Storm Prey

One of the men pulled a semiautomatic pistol from his belt, a heavy, blued, no-bullshit Beretta, stolen from the Army National Guard in Milwaukee, checked it, stuck it back in his belt. He said, “Okay? Everybody got his mask? Okay. Let’s go.”
    They stuffed the ski masks into their belts and two hard men pushed the cart into the corridor. The tall man led them farther through the narrow, tiled hallways, then said, “Here’s the camera.”
    The two men pushing the cart turned sideways, as the tall man told them to, and went through a cross-corridor. A security camera peered down the hall at them. If a guard happened to be looking at the monitor at that moment, he would have seen only the backs of two orderlies, and a lump on the cart. The tall man in the raincoat scrambled along, on his hands and knees, on the far side of the cart.
    The big man on the cart, looking at the ceiling tiles go by, giggled, “It’s like ridin’ the Tilt-A-Whirl.”
    When they were out of the camera’s sight line, the tall man stood up and led them deeper into the hospital—the three outsiders would never have found the way by themselves. After two minutes, the tall man handed one of the outsiders a key, indicated a yellow steel door, with no identification.
    “This is it?” The leader of the three was skeptical—the door looked like nothing.
    “Yes,” said the tall man. “This is the side door. When you go in, you’ll be right among them. One or two. The front door and service window is closed until six. I’ll be around the corner until you call, watching.”
    He’d be around the corner where he could slip out of sight, if something went wrong.
    The other man nodded, asked, “Everybody ready?” The other two muttered, “Yeah,” tense now, pulled on the masks, took their pistols out. The leader put the key in the lock and yanked open the door.
     
     
    WEATHER KARKINNEN had taken a half-pill at nine o’clock, knowing that she wouldn’t sleep without it. Too much to do, too much to think about. The procedure had been researched, rehearsed, debated, and undoubtedly prayed over. Now the time had come.
    Sleep came hard. She kept imagining that first moment, the first cut, the commitment, the parting of the flesh beneath the edge of her scalpel, on a nearly circular path between the skulls of the two babies—but sometime before nine-thirty, she slipped away.
    She didn’t feel her husband come to bed at one o’clock in the morning. He took care not to disturb her, undressing in the dark, lying as unmoving as he could, listening to her breathing, until he, too, slipped away.
     
     
    AND THEN her eyes opened.
    Pop.
    Dark, not quite silent—the furnace running in the winter night. She lifted her head to the clock. Four-thirty She’d been asleep for seven hours. Eight would have been the theoretical ideal, but she never slept eight. She closed her eyes again, organizing herself, stepping through the upcoming day. At twenty minutes to five, she got out of bed, stretched, and headed to the en suite bathroom, checking herself: she felt sharp. Excellent. She brushed her teeth, showered, washed and dried her short-cut blond hair.
    She’d laid out her clothes the night before. She walked across the bedroom barefoot, in the light of the two digital clocks, picked them up: a thick black-silk jersey and gray wool slacks, and dressy, black-leather square-toed shoes. She would have preferred to wear soft-soled cross-training shoes, like the nurses did, but surgeons didn’t dress like nurses. She’d never even told anyone about the gel innersoles.
    She carried her clothes back to the bathroom, shut the door, turned on the light again, and dressed. When she was ready, she looked at herself in the mirror. Not bad.
    Weather might have wished to have been a little taller, for the authority given by height; she might have wished for a chiseled nose. But her husband pointed out that she’d never had a problem giving orders, or having them followed; and that he thought her nose, which she saw as lumpy, was devastatingly attractive, and that any number of men had chased after her, nose and all.
    So, not bad.
    She grinned at herself, turned to make sure the slacks didn’t make her ass look fat—they didn’t—switched off the light, opened the bathroom door and tiptoed across the bedroom. Her husband said, in the dark, “Good luck, babe.”
    “I didn’t know you were awake.”
    “I’m probably more nervous than you are,” he