Storm Prey

by Sandford, John

  THE SEPARATION TEAM was standing around, repeating what Yamaguchi had said, when Thomas Carlson, the hospital administrator, came hurrying down the hall. Carlson was wearing his white physician’s coat, which he often did on public occasions, to remind people that he had an MD in addition to the MBA; but for all that, not a bad guy, Weather thought.

  He went straight to Maret: “Gabe, you’ve heard.”

  “I’ve heard there was a robbery”

  “Unfortunately. The problem is, we’ve also got a man down. He’s hurt pretty badly, and we won’t have access to your drugs—any drugs, except in an absolute emergency, and then we’ll be crawling around on the floor trying to find them. The place is completely wrecked. They threw everything out of the lockers, what they didn’t take.”

  “So: everybody is here,” Maret said.

  “But you’re going to have to wait,” Carlson said. “God, I’m sorry, man. But this is an incredible mess. As long as the kids are stable ...”

  Maret nodded: “Well. I guess we can wait.”

  WEATHER AND MARET went together to tell the Rayneses. The parents were waiting in what the team called the “separation lounge,” once a meditation room, which had been converted for family use and for team conferences.

  The Rayneses were sitting on a couch, looking out over a table full of magazines: neither one was reading. They were in their early thirties, and except for their sex, as alike as new marbles: honey-blond, tall, slender, from the small town of New Ulm in southern Minnesota. Larry worked in a heating and air-conditioning business owned by his father; Lucy worked at the post office. Neither had lived outside of New Ulm. Both of them spoke fluent German, and went to Germany every summer, to hike. They had no other children.

  They’d conferred with Maret on the separation process, but had worked more with Weather than any other physician, because of Weather’s involvement in the preliminary surgery.

  They were astonished by the news. “What does it mean? It’s off? For how long?” Lucy Raynes blurted. “I mean ... ?”

  “We’ll go tomorrow,” Weather said, patting her arm. “Same time. This whole thing is so bizarre ... there are police everywhere, I guess. The girls are fine, no change for them.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Larry Raynes said. “After we got this far . . .”

  His wife put an arm around his waist and squeezed him: “We’ll be okay. It’ll be all right.”

  OF THE TWO RAYNESES, Lucy was the most demanding of information, had studied the details of the separation, used terms like “superior sagittal sinus” and “calvaria,” read medical papers on other separations. She’d spoken to the media on a number of occasions, both televised and print. Larry, on the other hand, mostly talked about timing, and the children’s development, and often, to Weather, seemed to simply want to get it over with. He wasn’t stupid, but swept along in a current too strong for him, part medical science, part circus. He wanted to go home.

  Maret had warned everybody about the circus. “Whenever this is done, we get the media, because of the drama and the sympathetic aspects. You have to be prepared. In Miami, we had reporters following the surgeons home, knocking on doors, waiting in the streets.”

  Now he said to the Rayneses, “I’ll talk to the media in ten minutes or so. I’d like you to be with me.”

  Larry Raynes said to his wife, “You go. I’ll go sit with the kids.”

  Weather left them talking, and went back to the locker room to change back into her street clothes.

  BY THE TIME she got back, most of the team had drifted away. The OR nurses were shutting the place down. Weather stopped to talk with her surgical assistant, when one of the team’s cardiologists, Alan Seitz, who’d been called to the ER, came ambling down the hall, looking distracted. “What?” Weather asked.

  “That Don guy died,” Seitz said. “One of the robbers kicked him to death. Broke up his kidneys. He was soaked in Coumadin. He bled out before we could get anything going. We were dumping fluid into him fast as we could, nothing to do.”

  Weather stepped up and gave him a squeeze. Seitz was an old friend. “Nothing to do. You only do what you can.”

  “Yeah.” Seitz looked around and said, “I mean, Jesus Christ: kicked to death. In the hospital.”

  2

  LUCAS DAVENPORT CRACKED his eyes at nine o’clock and did the calculation: Weather should be done with the initial part of the operation. She’d be removing one of the expanders, and also making the first cuts down to the skull itself. If it had gone off as scheduled, at seven-thirty, she’d be drinking a cup of coffee, while the bone-cutter went to work.

  All right. Interesting.

  He lay under the blankets for a couple of minutes, listening: nothing to hear. Might be snowing again. Lucas had helped the architect put the house together, and had isolated the bedroom suite at the north end, away from the other bedrooms, and the kids. Weather had imported a baby monitor, so she could hear Sam wake in the night, but the monitor was quiet: the housekeeper would have Sam in hand, by this time.

  Get up.

  He rolled out, dropped to the carpet, did a few push-ups, a few sit-ups, picked up two twenty-five-pound dumbbells and did a hundred curls with each arm. In the bathroom, he brushed his teeth and shaved, watching himself in the mirror. Still in good shape, even after a lot of hard years. But it was something he’d have to work on, he thought, as he got to fifty—once the tone is lost, it’s tough to get back.

  Still had all his hair, dark, but threaded through with gray. His face was too white after three months of Minnesota winter gloom, showing scars and dimples from fifteen years of hockey and twenty-five years of cops; he’d kept the winter weight off by playing basketball, his cheekbones showing beside his hawkish nose. At least he didn’t smoke. He could see the smoke eating into guys like Del.

  He was standing in the shower, lathered up with Weather’s body wash, when she called from the bedroom—“You still in there?”

  “One more minute ...” he shouted back. Surprised: he hadn’t expected to see her until sometime in the evening. He rinsed off the body wash, gave the ugly bits a final scrub, climbed out and found her standing in the doorway.

  She reached across to the towel bar, pulled a towel free and handed it to him. “The operation was canceled because a man got murdered in the pharmacy and they took all the drugs.”

  “What?” He was dripping, and started to dry down.

  She said, “Mmm, you smell like spring rain.”

  “What?”

  “There were about a million media people there, all the cable networks, and Gabe had to go out and tell them the hospital got held up and they murdered Don Peterson by kicking him to death.”

  Held up his hands: “Wait-wait-wait. I can’t listen to this naked.”

  “Ah, God, this is the third most awful day of my life,” she said, but she popped him on the ass as he went by.

  Lucas got his shorts on and pulled a T-shirt over his head. “Now. Start from the beginning.”

  “Okay. The hospital pharmacy got robbed. One of the pharmacists was beaten up so bad that he died. Guess who’s running the investigation for Minneapolis?”

  He shrugged. “Who?”

  “Your old pal Titsy.”

  Impatient, didn’t want to hear about it: “Weather ... just tell me.”

  She backed up and sat on the bed as he dressed: “Okay. I got there on schedule ...”

  THE BROTHERS Lyle Mack and Joe Mack, Mikey Haines, Shooter Chapman, and Honey Bee Brown sat in the back of Cherries Bar off Highway 13, looking at an old tube TV balanced on a plastic chair, the electric cord going straight up to a light socket. The room smelled of sour empty beer bottles and wet cardboard. Three nylon bags full of drugs sat on the floor behind them, and Lyle Mack said, “You dumb fucks.”

  “What was we supposed to do? The guy was calling the cops,” Chapman said. Haines, who’d done the kicking, kept his mouth shut.

  Honey Bee stared at them, as she wor
ked through a wad of Juicy Fruit the size of a walnut. She said, around the gum, “You guys could screw up a wet dream.”

  Lyle Mack was sweating, scared, and thinking: Too many witnesses. Too many people knew that Joe Mack, Haines, and Chapman had raided the pharmacy. He and Honey Bee, the three of them, anyone they may have talked to—and there were probably a couple who’d taken some hints—plus the doc, and maybe the doc’s pal, the square doc, whoever he was.

  “Tell me about the woman in the Audi,” Lyle Mack said.

  “She rolled in as we were rolling out. She might not connect us,” Joe Mack said. “She saw me, I think, but who knows? Our lights was in her eyes. She was blond, she was short, was driving an Audi. Could have been a nurse.”

  “She totally saw you, dude,” said Haines, trying to take some pressure off himself. Christ, he’d kicked that dude to death. He didn’t know what he thought about that. Shooter had once killed a spade out in Stockton, California, but that was different. “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 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, brown-blond, down on his shoulders, and a beard. He looked like a Harley guy. Big nose. That was just about ...” She rubbed her forehead, working it out, and said, “That must have been just about the time of the robbery.” She looked up: “Jeez, what if that was the guys? The driver looked the same way. I didn’t see him so well, but he had a beard ...”

  Lucas held up a finger, picked up his cell phone, sat on the bed, and punched up a number. A moment later, said, “Yup, it’s me, but I can’t talk because my wife is standing about a foot away.”

  “Hey, Marcy,” Weather called. Marcy Sherrill was a deputy chief with the Minneapolis cops: Titsy.

  Lucas said, “What we need to know is, what time exactly did this whole thing happen? What time did it start, and when did it end?”

  Marcy: “I don’t think this is for the BCA.”

  “Listen, just shut up and tell me, and then I’ll tell you why I want to know,” Lucas said.

  He listened for a moment, turned to Weather and said, “Between five-thirty and five-forty, right in there.”