Storm Prey Read Free

attention. Too much going through her head. She went on to the physicians’ parking, got a spot close to the door, parked, and hurried inside.
     
     
    THE TALL MAN got back to the utility closet, pulled off the raincoat and pants, which he’d used to conceal his physician’s scrubs: if they’d been seen in the hallway, the three big men with a doc, somebody would have remembered. He gathered up the scrubs abandoned by the big men, stuffed them in a gym bag, along with the raincoat and pants, took a moment to catch his breath, to neaten up.
    Listened, heard nothing. Turned off the closet light, peeked into the empty hallway, then strode off, a circuitous route, avoiding cameras, to an elevator. Pushed the button, waited impatiently.
    When the door opened, he found a short, attractive blond woman inside, who nodded at him. He nodded back, poked “1,” and they started down, standing a polite distance apart, with just the trifle of awkwardness of a single man and a single woman, unacquainted, in an elevator.
    The woman said, after a few seconds, “Still hard to come to work in the dark.”
    “Can’t wait for summer,” the tall man said. They got to “2,” and she stepped off and said, “Summer always comes,” and she was gone.
     
     
    WEATHER THOUGHT, as she walked away from the elevator, No point looking at the kids. They’d be asleep in the temporary ICU they’d set up down the hall from the operating room. She went instead to the locker room and traded her street clothes for surgical scrubs. Another woman came in, and Weather nodded to her and the other woman asked, “Couldn’t sleep?”
    “Got a few hours,” Weather said. “Are we the only two here?”
    The woman, a radiologist named Regan, laughed: “No. John’s got the doll on the table and he’s talking about making some changes to the table, for God’s sakes. Rick’s here, he’s messing with his saws. Gabriel was down in the ICU, he just got here, he’s complaining about the cold. A bunch of nurses ...”
    “Nerves,” Weather said. “See you down there.”
    She was cool in her scrubs, but comfortably so: she’d been doing this for nearly fifteen years, and the smell of a hospital, the alcohol, the cleaners, even the odor of burning blood, smelled like fresh air to her.
    No point in looking at the kids, but she’d do it anyway. There were two nurses outside the temporary ICU, and they nodded and asked quietly, “Are you going in?”
    “Just a peek.”
    “They’ve been quiet,” one of the nurses said. “Dr. Maret just left.”
    Moving as silently as she could, in the semi-dark, she moved next to the babies’ special bed. When you didn’t look closely, they looked like any other toddlers, who happened to be sleeping head-to-head; small hands across their chests, eyes softly closed, small chests rising up and down. The first irregularity that a visitor might notice was the ridges in their skulls: Weather had placed a series of skin expanders under their scalps, to increase the amount of skin available to cover the skull defects—the holes—when they were separated.
    There was really no need for her to look at them: she simply wanted to. Two babies, innocent, silent, feeling no pain; their world was about to change. She watched them for a minute. The one named Ellen sighed, and one foot moved, and then she subsided again.
    Weather tiptoed out.
     
     
    THE OLD MAN in the pharmacy was moaning, the woman trying to talk, and the old man heard the woman fall down against a chair, after trying to get up, and then somebody was rapping at the service window and they both tried to scream, and they were loud but muffled. He was chewing at the duct tape on his mouth, and finally it came loose from one side and he spat it away from his face.
    “Dorothy, can you hear me?”
    A muffled “Yes.”
    “I think I’m hurt bad. If I don’t make it, tell the police that I scratched one of the robbers. I should have blood on my hand.”
    She