Storm Prey

getting better.
    “Those poor little babies,” Lucy Raynes said. “They hurt so bad, I can see it in their eyes. Sara knows what’s going on, I can see it, she knows her heart isn’t working right. She’s really scared.”
    Weather explained about pain control, ground that Maret had already been over, but she wasn’t convincing because she really didn’t know for sure what the twins were experiencing. They might be, she thought, in some kind of inexpressible pain, though the cardiologist said they were comfortable. But then, he didn’t know, either, Weather thought. “God, this is awful,” she said aloud. “We’d hoped to get through it in a hurry, but Sara’s heart ... We should finish tomorrow. I really believe we will. We were ready to go this afternoon, but they started doing better. By this time tomorrow, we’ll be done, and then the medical guys can really get in there with individual treatments ...”
    “Just want to get done,” Larry Raynes said. “Just ... over.”

    WEATHER FOUND a spot in an empty waiting lounge and took the paper out of her briefcase and looked it over: seventeen names, French nationals working in the hospital. All French nationals, not just doctors, of whom there were four.
    She knew one of them, vaguely, an ENT guy who thought he was also a plastic surgeon. He had, in Weather’s estimation, bungled a nose job or two or three. One of them, a black woman who found herself with a nose the size of a peanut, had been referred to Weather for help. Weather had reworked the nose, but the result, while better, had still been poor.
    In general, Weather decided, if some French doc had to fall on a robbery charge, he was the one she’d pick. Not because she really thought he’d done it, but because it might save somebody’s nose.
    Jenkins was reading The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Middle East Conflict, and she stood up and said, “Give me a half hour. I need one more consult.”
    “Right here?”
    “Upstairs.”
    “I’ll come along.”
    “Jenkins...”
    “Look, if you get killed, Lucas is gonna pound me on my annual review. Okay?”
     
     
    THEY TOOK the elevator up two floors, and she left him sitting in a broken-down corridor chair while she went into the office of the head of surgery, a woman named Marlene Bach. Bach’s secretary’s desk was vacant, but Weather could see the other woman sitting in her office, her back to the door. She knocked: “Marlene?”
    Bach turned in her chair and called, “Come on in, Weather.”
    Bach was a tall, thin woman, with a small head and dark hair, which gave her somewhat the aspect of a stork. She usually had a yellow No. 2 pencil stuck behind one ear, and had a reputation for efficiency and speed in the operating room. And, the OR nurses said, she listened to classic Whitesnake while she worked.
    She had pinned a half-dozen large-format photos of a burn victim onto a corkboard on her office wall. The torso was nude, and the top half was covered with snarky black burns. Weather looked at them and said, “Electrical?”
    “Yes. Blew him right off a power pole,” Bach said. “He was hanging upside down for fifteen minutes before somebody went up after him.”
    “He gonna make it?”
    “I don’t know. He’s forty-four, he’s got fifty percent third-degree burns. Gonna be close.” Rule of thumb: if the burns covered more of your body than your age deducted from one hundred, you’d probably die. Forty-four deducted from one hundred was fifty-six. Close.
    “Looks like a lot of work,” Weather said. She sat down and said, “Listen, I have a personal concern.”
    Bach nodded. “I heard. Somebody’s trying to kill you. Or tried to, anyway.”
    “Yes. There’s been some talk that the person in the pharmacy, who opened the pharmacy for the robbers, was a physician, and the witness thinks he might have had a French accent. And you know who I thought of ...”
    “Halary,” Bach said. “You really think ... ?”
    “Not really. But I was wondering what you think? You know him better than I do.”
    “He’s a weasel, but I don’t believe he’d do anything like that,” Bach said. “For one thing, his wife’s a dermatologist with a big practice out in Edina. He really wouldn’t need the money.”
    “I didn’t know that,” Weather said.
    “And he’s not a bad ENT, if he’d lay off the plastic surgery,” Bach said. “I know that thing with the noses irritated you.”
    “Not as much as it irritated the