Storm prey

5

Weather walked quietly down the stairs, sensed a presence, stepped sideways and looked into the kitchen. In the reflected light from a hallway sconce, she could see Virgil Flowers sitting on his sleeping bag in the arch between the dining room and the kitchen. From there, he could see both the front door and the back. A shotgun was lying on the floor behind him.

"Did you get any sleep?" she asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine," he said. He yawned.

She suspected that he was lying; that he'd spent the night prowling the first floor with his gun. "I'm going to make some coffee, and there's a coffee cake in the freezer. I could stick it in the oven. Ready in twenty minutes?"

"Great, thanks. I need to brush my teeth. Don't open the curtains in the kitchen."

"I don't think-"

"Don't open the curtains," he said. He said it with the same hard tone that Lucas sometimes used; not something she often saw in Virgil, though she knew it must be there.

She nodded. "Okay."

Virgil asked, "Would there be enough coffee cake for another guy?"

"There's enough for six," she said.

"Jenkins has been wandering around outside. I might give him a call."

"Ah, you guys…"

Guys with guns, taking care of her. She hadn't flashed on the sniper killing again, but it was back there, somewhere, like Grendel, waiting to crawl out of its cave. LUCAS CAME DOWN the stairs a moment later, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, looking sleepy. He was carrying a shoulder holster with a..45. Virgil, just off his cell phone, said, "Jenkins thought he'd stop by."

Lucas nodded, taking Jenkins's behavior for granted. He dropped the.45 on the kitchen counter, and a minute later, Jenkins knocked on the side door. Virgil let him into the mudroom, a big man, cold, blowing steam. He said, "Four below," and, clapping his gloved hands, said, cheerfully, "Looks like everybody's up and at 'em, huh?"

"Ah, Christ," Lucas said. Early mornings disagreed with him, unless he was coming from the dark side.

Weather got the coffee going and Lucas got the oven preheating, and Virgil went off to the guest bedroom with his Dopp kit while Jenkins shed his coat and rubber overshoes, and put two 9mm Glocks on the end of the kitchen table.

With the coffee going, Weather went to the phone and punched in a number, identified herself and asked, "Are we on schedule? Thanks." She hung up and said to Lucas: "We're on schedule. Sara's stable. Don't know if she'll stay that way, but we're going to do it."

They ate the coffee cake, and argued about politics and medical care. The morning felt almost like an early fishing trip, a bunch of people sitting around eating unhealthy food.

Then Weather looked at her watch and said, "Better go."

Lucas and Weather took Lucas's SUV, on the theory that if somebody was still shooting for Weather, they might not know where she lived, or what other vehicles she had access to. Jenkins led the way in his personal Crown Vic, followed by Lucas in his SUV, with Virgil trailing behind in his 4Runner. Instead of going to the hospital parking ramp, they went to the front entrance. Jenkins parked, put a BCA placard in the front window, and held the door for Weather as she went in, with Lucas a step behind her.

"So I'm good," she said, when they were in the lobby. "See you guys this afternoon?"

"I think I'll hang out for a while, see who comes by," Jenkins said. Virgil came in.

Lucas said, "Maybe I'll get a bite in the cafeteria."

"I'll come with you," Virgil said.

Weather looked at them: "You're going to stay here all day, aren't you?"

Jenkins shrugged: "Maybe."

Virgil said, "Not me. I'm going back to your place and crash."

"I don't think it's necessary-" Weather began.

Lucas cut her off: "You do the surgery, we'll do the body-guarding."

Then there was the deal with the chickens. But not just any chickens.

Arnold Shoemaker, the farmer, was either blessed with, or cursed by, exotic fowl. He wasn't quite certain which.

He didn't buy them, he accumulated them. Somebody would come by, hearing that Arnold would take them, and they'd drop them off-unwanted family pets, stray birds, leftovers from farms that were going down. Cuckoo Marans, Golden Penciled Ham-burgs, Leghorns, Buttercups, Red Caps, Blue-Peckered Logans, assorted bantams and guinea hens, he had them all.

He ate the few eggs they produced, when he found them fresh, but never ate the chickens. They ran in and out of the old barn in the winter, and he'd feed them table scraps and ground corn, and leave them on their own to peck up gravel out by the road and bugs in the barn.

The fact was, they made him happy to look at. It was nothing short of remarkable, he thought, how so few people realized how good-looking a chicken could be. Better-looking than parrots, by a long way. No contest.

Arnold was up before dawn, into town, had breakfast at the diner, where the waitress called him "hon" and knew to bring the Heinz 57 sauce for his scrambled eggs and home fries cooked in sausage grease; the combo gave him gas, but the taste was unparalleled, and Arnold lived alone, except for the chickens and his yellow Lab, so the gas wasn't a critical problem, though the dog sometimes got watery eyes.

The sun was just over the horizon when Arnold topped the hill on the way home, and came down to Minnie Creek and saw the coyotes break out from under the bridge and into the trees. He went on by, but he could see them at the edge of the woods, watching the truck with their silver eyes.

Coyotes loved the taste of a tender young guinea hen. Arnold's young guinea hens. He lost a half-dozen birds a year to the coyotes-he'd find an explosion of feathers outside the barn and another old pal was gone. And the dogs were getting more and more aggressive.

So Arnold parked the car in a hurry, hustled inside, put on his insulated hunting boots and cold-weather hunting jacket, opened the gun safe and got out the Savage.223 with the nine-power variable scope. Back outside, he headed straight down the driveway, across the road, across Dornblicker's field, over a hump and down toward the creek. The land sort of swole up, as Dornblicker said, before it dropped down to the creek, and the swole covered Arnold's approach.

He crawled the last few yards on his elbows and thighs, slithering over the snow. At the top, he lay still for a minute, then two, then carefully, slowly, pushed up. Four coyotes down by the creek; cold breeze in his face, so they couldn't smell him. Maybe they found a roadkill deer, Arnold thought.

He pushed the rifle forward. He was 130 yards out, but the coyotes were big animals compared to woodchucks. He eased off the safety, picked out the biggest mutt, let out a breath, squeezed…

BAP! The shot echoed across the freezing winter countryside, and three of the coyotes broke for the trees. One of them jumped, and fell.

Arnold worked the bolt action, watching the tree line, looking for a second shot, but the coyotes were gone. He stood up, slung the gun over his shoulder, and walked down through the crunchy snow to look at the dead one.

Thirty feet out, he saw the garbage bags and thought, Goddamnit. Every once in a while, somebody who didn't want to pay garbage fees would throw sacks of garbage and trash in the roadside ditches. Half the time, it was full of hazardous waste-paint cans, old TVs, insecticide. Stuff you had to pay to get rid of.

Ten feet out, as he was looking at the dead coyote, the muzzle of his gun on the mutt's head, he saw the shoe.

And then, through a hole in the second garbage bag, a single, frozen, blue eye, wide open.

Lucas was sitting in the hospital cafeteria, reduced to reading a tattered copy of The Onion, nearly delirious with boredom, when, at three o'clock, Marcy Sherrill called and said, "I'm having carrot sticks and low-fat yogurt for my afternoon snack."

"I'm proud of you," Lucas said. "Can I hang up now?"

"No. I've got something that might interest you, out of Dakota County. A farmer down there found a couple fresh bodies in garbage bags under a bridge. Their wallets were gone, but one of them had an envelope in his pocket, a gas bill, with his name on it. Charles Chapman, aka 'Shooter' to his pals in the Seed. The Dakota deputies ID'd the other one as Michael Haines, Chapman's housemate. Both of them are on the computer, both of them are members of the Seed. Both of them were wearing jeans, biker boots, and tan Carhartt work jackets."

Lucas hunched over the table, and Jenkins, across the table, perked up. "Man… that's interesting."

"They took the bodies up to St. Paul, and we called an ME's investigator and asked him to take a peek at their legs. Their arms and faces had been ripped up by coyotes, but their legs were okay. Haines has three scratches down the back of his left leg, just above his Achilles tendon. They look like fingernail scratches."

"Now we're getting somewhere," Lucas said. "I'll get Weather home, then I'll head over to the office and talk to the gang guys. Goddamn, this could break it."

"But if two out of the three are dead…"

"The other one, the one still alive, is a smart guy. He had to get rid of the other two for security reasons, after Peterson died. Maybe the smart guy knew what it meant when Haines got scratched. The assholes are getting onto DNA."

"The ME's sending DNA samples over to your lab, if we could get them to hurry it up a little," Marcy said. "The samples from Peterson's fingernails are already there."

"Well, you know, they keep telling me that chemistry is chemistry, but I'll call them," Lucas said. "I'll tell you what: shutting this down would be a load off my mind."

"I think we can shut it down," Marcy said. She leaned on the we, meaning Minneapolis.

"I'm not going to bullshit you, Marcy. We've got the gang guys and the files," Lucas said. "I'm going to take a look, see what's what, and go talk to whoever I need to talk to. This is my wife they're screwing with."

Long silence. "Take it easy. Talk to me."

"You know me," Lucas said.

Weather had reopened the sutures in the twins' heads, and the neurosurgeons got back to work, slowly, millimeter by millimeter, splitting the dura mater into separate sheets. By two in the afternoon, they were halfway done.

"We're showing some heart," the anesthesiologist said.

Maret stopped and peered at Sara.

"Not Sara. It's Ellen," the anesthesiologist said.

They got Seitz, the cardiologist, in. "Her blood pressure is too low," he said, looking at the monitors. "Too low… goddamn it, she's gonna arrest."

Then things got quick: Seitz put some chemicals into her, steadying her heart, and avoided arrest, but then Sara started looking shaky.

Seitz: "You've got to get out now. We've got to get her blood pressure up, but we can't let Sara's get too high. We need to get them in the ICU again."

Maret said, "If we could get another hour or two…"

The cardiologist shook his head. "We'd lose one or the other. They can't tolerate any more of this."

"Damn. Everything else is going so well…" Maret said. He looked at a clock, then up at the observation wall.

"Dr. Karkinnen… how long will it take you to close?"

Weather was in the front row, Jenkins two rows behind her. "Half hour."

"Scrub up, and we'll back out."

The babies looked like little pale meat loaves under her bloody gloves, faceless, masked and taped, the edges of the skin on their head drying and raggedy now, their personalities submerged. At times, it was like working on a couple of logs; and then they'd come back, and be children again. She moved fast, with Maret leaning on her elbow, pulling the kids together again. People in the room silent, watching, regretful. For every day they didn't finish, death got closer, for one or the other or both. WHEN WEATHER had finished, and gotten back into her street clothes, she walked with Jenkins back out to the front lobby. Marcy Sherrill was waiting with Lucas. Marcy took mug shots of Haines and Chapman from her briefcase and passed them to Weather.

"Is either one of these the guy you saw?"

Weather shook her head. "I don't think so. The guy had real thick hair, down on his shoulders, almost… How'd you come up with these guys?"

"Somebody murdered them. One of them has scratches on his leg; and they're members of the Seed."

Weather shuddered. "They may be the guys who did the holdup, but I don't think they're the one I saw. Could have been the driver-all I saw of him was a beard."

Lucas said to Marcy: "This might not be bad: it means we've still got a handle on our third guy."

Virgil was sitting on the front porch, in the cold, eating a Hostess cupcake, when they got home. Jenkins stopped at the curb behind a brown Cadillac and Lucas turned up the drive and took the truck straight into the garage.

Jenkins came crunching up the driveway and asked Virgil, "Shrake inside?"

"You know anybody else with a brown Cadillac?"

"He got a deal on it," Jenkins said.

"I should hope." Virgil finished the cupcake and led the way in. Lucas and Weather came in through the back, and they all met in the kitchen, where Shrake and Letty, Lucas and Weather's fifteen-year-old daughter, were playing gin rummy at the breakfast table.

Shrake was a big man, as big as Jenkins, in shirtsleeves, with a.40-cal Smith in a shoulder holster. He was staring fixedly at his cards, and Weather asked, "Who's winning?"

"Don't bother us," Letty said. "If he goes out, I've got to take off my bra."

Shrake jerked bolt upright, looked from Letty to Weather, mouth open, recovered and said, "Jesus Christ. It's dangerous just being around her."

"You got no idea," Lucas said. "So listen up, guys, we got a break-"

"What about me and my bra?" Letty asked.

"That's your problem," Lucas said. "Now either shut up, or go away."

Lucas laid it out: the Minneapolis cops were focusing on the hospital, but the BCA had the gang files. "So we're on it. We're cooperating, but I'm going after it full-time. Virgil, Jenkins, you guys stay with Weather. Shrake, I want you hanging around, keep loose. If something comes up, I'll call you."

Weather said, "You don't think this has anything to do with… that other time? With the Seed?"

Lucas shook his head: "That's ancient history. Those guys were nuts, everybody knows it. Nope: this has to do with the hospital. They've got themselves in a crack now, and they're trying to get out."

Virgil said, "You think somebody in the hospital was involved, an insider, right? Maybe Weather, or me, or somebody else, could talk up the idea that the Seed guys might be coming after him. Maybe break him out."

Letty said, "Put it on the ten-o'clock news."

Lucas shrugged: "We could try, but I don't see anybody confessing. We've got three murders now. More likely somebody'd quit his job and head out. That's something we could look for."

"Need to talk to other gang squads where the Seed and the Angels have branches," Jenkins said. "See if anybody dumps a load of commercial pharmaceuticals on the street."

"That we can do," Lucas said. "What else?"

"Roust the Seed," Shrake said. "Kick some ass. Keep an eye on Weather."