Sudden Prey

LaChaise went to the double doors, pushed through, found himself in a nursing station. Two nurses were looking at a clipboard, and one of them was saying, “. . . must be stealing scrubs again. They’re all his size, and it’s only the new ones . . .”
    They both looked up at the same time. LaChaise was there in his heavy dark coat, dripping water from the melting snow, his eyes dark and two guns in his hand. He said, “Ladies, I need to see Dr. Weather Karkinnen.”
    The taller and younger of the two nurses said, “Oh, shit,” and the older, shorter one shook her head and said, “You can’t. She’s operating.”
    “Then let’s go down to the operating room and see her.”
    “You’re not authorized,” the older woman said.
    “If you don’t show me, I’m going to kill one of you, and then the other one will show me, I bet. Who do I kill?” He pulled back the hammer on the ’dog, and the catches ratcheted in the silence. The two nurses looked at each other, then the older one began to sniffle, the way the boy in the car had; and the younger one said, finally, “I’ll show you.”
    She led the way through another set of doors, stopped outside of a single wide door, stood on tiptoe to look through a window and then stepped back and said sadly, “In there.”
    “If she’s not, I’ll be back,” LaChaise said, holding her eyes. The woman looked away, and LaChaise bumped through the door.
     
     
     
    WEATHER HAD HER eyes to the operating microscope while her hands made the delicate loops that produced square knots in the nearly invisible suture material. She’d just said, “If you actually listen to The Doors you start to laugh; listen to the words of ‘L.A. Woman’ sometime and tell me they’re not . . .”
    The door banged open and she almost jumped, and everybody turned and, without looking up, she said, “Who in the fuck did that?”
    “I did,” LaChaise said.
    Weather finished the knot and then looked up from the scope, blinked and saw him there, with the two pistols.
    “Who’s Weather Karkinnen?”
    “I am,” Weather said. He pointed a pistol at her and she closed her eyes.
    “Come out of there.”
    She opened her eyes again and said, “I can’t stop now. If I stop now, this little girl will lose her thumb and she’ll go through life like that.”
    LaChaise took a mental step back, confused: “What?”
    “I said, if I quit now . . .”
    “I heard that,” he snapped. “What’re you doing?”
    “I’m hooking up an artery. She had a benign tumor and we removed it and now we’re hooking up the two ends of the artery to get the blood supply going again.”
    “Well, how long will it take?”
    Weather looked back through the operating microscope. “Twenty minutes.”
    “You’ve got five,” he said. And he said, “You’re really short for a doctor.”
    Weather looked away again, and asked, “Are you going to kill everybody in here?”
    “Depends,” LaChaise said.
    “If I get another doctor in here, he could finish for me.”
    “Get him.”
    “Not if you’re going to hurt him, or the others.”
    “I won’t hurt him if he doesn’t fuck with me.”
    Weather looked at the circulating nurse and said, “Betty, go down and ask Dr. Feldman to step in here, if he would.”
    LaChaise looked at the nurse and said, “Go. And if you fuck with me . . .”
    Weather went back to the microscope and they all waited, silently, her hands barely moving, for two or three minutes, when a man in an operating gown bumped hip-first into the room, his hands at chest level. “What’s going on?”
    LaChaise pointed one of the guns at him, and Weather said, “We’ve got a gentleman with a gun. Two guns, in fact. He wants to talk with me.”
    “The police are coming,” the new doctor said to LaChaise. In the sterile operating theater, LaChaise looked like a rat on a cheesecake.
    “They’re always coming,” LaChaise said.
    “However this works out, we’ve got to finish this,” Weather said to Feldman, her voice steady. “Could you take a look?”
    The operating scope had two eyepieces, and Feldman, his hands still pressed to his chest, stepped to the operating table opposite Weather and looked into the second eyepiece. “You’re almost done.”
    “I need to put in two more knots, and then it’s a matter of closing . . .”
    She gave him a quick brief on the operation, and finished one of the two knots. “One more,” she said.
    “I’ve got to go down and back off