Storm Prey

palm trees. That he should wind up in this place ...
    When he finished here, one more year, he would move to Paris. He’d gone online and found that his American medical certificate was good in France, though there would be some paperwork. Paris. Or maybe LA.
    Only one good thing about Minneapolis: he could still get Gauloises, smuggled down from Canada. No: two good things.
    The cocaine.
    He took a long drag and thought about going back inside. Fuck this. He had nothing to do with anybody being dead.
     
     
    BUT OF COURSE he did. The whole thing had been his idea. He’d seen a chance to steal a pharmacy key, and he’d taken it, without even knowing why at that moment. Or maybe he’d known why, but not how ...
    Barakat had started with cocaine at the Sorbonne, buying it from a fellow student who was working his way through college. He’d tried other stuff, uppers, downers, a little marijuana, a peyote button once, but none of it did it for him: the idea wasn’t less control, it was more control.
    That’s what you got from the cocaine.
    It had helped him through med school, but after that, in Miami, getting cocaine had not been a problem. Once in Minneapolis, for his residency, he’d asked around, found a guy who was recommended as a source for decent marijuana, the imported stuff down from Canada. A guy like that knew where to get cocaine.
    So he bought his coke from a dealer named Lonnie, and then from a redneck named Rick, who took over Lonnie’s route when Lonnie moved to Birmingham. Then Rick got hurt in a motorcycle accident, hurt really bad, and Barakat went stone cold sober for a week and a half, and it almost killed him.
    One day Joe Mack showed up on his porch with a free baggie of blow.
    Like the cocaine Welcome Wagon.
    “Our friend Rick said you were one of his best guys, but he’s gonna be out of it for a while ...”
    At that point, Barakat was spending eight hundred dollars a week on cocaine, with no way to get more money. He hung at eight hundred, until one late night he was waiting at the pharmacy window, the key already in hand, and thought, They’ve got no protection, and I know the guys who could take it away from them.
    It all seemed so simple. And it should have been.
     
     
    NOW HERE he was, freezing his ass off, trying to set up an assassination. Not simple anymore. Not uninteresting, though, if only he’d been working with a competent crew. The whole concept of crime was interesting: the strong taking from the weak, the smart from the stupid. A game, with interesting stakes ... if only he hadn’t been working with the Macks.
    At twenty minutes after five o’clock, a black Audi convertible rolled up the ramp, headlights bouncing when its tires bumped over expansion joints. The car swooped into a reserved parking place in the physicians’ area. Five seconds later, a short blond woman got out and started toward the exit door opposite Barakat.
    Had to be her—the same woman he’d seen in the elevator. He let the door close: he couldn’t allow her to see him again. Even being in the same part of the building, where she might see him by accident, could trip off a memory.
    He waited, nervous, stressed, sweating in the freezing cold, and when she’d gone through the door, went after her. And as he went, the thought crossed his mind: fix it now. Take her. She was a small woman in a deserted building, he could break her neck, who’d know what happened?
    Just a thought, but it stayed with him. He might catch her at the elevators ... but when he got there, she was gone. A little feather of disappointment trickled across his heart, his gut. He could have done it.
    So now, the question remained. Who was she, and where was she going?
    She was early for most docs. They wouldn’t normally arrive until sometime after six. On the other hand, the Frenchman’s surgical team was supposed to start separating the twins ...
    He went that way.
     
     
    THIRTY PEOPLE milled in the hallway outside the special operating theater. Like most of the other docs, he’d found an excuse to look the place over—the special double operating table, the intricate anesthesia setup, the newly painted, sign-posted floor, an attempt to better choreograph the movements of the massive operating team, to keep the sterile and the non-steriles separate, even as they walked among each other.
    He saw the blond woman, still in her long winter coat, talking to Gabriel Maret, the Frenchman. Maret was listening closely.