Storm Prey

twelve years to get his degree. Now, so close ... if I turned him in, it would be the end for him. So I did not. I turned my eyes away.”
    “All right,” Jansen said. “If ... when this is settled, could we call on you to take care of funeral details?”
    “Of course. I will call his family—they are still in Beirut. I will call an uncle, who will tell his mother. Addie ... he was the great hope of his family, you know.”
    “I’m sorry,” Crowe said. “Had he ever done anything that, looking back, might make you think that he might have been involved with the pharmacy robbery at the hospital?”
    “Addie? No! Not at all. He was ... mmm ... a timid man, really. This is one reason he liked cocaine, because then he was not so timid. He could go to parties and talk with the girls, you know? But a robbery, I can’t believe this.”
    “How was he financially?”
    “He had no money ... ”
     
     
    THEY TALKED for ten minutes, and Barakat began developing an irrational fear that Cappy would do something insane, like flush a toilet, or appear with a gun, or even creak a floorboard. None of that happened, and the cops trailed off with a few incidental questions, and left, apparently satisfied.
    When the car had gone, Barakat walked back to the bedroom, opened the door: nobody. Then Cappy asked, “They gone?” and sat up from a spot on the floor, behind the bed.
    “They know nothing. Still, I am uneasy, you know? This woman ... if she sees Addie’s picture in the newspaper, or on the TV, she may remember another man in the elevator. I do not look like Addie, but there is a similarity.”
    “So, we take her out.”
    “If possible. Then, we have only Joe Mack. Joe Mack continues to worry me.”
    “He’s gone, man,” Cappy said. “I don’t think even Joe is dumb enough to come back here, not after all this.”
     
     
    BARAKAT FOLLOWED Cappy to the hospital, up into the ramp, and then past him to the physicians’ parking, and into the hospital through a different entrance. Cappy would scout the hallways in his civilian clothes, and then stop by the closet for the scrubs.
    Cappy, Barakat thought, could become a problem. He would have to deal with that later, if the police didn’t do it first. He doubted that Cappy, from the way he talked, would be taken alive; he was convincing about that, a young man rushing toward death.
     
     
    AT THREE O’CLOCK in the afternoon, Sandy Groetch looked up from the operating table and said, “I’m done.”
    There was a rustle of talk both in the operating room and up above, in the observation room, as Rick Hanson moved in with his saws. Up above, Weather stood up and headed for the door, led by Virgil and trailed by Lucas.
    In the hall outside, Weather said, “We’re almost there.”
    “What was that talk about Ellen?”
    “It’s her heart again. The last time they dropped the blood pressure to try to reduce the stress on her heart, it got away from them and Ellen almost arrested. But now they’ve started treating them separately. Now we’ve got a chance.”
    “I thought we always had a chance,” Virgil said.
    “We liked to think so, but the chance was pretty small,” Weather said. They got to the stairway and headed down, Virgil leading. “If both of them live, it’ll be pretty much of a miracle.”
    They took her to the scrub room and waited there, in the hall.
     
     
    ANOTHER PLASTIC SURGEON, named Tremaine Cooper, was scrubbing when she got there. She joined him, and he asked, “Got any ideas about the fit?”
    “Can’t tell, but Rick’s stayed right on the nominal cut line, as close as I can tell. If he’s a little outside it, we’re okay. I just hope that he didn’t get inside.”
    A maxio-facial surgeon at the hospital had prepared caps made from a composite material to fit inside the defects in the twins’ skulls. Weather and Cooper would fit the caps into the defects, before stretching the expanded scalps over the holes.
    Weather added, as they finished scrubbing, “I’ll tell you what, Trey. They’re gonna want one thing from us, and that won’t be neatness. They’re gonna want to get the last expanders out, the caps in, and the scalps stitched up, fast as we can do it. They want to get those kids out of here and into the ICU.”
    “Fast as we can,” Tremaine agreed.
    “So if you get done before me,” Weather said, “don’t hesitate to come over and help me out.”
    “I’ll do that,” he said.
    Weather was faster than