Storm Prey

said.
    She went back to the bed and kissed him on the forehead. “Go back to sleep.”
    Downstairs in the kitchen, she had two pieces of toast, a cup of instant coffee, and a yogurt, got her bag, went out to the car, backed out of the garage, and headed downtown, on the snowy streets, across the river to the Minnesota Medical Research Center. She might be first in, she thought, but maybe not: there were forty people on the surgical team. Somebody had to be more nervous than she was.
     
     
    AT THE HOSPITAL, the yellow door popped open and the three big men swarmed through.
    Two people were working in the pharmacy—a short, slender, older man, who might once in the sixties have been a dancer, but no longer had the muscle tone. He wore a scuzzy beard on his cheeks, a soul patch under his lower lip. First thing, when he came to work, he tied a paper surgeon’s cap on his head, for the rush he got when people looked at him in the cafeteria. The other person was a busy, intent, heavyset woman in a nurse’s uniform, who did the end-of-shift inventory, making sure it was all there, the stacks and rows and lockers full of drugs.
    Some of it, put on the street, was worthless. Nobody pays street prices to cure the heartbreak of psoriasis.
    Most of it, put on the street—on more than one street, actually; there was the old-age street, the uninsured street, the junkie street—was worth a lot. Half-million dollars? A million? Maybe.
    The three hard men burst through the door and were on top of the two pharmacy workers in a half-second. The woman had enough time to whimper, “Don’t,” before one of the men pushed her to the floor, gun in her face, so close she could smell the oil on it, and said, “Shutta fuck up. Shut up.” Soul-patch huddled into a corner with his hands up, then sank to his butt.
    The leader of the three waved a pistol at the two on the floor and said, “Flat on the floor. Roll over, put your hands behind your back. We don’t want to hurt you.”
    The two did, and another of the men hurriedly taped their hands behind them with gray duct tape, and then bound their feet together. That done, he tore off short strips of tape and pasted them over the victims’ eyes, and then their mouths.
    He stood up: “Okay.”
    The leader pushed the door open again and signaled with a fingertip. The tall man stepped in from the hallway, said, “These,” and pointed at a series of locked, glass-doored cupboards. And, “Over here ...”
    A row of metal-covered lockers. The leader of the big men went to the man on the floor, who looked more ineffectual than the woman, and ripped the tape from his mouth.
    “Where are the keys?” For one second, the man on the floor seemed inclined to prevaricate, so the big man dropped to his knees and said, “If you don’t tell me this minute, I will break your fuckin’ skull as an example. Then you will be dead, and I will ask the fat chick.”
    “In the drawer under the telephone,” Soul-patch said.
    “Good answer.”
    As the big man retaped Soul-patch’s mouth, the tall man got the keys and began popping open the lockers. All kinds of good stuff here, every opiate and man-made opiate except heroin; lots of hot-rock stimulants, worth a fortune with the big-name labels.
    “Got enough Viagra to stock a whorehouse,” one of the men grunted.
    Another one: “Take this Tamiflu shit?”
    “Fifty bucks a box in California ... Take it.”
    Five minutes of fast work, the tall man pointing them at the good stuff, sorting out the bad.
     
     
    THEN THE OLD GUY on the floor made a peculiar wiggle.
    One of the holdup men happened to see it, frowned, then went over, half-rolled him. The old guy’s hands were loose—he’d pulled one out of the tape, had had a cell phone in a belt clip under his sweater, had worked it loose, and had been trying to make a call. The big man grunted and looked at the face of the phone. One number had been pressed successfully: a nine.
    “Sonofabitch was trying to call nine-one-one,” he said, holding up the phone to the others. The old man tried to roll away, but the man who’d taken the phone punted him in the back once, twice, three times, kicking hard with steel-toed work boots.
    “Sonofabitch ... sonofabitch.” The boot hit with the sound of a meat hammer striking a steak.
    “Let him be,” the leader said after the third kick.
    But the old man had rolled back toward his tormentor and grasped him by the ankle, and the guy tried to shake