Storm Prey (22 page)

The sheriff nodded. "I'll get my boy on it."

A deputy said, "Ike's here."

IKE WAS A STOUT MAN, but hard fat, beer-belly fat, with a shiny red bald head and black-plastic-rimmed glasses on a full nose; with little yellow shark teeth under the nose, and water-green shark eyes. He was wearing a sixties army parka over a T-shirt. He was angry but was suppressing it: he'd dealt with the cops before.

Marcy held up her badge and said, "We're picking up evidence that your boys were here with the drugs. We're talking about murder, Ike. You're, what, sixty-five? We'll slam you in Stillwater for thirty years if you're in on it. So: where's Joe?"

"I ain't seen him." He put on a phony wild-eyed look, appealing to the cops. "I
ain't
seen him. He ain't been here. He knows better'n to draw the shit down on his old man."

Lucas said, "We're gonna get him, Ike. He's killed three or four people now. We're tearing the country up, and he's gonna fall. And when we get the lab results back, on these straps, your ass is grass."

"You find any dope? You won't find dope here, nosir. You'll find some Millers, but there's no dope. I don't allow it."

"Well, shoot, Ike, you made meth for ten years," one of the deputies said. "Everybody in the county knows it. You could smell it all the way down to Barronett."

"I don't know anything about any meth--"

"Ah, bullshit, you're wasting our time, Ike," Stephaniak said. "You could cooperate for fifteen seconds and we'd let you skate on the murder."

"... Maybe ..." Marcy said.

"Maybe," Stephaniak agreed. "But if you don't talk to us, and we find out you been hiding that boy, or that you know where he is ..."

"You went and burned the bags out in the incinerator, but you didn't burn them well enough," Lucas said. "We'll get them identified by the witness, and you're done."

Ike didn't ask, "What bags?" but said, "I don't know everything that goes in the fire. If Joe was up here, he didn't tell me. I work all day. I don't know everything that happens out here." He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, sniffed, and said, "I'm old. I'm gonna go lay down. If you don't mind."

"Put a cold rag on your head and think about it," Marcy said. "If you talk to us before I leave, we can deal. Once we're gone, you're toast. You get no second chances."

Ike looked around at all the cops, shook his head, muttered "fuckin' ..." and stalked through the house to the back bedroom.

When he was out of earshot, Stephaniak said to Lucas, "You were right about the bags. That's them, and he knows it."

IKE WAS IN the bedroom for fifteen minutes, then came out, got a beer, and sat in a platform rocker in front of the television and watched the cops take the place apart. No drugs. No anything, but the bag straps from the incinerator.

Marcy got her coat on, said to Ike, "We're leaving. Your last chance is walking out the door."

"Don't let it hit you in the ass," Ike said.

WEATHER AND VIRGIL got the names of French-passport employees. Virgil called Jenkins, who'd been down in the cafeteria, and went off to talk to some of the employees. Jenkins showed up, leaned against a wall. Weather put a copy of the list in her briefcase, and then went down and found the Rayneses, Jenkins tagging behind. She'd thought the Rayneses seemed shell-shocked before, and they weren't getting better.

"Those poor little babies," Lucy Raynes said. "They hurt so bad, I can see it in their eyes. Sara knows what's going on, I can see it, she knows her heart isn't working right. She's really scared."

Weather explained about pain control, ground that Maret had already been over, but she wasn't convincing because she really didn't know for sure what the twins were experiencing. They might be, she thought, in some kind of inexpressible pain, though the cardiologist said they were comfortable. But then, he didn't know, either, Weather thought. "God, this is awful," she said aloud. "We'd hoped to get through it in a hurry, but Sara's heart ... We should finish tomorrow. I really believe we will. We were ready to go this afternoon, but they started doing better. By this time tomorrow, we'll be done, and then the medical guys can really get in there with individual treatments ..."

"Just want to get done," Larry Raynes said. "Just ... over."

WEATHER FOUND a spot in an empty waiting lounge and took the paper out of her briefcase and looked it over: seventeen names, French nationals working in the hospital. All French nationals, not just doctors, of whom there were four.

She knew one of them, vaguely, an ENT guy who thought he was also a plastic surgeon. He had, in Weather's estimation, bungled a nose job or two or three. One of them, a black woman who found herself with a nose the size of a peanut, had been referred to Weather for help. Weather had reworked the nose, but the result, while better, had still been poor.

In general, Weather decided, if some French doc had to fall on a robbery charge, he was the one she'd pick. Not because she really thought he'd done it, but because it might save somebody's nose.

Jenkins was reading The
Complete Idiot's
Guide to the Middle East
Conflict,
and she stood up and said, "Give me a half hour. I need one more consult."

"Right here?"

"Upstairs."

"I'll come along."

"Jenkins..."

"Look, if you get killed, Lucas is gonna pound me on my annual review. Okay?"

THEY TOOK the elevator up two floors, and she left him sitting in a broken-down corridor chair while she went into the office of the head of surgery, a woman named Marlene Bach. Bach's secretary's desk was vacant, but Weather could see the other woman sitting in her office, her back to the door. She knocked: "Marlene?"

Bach turned in her chair and called, "Come on in, Weather."

Bach was a tall, thin woman, with a small head and dark hair, which gave her somewhat the aspect of a stork. She usually had a yellow No. 2 pencil stuck behind one ear, and had a reputation for efficiency and speed in the operating room. And, the OR nurses said, she listened to classic Whitesnake while she worked.

She had pinned a half-dozen large-format photos of a burn victim onto a corkboard on her office wall. The torso was nude, and the top half was covered with snarky black burns. Weather looked at them and said, "Electrical?"

"Yes. Blew him right off a power pole," Bach said. "He was hanging upside down for fifteen minutes before somebody went up after him."

"He gonna make it?"

"I don't know. He's forty-four, he's got fifty percent third-degree burns. Gonna be close." Rule of thumb: if the burns covered more of your body than your age deducted from one hundred, you'd probably die. Forty-four deducted from one hundred was fifty-six. Close.

"Looks like a lot of work," Weather said. She sat down and said, "Listen, I have a personal concern."

Bach nodded. "I heard. Somebody's trying to kill you. Or tried to, anyway."

"Yes. There's been some talk that the person in the pharmacy, who opened the pharmacy for the robbers, was a physician, and the witness thinks he might have had a French accent. And you know who I thought of ..."

"Halary," Bach said. "You really think ... ?"

"Not really. But I was wondering what you think? You know him better than I do."

"He's a weasel, but I don't believe he'd do anything like that," Bach said. "For one thing, his wife's a dermatologist with a big practice out in Edina. He really wouldn't need the money."

"I didn't know that," Weather said.

"And he's not a bad ENT, if he'd lay off the plastic surgery," Bach said. "I know that thing with the noses irritated you."

"Not as much as it irritated the owners of the noses," Weather said. And she said, "Hmm. How about a guy named Albert Loewe? Supposed to be a ..."

Bach was shaking her head: "Got hit by a car a month ago. In a supermarket parking lot. Broke both his legs. He was a mess, and he's still in casts."

"All right. Look, check this list. You know anybody else?"

Bach knew two more people on the list, a male nurse and a third doc named Martin, but she didn't know either of them well enough to make a judgment. "Let me ask around."

"Discreetly," Weather said. "This guy did try to kill me."

"I'll be very discreet," Bach said. "I'm too good-looking to die." She looked back up at the burn photos. "Unlike Bob. Bob's not too good-looking to die."

OUT IN THE HALL, Jenkins asked, "You done?"

Weather said, "Yes. A burn victim. We'll be moving some skin around on him, if he makes it through the next couple weeks."

Didn't want to worry him, to think she was investigating.

THAT NIGHT, at the dinner table, Lucas told them about the proposed raid on Mack's place. "If Weather weren't going to the hospital every day, I'd back off," he said. "We know who did it--it's the whole damn Mack family, plus Haines and Chapman. We'll never prove anything about those bags, but we know what they were, and why they burned them. The drugs went through Ike's place, and from there, probably over to the Seed headquarters in Milwaukee, and down to the Outlaws, and they're probably all over Illinois and the East Coast by now."

"Still gotta find the guy in the hospital," Virgil said.

"All we have to do is nail one of the Macks--any one of them--and we'll get him."

"Could be done with the hospital tomorrow," Weather said. "I cleared out two weeks, just in case. If we get it done, we could take off for a week."

Lucas's eyebrows went up, and he said to Letty: "Disney World."

She stopped with a fork spun full of spaghetti, halfway to her mouth, and said, "Instead of St. Paul in January? I'd buy that."

"You'd be willing to leave the case?" Weather asked Lucas.

"My main concern in this, is you. If we take off, and nobody knows where we are, what're the Macks going to do? They won't have any way to find you," Lucas said. "If you're done with the babies, we could take off."

"I think we will be," Weather said. "One way or another, we can't wait much longer."

13

BARAKAT WALKED down the hall in his stocking feet and took a seat in the ER next to an unconscious woman with a temperature of 104; a saline bag hung overhead and was dripping into her arm. Another doc was looking at her chart. Barakat sniffed at one of his shoes, said, as he pulled it on, "I require some shoe spray ..." And, "So, what do you think?"

"You started the antibiotics?"

"Yes. She was here two days ago with a urinary tract infection and we gave her a prescription, but I think she didn't fill it. She has no insurance and probably no money, looking at her, so I think she tried to get along without the pills and it got away from her."

The other doc nodded and said, "No pain?"

"No. The woman who came with her said this one kept getting hotter and sleepier and finally fell asleep watching TV, and then she couldn't wake her up when it was time to go to bed."

The other doc nodded and snapped the chart shut and said, "Willing to bet you're right. Wish I could talk to her."

"If I'm right, she'll be talking in an hour," Barakat said. "No sign of lung congestion, so I don't think it's the flu ..."

They talked about some other possibilities and then the other doc said, "You got a kinda froggy accent. Are they talking to you, too?"

"What? Froggy?"

"French accent," the doc said. "There's a cop asking around for French accents, and now one of the docs is asking around. Because of that guy who got killed, you know, in the pharmacy."

Barakat suppressed a shrug and said, "I have not heard. Anyway, my accent is already Lebanese, not French. The fucking French, they are the most responsible for destroying my country."

"Didn't know that," the doc said. He looked back at the patient. "Goddamn women get the weirdest diseases up there. You know? We oughta have a wazoo guy working full-time."

"You've seen the other one? Rosemary something?"

"Nope. What's that about?"

"Either a bad sprain or a broken navicular. She was in yoga class, doing some pose, and she fell and put her hand down. She's in imaging, should be back anytime. Barry has her chart ..."

CAPPY WAS WAITING in the parking garage. "We have trouble," Barakat said. He popped his car door and threw the briefcase in the back.

Cappy looked sleepy. "What kind?"

"A cop is looking for somebody with a French accent. Also, this woman doctor is now going around the hospital, telling everyone. They will come to me."

"So what?"

Barakat looked at him. "So ... it's a problem."

"Don't tell them the truth, dude. No problem. Tell them you don't know what the fuck they're talking about."

Barakat thought,
She'll recognize me.
"You're right. I'm being a woman."

"Don't ask for an attorney. Get pissed off. You're a big-shot doctor, right? No cops can talk to you like that."

"My friend, you are smarter than you look," Barakat said.

"When I move to Paris, or LA, you should come along. We will be partners in crime."

They took Barakat's car, a three-year-old Subaru, for the four-wheel drive, and Cappy asked, "So, did you bring some tools?"

"A scalpel, duct tape, and I took a hammer from the maintenance shop. I was careful. I took an old one; they have several."

"Have you thought about how we do it?"

"Yes, we go in. You shoot him in the knee, and we fall on him."

"Fall on him?"

"Jump on him. Attack him. Immobilize him with the duct tape. Then I set to work. I cut his pants here ..." He touched his groin. "I tell him, the first thing I do is, I take off one ball. Then I take off the penis, and then the other ball. I tell him, I take one ball before we ask him anything, to show him that I will do it ..."

"That's cold," Cappy said cheerfully.

"With any luck, we don't need the second ball."

"What if Honey Bee's there?" Cappy asked.

Barakat did the shrug again: "We don't need her, yes? We don't need her."

THEY DROVE SOUTH on I-35, and thirty minutes later, cut east and south, through thinning suburbs, away from the lights. Cappy read off the turns as they came to them, and finally they left the highway for snow-covered tarmac road, down the valley and around the curve, and saw Honey Bee's place, white-on-white, with the snow in the fields, under the blue glow of her yard light.

Hardly a light in the house: a yellow glimmer from the kitchen, which looked like an alarm light, or a candle.

"Nobody home," Cappy said. "Ain't that a bite in the ass?" He was annoyed: all dressed up and nowhere to go.

"Maybe he ran," Barakat said.

"He was talking about going to Green Bay. Somewhere in Green Bay," Cappy said, remembering the vague conversation after the attack on the doctor chick. "He even said where--but I don't remember that part."

"This is a misfortune," Barakat said. Then, "There's more than one way to ... I don't know the word ... flay? Flay a cat?"

"Skin a cat," Cappy said. "What you got in mind?"

Barakat said, "Well, there are
two
brothers...."

They went and knocked on Honey Bee's door, but there was no answer, and in the last dying light of day, they turned the car around and headed back to town.

AT BARAKAT'S PLACE, they got into the cocaine, clicked around the television, ate a pizza, and had a long, intricate, dope-fueled discussion about their childhoods. "I don't really think you should kill your old man, because it's not the right thing to do," Cappy announced at one point. "That's why I stay away from Rochester. 'Cause if I saw that cocksucker, I'd shoot him down like a yellow dog."

"My father, he has money, but does he give it to me? No. It's mine by rights," Barakat said. "He got it from his father, who got it from his father. But with my father, it stops. He tells me everything. He tells me to do this, and I must do this. He tells me to do that, to be a doctor, and here I am, a doctor. Do I want to be a doctor? No, I do not. Not much. Huh? Every day, I have my finger in somebody's rectum. Is this a way to go through life? I am living in Paris, and I see other sons, whose fathers are not so greedy, and they are living very, very well. And the women. The most beautiful women in the world, and do I get them? No, I do not, because my father is so greedy, so small."

"Where does he live?"

"West Palm Beach, in Florida."

"Tell you what, when we get done with this, we go to Rochester, you kill my old man, and then we go to Florida, and I kill your old man," Cappy said. "My old man owns a recreational equipment business, and I'll fuckin' inherit. And you'll fuckin' inherit. We'll both be fuckin' rich."

"My friend," Barakat said, pausing for a twist, "we have a deal. Huh. I kill your cocksucker father and you kill my cocksucker father and we go to Paris."

Cappy took a hit and a thought occurred to him: "You don't like being a doctor. That's scary, you know, having a doctor working on you who doesn't like it."

"Well, I don't like it much, but ..." Snort. "I am really a very good doctor, huh? I know what I'm doing. But I don't like it. I have seen one asshole too many."

At two o'clock in the morning, they watched the last drunk roll out of Cherries, pause in the parking lot to light a cigarette and zip a parka against the cold, and then drive away; two minutes later, a bartender came out, walked around to the side, got in his car, and disappeared.

"Let's go," Cappy said. They got out of the van and walked across the back parking area, where Lyle Mack's car was parked next to the dumpster, the last car at the bar. They climbed the back stoop to the door, then stepped sideways into a shadow of the loading-dock door.

Ten minutes, and a light went out; and another. "He's coming," Cappy muttered.

"Finally. My hands are freezing."

They both unconsciously shuffled their feet. A minute later, Lyle Mack came out the back door, turned to pull it shut. Cappy jumped across the space between the loading dock and door, hit Mack in the back, slammed him through the door and into the bar.

Barakat was a step behind, with his .45. Cappy was on Mack's back, Mack facedown on the floor, trying to do a push-up. Barakat slammed the door closed, and in the dark, pressed the muzzle of the .45 against Mack's head and said, "Stop, or I kill you."

Mack went limp. Cappy said, "Lyle, we need to talk."

LYLE PLEADED and moaned and argued, but they taped him up with duct tape, awkward in their heavy winter gloves, and then Lyle asked the question, "Why?"

"The thing is, man, this whole deal has gotten too complicated, and sooner or later somebody is going to talk, and then you're going to sell us out," Cappy said. "So we decided we had to move."

"Man, I can't sell you out," Lyle Mack said. "If I sell you out, I go to jail for thirty years."

"Yes, yes. Now. We need answers to two questions," Barakat said. "Where is the dope? And, where is your brother?"

"Well, fuck you," Lyle Mack said, nearly choking on the words. "You're gonna kill me anyway."

"But maybe not," Barakat said. "You don't want to hurt Joe, because he is your brother. But if Joe disappears, then who can touch us? Then, we believe you. You won't sell us out, because there is no reason. You take revenge on us, you send yourself to prison. We will kill your brother, and then the woman doctor cannot reach us, and maybe you plan revenge, or maybe you choke on his death, but you don't sell us out."

"About the dope," Cappy said. "We're not going to see any of that. That's gone, isn't it?"

"No. We hid it good. We gotta wait, guys--"

"Bullshit, wait," Barakat said. "Now, Lyle, I think you will tell us where the drugs are, and where your brother is. How hard this will be, you decide." He emptied his pockets--the scalpel, the hammer, two vinyl gloves. He took off his winter gloves, pulled on the medical gloves. "Now, I will tell you. You do not believe what we will do to you, so before you answer the question, I will cut a ball off. Huh? One ball. You will still be able to fuck later, with one ball. But if you do not answer after the ball comes off, then I cut off your penis and then the other ball. Then, I work with the hammer. Huh?"

"Oh, man, don't do that. I'll tell you," Lyle Mack said. "Joe's on his way to Mexico. Our friend Eddie picked him up this afternoon. They should be in Wichita tonight. The drugs, we hid up north ... "

Barakat held up a hand. "Maybe I believe you. But I cut off one ball anyway, huh? Just to show you." He wiggled his fingers and picked up the scalpel.

Cappy said, "Let's get him in where it's warmer," and they dragged him like a sack of potatoes across the loading dock and through the door into the bar itself, his head bumping on the door-jamb. Cappy got a chair and said, "Roll him," and when Barakat rolled him, Cappy put the chair across Lyle Mack's chest, one of the crossbars over his neck, another cutting into the fat man's gut. Cappy sat in the chair and said to Barakat, "Go 'head."

Lyle Mack began to weep: "Man, please, please, don't do this, man, please ..."

ANYONE WALKING by the bar, bareheaded and listening, might have heard the screams, but then again, they might not have; there was just enough wind to carry the sound away.