Storm Prey

owners of the noses,” Weather said. And she said, “Hmm. How about a guy named Albert Loewe? Supposed to be a ...”
    Bach was shaking her head: “Got hit by a car a month ago. In a supermarket parking lot. Broke both his legs. He was a mess, and he’s still in casts.”
    “All right. Look, check this list. You know anybody else?”
    Bach knew two more people on the list, a male nurse and a third doc named Martin, but she didn’t know either of them well enough to make a judgment. “Let me ask around.”
    “Discreetly,” Weather said. “This guy did try to kill me.”
    “I’ll be very discreet,” Bach said. “I’m too good-looking to die.” She looked back up at the burn photos. “Unlike Bob. Bob’s not too good-looking to die.”
     
     
    OUT IN THE HALL, Jenkins asked, “You done?”
    Weather said, “Yes. A burn victim. We’ll be moving some skin around on him, if he makes it through the next couple weeks.”
    Didn’t want to worry him, to think she was investigating.

    THAT NIGHT, at the dinner table, Lucas told them about the proposed raid on Mack’s place. “If Weather weren’t going to the hospital every day, I’d back off,” he said. “We know who did it—it’s the whole damn Mack family, plus Haines and Chapman. We’ll never prove anything about those bags, but we know what they were, and why they burned them. The drugs went through Ike’s place, and from there, probably over to the Seed headquarters in Milwaukee, and down to the Outlaws, and they’re probably all over Illinois and the East Coast by now.”
    “Still gotta find the guy in the hospital,” Virgil said.
    “All we have to do is nail one of the Macks—any one of them—and we’ll get him.”
    “Could be done with the hospital tomorrow,” Weather said. “I cleared out two weeks, just in case. If we get it done, we could take off for a week.”
    Lucas’s eyebrows went up, and he said to Letty: “Disney World.”
    She stopped with a fork spun full of spaghetti, halfway to her mouth, and said, “Instead of St. Paul in January? I’d buy that.”
    “You’d be willing to leave the case?” Weather asked Lucas.
    “My main concern in this, is you. If we take off, and nobody knows where we are, what’re the Macks going to do? They won’t have any way to find you,” Lucas said. “If you’re done with the babies, we could take off.”
    “I think we will be,” Weather said. “One way or another, we can’t wait much longer.”

13
    BARAKAT WALKED down the hall in his stocking feet and took a seat in the ER next to an unconscious woman with a temperature of 104; a saline bag hung overhead and was dripping into her arm. Another doc was looking at her chart. Barakat sniffed at one of his shoes, said, as he pulled it on, “I require some shoe spray ...” And, “So, what do you think?”
    “You started the antibiotics?”
    “Yes. She was here two days ago with a urinary tract infection and we gave her a prescription, but I think she didn’t fill it. She has no insurance and probably no money, looking at her, so I think she tried to get along without the pills and it got away from her.”
    The other doc nodded and said, “No pain?”
    “No. The woman who came with her said this one kept getting hotter and sleepier and finally fell asleep watching TV, and then she couldn’t wake her up when it was time to go to bed.”
    The other doc nodded and snapped the chart shut and said, “Willing to bet you’re right. Wish I could talk to her.”
    “If I’m right, she’ll be talking in an hour,” Barakat said. “No sign of lung congestion, so I don’t think it’s the flu ...”
    They talked about some other possibilities and then the other doc said, “You got a kinda froggy accent. Are they talking to you, too?”
    “What? Froggy?”
    “French accent,” the doc said. “There’s a cop asking around for French accents, and now one of the docs is asking around. Because of that guy who got killed, you know, in the pharmacy.”
    Barakat suppressed a shrug and said, “I have not heard. Anyway, my accent is already Lebanese, not French. The fucking French, they are the most responsible for destroying my country.”
    “Didn’t know that,” the doc said. He looked back at the patient. “Goddamn women get the weirdest diseases up there. You know? We oughta have a wazoo guy working full-time.”
    “You’ve seen the other one? Rosemary something?”
    “Nope. What’s that about?”
    “Either a bad