"Look at this," Lyle Mack said to Joe Mack. "They got guns. I bet the motherfuckers were going to kill us. Can you believe that? Can you believe it?"
"Well, yeah," Joe Mack said, spitting again. "They were probably thinking the same way we were."
They looked at the bodies for a few more seconds, and then Lyle Mack said, "Well, I'll get the garbage bags. We won't need the Scrubbing Bubbles. See if there's a shovel in the barn, we should scrape up any ice that's got blood on it."
Joe Mack went into the barn and found a No. 5 grain scoop, which would be okay for the snow, and scraped it away, though it was hard work; the blood just kept coming. Lyle fished the wallets out of the two men's pockets, retrieved the money he'd given to Chapman, and passed it to Cappy. "Your two thousand. It's my money, not theirs. I loaned it to them this morning."
Cappy nodded and took a drag on his Camel. Lyle said, "And don't go throwing that Camel on the ground. You always see in cop shows where somebody finds a cigarette butt."
Cappy nodded again, and Joe and Lyle put on the gloves and together rolled the dead men into the contractor's bags, while Cappy sat in the van door and watched. When they hoisted the bodies into the back of the van, thought Joe Mack, they looked exactly like dead men in garbage bags.
"Don't want to go driving around like this," Cappy said.
"No, we don't," Lyle Mack said. "I know a place we can dump them. I got lost one day, driving around. Way back in the sticks. Won't find them until spring, or maybe never."
To his brother: "Joe Mack, you take their car, drop it off at the Target by their house."
They scraped up the last bit of blood, wiped the grain scoop with a horse towel, and threw the towel in another bag, along with the rubber gloves. "Burn that when we get back to the bar," Lyle Mack said. "Take no chances."
"How far to the dump-off spot?" Cappy asked.
"Eight or nine miles. Back road, nobody goes there. We can put them under this little bridge. Hardly have to get out of the van. No cops, no stops."
"What about the woman that saw me?" Joe Mack asked.
"We gotta talk about that," Lyle Mack said. He looked at Cappy.
"What woman?" Cappy asked.
3
SAME TIME, SAME STATION, doing it all over again.
Weather slept less well, with the anxiety of the prior day weighing her down. Again she got up in the dark, dressed, spoke quietly with Lucas, and went down to a quick breakfast and the car. Driving down the vacant night streets, to University, along University to the hospital complex. Nothing in her mind but the babies.
Alain Barakat waited for her, one flight up from the security door he'd opened the morning before, freezing in his parka, smoking. The place was a nightmare; dark, brutally cold. Barakat had grown up in the north of Lebanon, with beaches and palm trees. That he should wind up in this place…
When he finished here, one more year, he would move to Paris. He'd gone online and found that his American medical certificate was good in France, though there would be some paperwork. Paris. Or maybe LA.
Only one good thing about Minneapolis: he could still get Gauloises, smuggled down from Canada. No: two good things.
The cocaine.
He took a long drag and thought about going back inside. Fuck this. He had nothing to do with anybody being dead. BUT OF COURSE he did. The whole thing had been his idea. He'd seen a chance to steal a pharmacy key, and he'd taken it, without even knowing why at that moment. Or maybe he'd known why, but not how…
Barakat had started with cocaine at the Sorbonne, buying it from a fellow student who was working his way through college. He'd tried other stuff, uppers, downers, a little marijuana, a peyote button once, but none of it did it for him: the idea wasn't less control, it was more control.
That's what you got from the cocaine.
It had helped him through med school, but after that, in Miami, getting cocaine had not been a problem. Once in Minneapolis, for his residency, he'd asked around, found a guy who was recommended as a source for decent marijuana, the imported stuff down from Canada. A guy like that knew where to get cocaine.
So he bought his coke from a dealer named Lonnie, and then from a redneck named Rick, who took over Lonnie's route when Lonnie moved to Birmingham. Then Rick got hurt in a motorcycle accident, hurt really bad, and Barakat went stone cold sober for a week and a half, and it almost killed him.
One day Joe Mack showed up on his porch with a free baggie of blow.
Like the cocaine Welcome Wagon.
"Our friend Rick said you were one of his best guys, but he's gonna be out of it for a while…"
At that point, Barakat was spending eight hundred dollars a week on cocaine, with no way to get more money. He hung at eight hundred, until one late night he was waiting at the pharmacy window, the key already in hand, and thought, They've got no protection, and I know the guys who could take it away from them.
It all seemed so simple. And it should have been. NOW HERE he was, freezing his ass off, trying to set up an assassination. Not simple anymore. Not uninteresting, though, if only he'd been working with a competent crew. The whole concept of crime was interesting: the strong taking from the weak, the smart from the stupid. A game, with interesting stakes… if only he hadn't been working with the Macks.
At twenty minutes after five o'clock, a black Audi convertible rolled up the ramp, headlights bouncing when its tires bumped over expansion joints. The car swooped into a reserved parking place in the physicians' area. Five seconds later, a short blond woman got out and started toward the exit door opposite Barakat.
Had to be her-the same woman he'd seen in the elevator. He let the door close: he couldn't allow her to see him again. Even being in the same part of the building, where she might see him by accident, could trip off a memory.
He waited, nervous, stressed, sweating in the freezing cold, and when she'd gone through the door, went after her. And as he went, the thought crossed his mind: fix it now. Take her. She was a small woman in a deserted building, he could break her neck, who'd know what happened?
Just a thought, but it stayed with him. He might catch her at the elevators… but when he got there, she was gone. A little feather of disappointment trickled across his heart, his gut. He could have done it.
So now, the question remained. Who was she, and where was she going?
She was early for most docs. They wouldn't normally arrive until sometime after six. On the other hand, the Frenchman's surgical team was supposed to start separating the twins…
He went that way. THIRTY PEOPLE milled in the hallway outside the special operating theater. Like most of the other docs, he'd found an excuse to look the place over-the special double operating table, the intricate anesthesia setup, the newly painted, sign-posted floor, an attempt to better choreograph the movements of the massive operating team, to keep the sterile and the non-steriles separate, even as they walked among each other.
He saw the blond woman, still in her long winter coat, talking to Gabriel Maret, the Frenchman. Maret was listening closely. She had to be somebody important.
Barakat was an emergency room doc, not on the team, or anything close to it, and all the team members knew each other, so he couldn't risk joining the crowd. What he could do, though, was climb into the small observation theater above the OR. If you wanted a seat, all you had to do was get there early. One of the team members would be narrating the surgical procedures for the observers. The woman, if she were central to the work, would be introduced. LUCY AND LARRY RAYNES were with the children, who were still awake, but about to be moved to the operating theater. Sara saw Weather and her eyes misted up. She was still a baby, but she recognized the woman who'd caused her pain in the past. She began to cry, softly, and then Ellen started, not yet knowing why.