went into the barn and found a No. 5 grain scoop, which would be okay for the snow, and scraped it away, though it was hard work; the blood just kept coming. Lyle fished the wallets out of the two men's pockets, retrieved the money he'd given to Chapman, and passed it to Cappy. "Your two thousand. It's my money, not theirs. I loaned it to them this morning."

Cappy nodded and took a drag on his Camel. Lyle said, "And don't go throwing that Camel on the ground. You always see in cop shows where somebody finds a cigarette butt."

Cappy nodded again, and Joe and Lyle put on the gloves and together rolled the dead men into the contractor's bags, while Cappy sat in the van door and watched. When they hoisted the bodies into the back of the van, thought Joe Mack, they looked exactly like dead men in garbage bags.

"Don't want to go driving around like this," Cappy said.

"No, we don't," Lyle Mack said. "I know a place we can dump them. I got lost one day, driving around. Way back in the sticks. Won't find them until spring, or maybe never."

To his brother: "Joe Mack, you take their car, drop it off at the Target by their house."

They scraped up the last bit of blood, wiped the grain scoop with a horse towel, and threw the towel in another bag, along with the rubber gloves. "Burn that when we get back to the bar," Lyle Mack said. "Take no chances."

"How far to the dump-off spot?" Cappy asked.

"Eight or nine miles. Back road, nobody goes there. We can put them under this little bridge. Hardly have to get out of the van. No cops, no stops."

"What about the woman that saw me?" Joe Mack asked.

"We gotta talk about that," Lyle Mack said. He looked at Cappy.

"What woman?" Cappy asked.

3

SAME TIME, SAME STATION, doing it all over again.

Weather slept less well, with the anxiety of the prior day weighing her down. Again she got up in the dark, dressed, spoke quietly with Lucas, and went down to a quick breakfast and the car. Driving down the vacant night streets, to University, along University to the hospital complex. Nothing in her mind but the babies.

Alain Barakat waited for her, one flight up from the security door he'd opened the morning before, freezing in his parka, smoking. The place was a nightmare; dark, brutally cold. Barakat had grown up in the north of Lebanon, with beaches and palm trees. That he should wind up in this place ...

When he finished here, one more year, he would move to Paris. He'd gone online and found that his American medical certificate was good in France, though there would be some paperwork. Paris. Or maybe LA.

Only one good thing about Minneapolis: he could still get Gauloises, smuggled down from Canada. No: two good things.

The cocaine.

He took a long drag and thought about going back inside. Fuck this. He had nothing to do with anybody being dead.

BUT OF COURSE he did. The whole thing had been his idea. He'd seen a chance to steal a pharmacy key, and he'd taken it, without even knowing why at that moment. Or maybe he'd known why, but not how ...

Barakat had started with cocaine at the Sorbonne, buying it from a fellow student who was working his way through college. He'd tried other stuff, uppers, downers, a little marijuana, a peyote button once, but none of it did it for him: the idea wasn't less control, it was
more
control.

That's what you got from the cocaine.

It had helped him through med school, but after that, in Miami, getting cocaine had not been a problem. Once in Minneapolis, for his residency, he'd asked around, found a guy who was recommended as a source for decent marijuana, the imported stuff down from Canada. A guy like that knew where to get cocaine.

So he bought his coke from a dealer named Lonnie, and then from a redneck named Rick, who took over Lonnie's route when Lonnie moved to Birmingham. Then Rick got hurt in a motorcycle accident, hurt really bad, and Barakat went stone cold sober for a week and a half, and it almost killed him.

One day Joe Mack showed up on his porch with a free baggie of blow.

Like the cocaine Welcome Wagon.

"Our friend Rick said you were one of his best guys, but he's gonna be out of it for a while ..."

At that point, Barakat was spending eight hundred dollars a week on cocaine, with no way to get more money. He hung at eight hundred, until one late night he was waiting at the pharmacy window, the key already in hand, and thought,
They've got no protection, and I know the guys who could take it away from them.

It all seemed so simple. And it should have been.

NOW HERE he was, freezing his ass off, trying to set up an assassination. Not simple anymore. Not uninteresting, though, if only he'd been working with a competent crew. The whole concept of crime was interesting: the strong taking from the weak, the smart from the stupid. A game, with interesting stakes ... if only he hadn't been working with the Macks.

At twenty minutes after five o'clock, a black Audi convertible rolled up the ramp, headlights bouncing when its tires bumped over expansion joints. The car swooped into a reserved parking place in the physicians' area. Five seconds later, a short blond woman got out and started toward the exit door opposite Barakat.

Had to be her--the same woman he'd seen in the elevator. He let the door close: he couldn't allow her to see him again. Even being in the same part of the building, where she might see him by accident, could trip off a memory.

He waited, nervous, stressed, sweating in the freezing cold, and when she'd gone through the door, went after her. And as he went, the thought crossed his mind: fix it now. Take her. She was a small woman in a deserted building, he could break her neck, who'd know what happened?

Just a thought, but it stayed with him. He might catch her at the elevators ... but when he got there, she was gone. A little feather of disappointment trickled across his heart, his gut. He could have done it.

So now, the question remained. Who was she, and where was she going?

She was early for most docs. They wouldn't normally arrive until sometime after six. On the other hand, the Frenchman's surgical team was supposed to start separating the twins ...

He went that way.

THIRTY PEOPLE milled in the hallway outside the special operating theater. Like most of the other docs, he'd found an excuse to look the place over--the special double operating table, the intricate anesthesia setup, the newly painted, sign-posted floor, an attempt to better choreograph the movements of the massive operating team, to keep the sterile and the non-steriles separate, even as they walked among each other.

He saw the blond woman, still in her long winter coat, talking to Gabriel Maret, the Frenchman. Maret was listening closely. She had to be somebody important.

Barakat was an emergency room doc, not on the team, or anything close to it, and all the team members knew each other, so he couldn't risk joining the crowd. What he could do, though, was climb into the small observation theater above the OR. If you wanted a seat, all you had to do was get there early. One of the team members would be narrating the surgical procedures for the observers. The woman, if she were central to the work, would be introduced.

LUCY AND LARRY RAYNES were with the children, who were still awake, but about to be moved to the operating theater. Sara saw Weather and her eyes misted up. She was still a baby, but she recognized the woman who'd caused her pain in the past. She began to cry, softly, and then Ellen started, not yet knowing why.

Lucy Raines bent over them, comforting them. Larry flapped his hands around, helplessly, and said to Weather, "They're about to give them something."

Weather nodded: "We're not the only ones who feel the stress. They're babies, but they know something is happening."

Ellen pushed against the sides of the hospital bed, and that torqued Sara, who stopped crying and thrashed with her hands. The babies could hear each other talking, but had never seen each other.

Larry said, "We just talked to Gabriel, he said everything was going smoothly."

"Yesterday was like a freak accident," Weather said. "Everything now is just like it was yesterday--maybe better. Maybe some of the nervousness got burned off."

"I felt terrible about that guy," Lucy said.

"So do I." Weather bent forward and kissed Sara on the forehead. "It's hard, baby," she said.

AN HOUR LATER, the twins were rolled into the OR, sedated, but not yet fully anesthetized. As the two anesthesiologists worked to position them, to rig them with the drip lines and to take a final look at the blood chemistry, to check their monitors, Maret wandered over to Weather and said, "It's time. No problems with the pharmacy this morning."

Weather nodded and followed him into the scrub room. A few seconds later, Hanson, the bone-cutter, followed them in, with his resident; the surgical assistant stood waiting behind Weather. They scrubbed silently, until Maret said, "That first day of practice, we started with Vivaldi. If no one objects . . ."

"Perfect," Weather said. She'd always had music in her ORs. "Start with 'Primavera.' "

"Your choice," Maret said, smiling at her. "You're okay?"

"Anxious to get going," she said. Her part, her first part, would be routine, nothing more than she did every day: cutting down to bone, cauterizing the bleeders, rolling back the scalp. Then, she'd get out of the way until the bone-cutter was done.

An anesthesiologist stuck his head in: "We're set. You want to say go?"

Maret looked at the team members in the scrub room, pursed his lips, smiled, nodded and said, "Go."

THE OBSERVATION THEATER was packed: team members had the first choice of seats, but after that, it was first-come first-seated, as long as you had the right ID. Barakat looked around: the watchers weren't just residents, but included a lot of senior docs on their own time. He was at the back, in the highest row of seats.

Down below, three nurses and two anesthesiologists clustered around the two small bodies joined at the skull; so close to perfection, and yet so far. Each was an attractive child--if there'd been another inch of separation, they'd have been just fine. Now they lay on the special table, brilliantly lit, cradled in plastic, asleep, their eyes covered and taped, the bottoms of their faces isolated in breathing masks.

The scrub room doors opened in, and a small woman led a first group into the OR. A man sitting in the first row of the observation theater said into a microphone, "Doctors Gabriel Maret, Weather Karkinnen, Richard Hanson. Dr. Karkinnen will begin ..."

She was masked, hatted, robed, gloved and slippered, wearing an operating shield over her eyes; but she was the woman from the elevator and the Audi, Barakat thought. Right size, right shape. Now that he knew her name, he could Google her, just to be sure.

The narrator said, "For those who just got here, the first procedure will be to open the scalp at the point of conjoin, to remove the first expander, and to prepare the bed for the initial craniotomy."

The surgical lights were miked. Barakat could hear Karkinnen talking with her surgical tech as they prepared the tools on a tray at her left hand. Karkinnen bent over the babies, with a surgical pen, her head blocking Barakat's view of what she was doing. Then Karkinnen straightened and asked an anesthesiologist, "Where are we?" and the anesthesiologist took a few seconds and then said, "We're good. Sara's heart looks good."

Karkinnen: "Dr. Maret?"

Maret looked around and said, "Everybody ... may God bless us all, especially the little children. Weather, go ahead."

With Vivaldi playing quietly in the background, Weather took the scalpel from the surgical tech, leaned over the skulls of the two babies. She'd used a surgical pen to indicate the path of the incision, and now drew the scalpel along it, the black line turning scarlet behind the blade.

ALL SKIN has its own toughness and flexibility, and from post-puberty to old age, there was so much variation that you never knew quite what you'd get when you made the first cut. Sometimes it was saddle leather, sometimes tissue paper. Older people often had papery skin, and so did the young, though it was different.

Cutting into the twins was like cutting into a piece of Brie; Weather had noted that in earlier operations and no longer really paid attention to it. There was almost no separation between scalp and bone. She cut the first jigsaw pattern, got one little arterial bleeder, burned it, then slowly peeled the skin away from the incision. The room was suffused with the scent of burning blood, not unlike the smell of burning hair.

Her first part had taken twenty minutes.

She hadn't done much, but at the same time, she thought, everything: they were under way. They could still turn back, but the bone-cutter was right there, with his custom surgical jigs. Once they were in, turning back would be more complicated.

"I'm out," she said.

"Looks good," Maret said. "Perfect."

SEPARATING THE TWINS was not a matter of simply cutting bone and then snapping them apart. The venous drainage inside the skull had to be carefully managed, or blood pressure would build in the babies' skulls and damage their brains, and likely kill them.

The brains themselves were covered by a sheath of thin, tough tissue called the dura mater, which acted like a seal between the brain and the skull, and channeled the blood away from the brain. The dura mater, in most places, was thick enough that it could actually be split apart--like pulling a self-stick stamp off its backing--leaving each brain covered with a sheet of dura mater.

However, the imaging had shown that there were a number of veins that penetrated the dura mater, and rather than returning to the original twin, instead drained to the other twin. Those veins had to be tied off, and, in the case of several of the larger ones, redirected and spliced into other veins that drained to the appropriate twin.