Storm Prey

“All right. How about ... ten o’clock? Is ten good?”
    When he hung up he said, “The robbers were three guys, wearing blue orderly scrubs, but the woman in the pharmacy doesn’t think they were orderlies. They were apparently wearing the scrubs over street clothes. They were wearing heavy boots and ski masks, but the woman thought that at least a couple of them had beards. One of them was a really big guy. We need to talk to Marcy. Probably do a computer sketch, see if they can figure out who the guy was.”
    “Probably nothing, though,” Weather said, as though she regretted telling him about it.
    “Maybe not,” he said. “But hell, you’ve got the day off. The kids are out of the house—let’s go hang out. Talk to Marcy, do lunch. Hit a boutique. I could use a new suit or two for spring.”
    She nodded, quickly, and repeated, “It’s probably nothing.”
     
     
    LYLE MACK SAT in his tiny loading-dock office and thought about it for a minute, then got on the cold phone and called Barakat. He said, “We gotta talk.”
    “Why should I talk to you? My hands are clean,” Barakat said. “You and that bunch of idiots are in trouble. I’m walking away. I know nothing. Why are you calling me? You know the police can follow phone calls—”
    “I ain’t stupid, we all got cold phones. You gotta get one, too.”
    “What?”
    Lyle Mack was patient: “Go down someplace and buy a phone and a card and give them a fake name, if you gotta give them a name,” Lyle Mack said. “You can get them at the grocery store. Some grocery stores. You can go to Best Buy.”
    “I’m telling you, I am out of all this—”
    “Man, you were there. You can’t walk. And I got your goods,” Lyle Mack said.
    “I’ll get them some other time,” Barakat said.
    “Look. When the guys were going out the ramp, some chick was coming in. Black Audi convertible. Blond. She saw one of the guys, and we want to know who she is, just in case. They think she was probably a nurse.”
    “How am I going to find out? I’m not a mind reader,” Barakat growled. “What am I supposed to do, walk around asking people who saw the killers coming out of the ramp? How am I supposed to know that? That somebody saw somebody?”
    “Just listen ,” Mack said patiently. “People will talk about this for weeks—just listen. You don’t have to fuckin’ investigate.”
    Long silence. Then, “If she’s a nurse, she was working the day shift,” Barakat said. “There are probably a hundred Audis out in the ramp right now. So, I can keep an eye out tomorrow. If she’s a shift worker, she should be coming in about the same time. That’s all I can do.”
    “And listen around,” Lyle Mack said. As an added attraction: “The goods we got for you. It’s the best I’ve ever seen. It’s like a hundred percent gold.”
     
     
    ALAIN BARAKAT hung up and wandered into the kitchen. Glanced at his watch; had to get back.
    He was tired: he’d just worked the overnight shift, and was continuing straight through the day, with only the hour-long lunch break. He’d already used half of that, and had come home hoping to find a package inside the push-through mailbox.
    Hoping against hope.
    The box was empty. Lyle Mack still had the goods. The knowledge of that would drive him crazy, he thought: and sooner or later, he would be over there begging for it.
    Barakat lived in a modest brick house in St. Paul’s Highland Park, a street of tidy houses and neatly shoveled sidewalks and kids and yellow school buses coming and going. His father had bought the house for him, but carefully kept the title for himself, part of the family’s move out of Lebanon. They were investing in real estate—houses and farmland—socking away gold coins, buying American educations for the kids.
    The price of American houses had never gone down, his father had told him. A year later, when prices started going down, the old man had title to at least thirty houses in the hot markets of California and Florida. He was losing his shirt and he’d cut Barakat’s allowance to five thousand a month. He said, “You’re a grown man now and a doctor. You can be rich if you work.”
    “I don’t want to be a doctor,” Barakat had said. “I don’t want to be in St. Paul. This is not Lebanon, Pops, this is like the North Pole. It was minus twenty here the other day.”
    “Men have to work. That’s what men do. Finish the residency, then go where you like. Move to Los