Storm Prey

mater, so that each baby could drain blood back into the venous system, was the time-eater. The neurosurgeons were advancing toward each other a millimeter at a time, sorting veins, saving everything they could.
    But if something went too wrong ...
     
     
    JUST NEEDED A NAP, she thought. The surgery could resume in the middle of the night, if Sara’s heart function improved. Or, if it worsened enough that they were compelled to let Sara go, and attempt to rescue Ellen.
    As she came out of the parking garage, she glanced in her rearview mirror and saw the biker break away from the curb a block behind her; paid no attention, saw the stoplight ahead turn yellow, and floored the accelerator, clipping the red light as she went through. She kept the speed up down the block to the next light, and caught an odd motion in her rearview mirror; the biker had flat run the red light, and had almost been taken out by a car coming through.
    Asshole.
    She made a right and was on the long sweeping entry ramp, accelerating as she went. She liked to drive fast, and felt, as a surgeon, with a surgeon’s reflexes, that she was entitled to; and she’d had that race training, although there had been some knocks and bumps over the years ... unforeseen circumstances, she claimed in her own defense ... like when she drove through the garage door. She smiled, thinking of Lucas as he came running out of the house. He’d wanted to kill her, but had pretended to be totally calm about it, and understanding.
     
     
    COMING DOWN THE RAMP, she saw the biker again, leaning into the turn, coming fast. Since she’d be getting off quickly, she stayed in the right lane.
    She merged with traffic, pushed her speed to sixty-five, and in her left mirror saw the single headlight weave between cars in the right and the right-center lanes, two hundred yards back but coming very fast now. Too dark to see much.
    As the bike came up beside her, she glanced back, saw the face shield, black leathers. He was on her back quarter-panel when he took his left hand off the clutch and pulled something from beneath his jacket.
    She could feel him focused on her window, still coming, saw him lift his hand, in a peculiar way, and of the thousand things that might have occurred to her, only one rang true: she was a cop’s wife and she thought, Gun.
    She flicked the car left, into his lane, and at the same instant she hit the brakes on the Audi, hard, and the bike flicked left and surged past her, the rider, snapping his head around, dropped whatever it was, tried to grab it with his clutch hand, lost it, and she still thought, Gun, and she yanked the wheel left and fell in behind him, and with a surge of road rage, floored the accelerator again.
    She hadn’t had time to process it, but instinct told her that this was one of the guys from the robbery, one of the guys who killed Don, and now they were after her: and she was not the turn-the-other-cheek sort.
    Though the Audi was fast, it was no match for the bike. The rider glanced back, saw her coming and took off, the front wheel lifting off the ground. She got the impression of a small man. The people from the hospital were supposed to be fairly big ... but there was no doubt about what he’d tried to do, not in her mind.
    She stayed with him for a few hundred yards, but he sliced up the white line between two cars and was pulling away when the Cretin Avenue exit came up.
    She swerved onto it, up to the top, turned right, stopped beside the golf course, unsnapped her seat belt and turned to watch traffic, as she pulled out her cell phone and punched in 911.
    “Is this an emergency?”
    “My name is Weather Karkinnen, and I’m a surgeon. A man just tried to kill me. He’s on I-94 going east toward Snelling on a motorcycle. He’s going really fast ...”

    LUCAS SHOWED up fifteen minutes later.
    Weather had driven around the golf course to the clubhouse. She parked, went inside, told the restaurant manager that she was waiting for police. The first cops arrived two minutes later; in the interval, she’d called Lucas.
    “I’m pretty sure,” she told him on the phone. “Whatever it was, the gun, if it was a gun, he dropped it, and then he took off.”
    “You know where he dropped it?” Lucas asked.
    “Just after 280. Right there ... maybe three or four hundred yards east,” she said.
    “Okay. Any chance he saw where you went? That you’re at the club?”
    “No. I called nine-one-one, and then came right