“All right,” Lucas said. “Chat with people. Try not to piss off Marcy’s guys.”
“What are we gonna do?” Del asked.
Lucas told them about Marcy’s plan to go after Lyle Mack, when Joe Mack was caught. “We’re gonna pick him up, take him downtown, sweat him ... let him hire a lawyer, whatever. He could give us the insider at the hospital, or tell Joe to. We’ve got everything on Joe, nothing on Lyle, so maybe Lyle’ll save himself.”
Del said, “The other thing we could do is, start figuring out who Joe Mack’s friends are, and busting their chops. Somebody’s hiding him.”
“Unless he’s in Mexico,” Weather said.
“Marcy’s got the feds looking for him,” Lucas said. “Both the Canada crossings and the Mexican ones. We can’t do that—all we can do is look around here.”
LYLE MACK TURNED the bar over to Honey Bee at nine o’clock and headed home. Felt odd to be leaving so early. He watched his rearview mirror, wondering if the cops were following him, or had bugged him somehow. Saw lots of cars, but had no idea if anybody had followed him.
He lived in a shabby but quiet neighborhood a mile from the bar, a three-bedroom rambler with a dry basement and a two-car garage off the alley in back. He put the car in the garage, went inside the house, walked around turning on lights.
Turned on the TV
“Goddamnit.” He was scared. He went into the kitchen and turned the lights off, then went back and tried to watch a late-night sports channel. Gave it half an hour, then went to bed. He lay there, unable to sleep. Lay there for eight hours, looking at the clock every fifteen minutes. Knew he must have slept part of the time... was asleep when the alarm went off at five o’clock.
He got out of bed, drunk with exhaustion. Using his clean phone, he called Cappy. “Where are you?”
“Wal-Mart parking lot.”
“Let’s do it.”
“Call me when you’re set,” Cappy said.
He got dressed in the dark, and when he got his coat and gloves on, he looked out through the crack between the front-room curtains, up and down the street. He saw no vehicles that didn’t look like they belonged. He doubted that they were watching him, but...
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. He was scared. He went anyway. Out the back door down the sidewalk to the garage, into the garage, groping past the truck to the back door, then, after getting his guts up, out the back door and into the alley.
Nobody in sight: a cold, dark night in January, looking down a narrow alley toward the street a half-block away. He listened for a moment, heard nothing but distant cars on 1-494, and headed toward the street.
When he got there, he stopped beside a hedge and punched Cappy’s number on his speed-dial. The phone rang and Cappy said, “Ten seconds.”
Ten seconds later, Cappy’s van came around the corner. Not Joe Mack’s old van, but Cappy’s old van—and stopped at the mouth of the alley. Lyle Mack crawled in and said, “So fuckin’ cold. You get off work?”
“Yeah, I did. First day I ever missed,” Cappy said. “Told them I had the flu.”
“Whatever,” Lyle Mack said. He pointed. “Go that way.” Cappy did a lot of turns through Mack’s neighborhood, saw nothing behind them. They drove out to Cherries, stopped a block away, and Lyle Mack got into Joe Mack’s old van. They headed into St. Paul, Cappy a half-block behind Lyle Mack.
BARAKAT was waiting.
Lyle Mack pulled into Barakat’s driveway and Cappy parked in the street, and he and Lyle Mack went to the side door. Barakat jerked the door open, and they filed in, and Lyle Mack could see that Barakat was furious.
“What the fuck is going on?” he shouted. “Your brother kidnapped and strangled some woman? You guys are crazy.”
“Ah, Joe fucked up bad,” Lyle Mack said. “We’ve got him hid out.”
“They’ll get him,” Barakat said. “He’s all over TV”
“They won’t get him,” Lyle Mack insisted. “We got a guy named Eddie coming over from Green Bay. He’s gonna drive him down to Brownsville. He’s... going away.”
Barakat stared at him, eyes cold as black glaciers; just a thin patina of white under his nose. He was flying, Lyle Mack realized. He was high as a kite. Lyle Mack said, “This is Cappy. He’s gonna come with you.”
Barakat’s attention shifted to Cappy. “You as dumb as the Macks?”
“Hope not,” Cappy said. His voice was mild, and he smiled, the corners of his mouth turning up. His eyes were dead as planks.
“I hope to God,” Barakat said. He inspected Cappy for a moment, then nodded. “You could be an orderly. You got the look. We gotta talk before we go in.”
“Lyle said that you could teach me how to act like a hospital guy.”
“It’s not rocket science,” Barakat said. “I got a map for you and other stuff. A key. A place you can hide if you need to.”
“Cool,” Cappy said. To Lyle Mack. “You best get back. Leave the van . . .”
“... right up from the SuperAmerica. By the pink house.”
“Don’t put it on the plow side. It might snow.”
“Don’t worry . . .” Lyle Mack glanced at his watch. “I’m outa here.”
WHEN HE WAS GONE, Barakat said, “We have to leave in a half hour. So let’s sit, and I’ll tell you where you can go, and walk you through the map.”
“You got a little blow under your nose. In the whiskers,” Cappy said.
Barakat wiped his face with his hand and said, “Thanks. You want a taste?”
“Well, yeah. If you got some extra.”
“Just a taste,” Barakat said.
They had two or three tastes, and Cappy banged around the kitchen, going with the flow, talking like he didn’t usually talk; told Barakat about living in Bakersfield, and riding his bike to Vegas and LA. Barakat told him about growing up in Lebanon and the war with the Party of God. “Goddamn, this is good shit,” Cappy said, after a while. “You don’t operate on people when you’re high, do you?”
“I don’t operate on people. When somebody needs to be operated on, we call a surgeon.”
“So what do you do?”
“Whatever,” Barakat said. He said, “I can’t believe that idiot kidnapped that woman. Then killed her. I mean, if you want to get hunted down like a dog . . .”
“He didn’t kill her,” Cappy said.
“He didn’t? Who did?”
Cappy raised his hand. “I did.”
Barakat fixed on him, then stepped sideways to the kitchen table and sat down. “How’d you do that?”
CAPPY WAS TAKEN ABACK. Nobody wanted to talk about that. But Barakat seemed straight enough. Intent.
“Well, Lyle called me up and says Joe has this big problem . . .” He told Barakat about driving over to the airport parking structure, about getting lost, about finding the van, about crawling in and strangling MacBride. Barakat took another hit of the cocaine and passed another one of his twists to Cappy, who unwrapped it and snorted it as the punctuation at the end of his story.
“Okay, so you’re saying that she was already on her back when you went in there?”
“Sort of on her side, looking at me, and when I got in there she started to roll over and I thought she was going to scream or something, so I slap my hand over her mouth and pull her around and jump up on top of her and get her by the throat... my thumbs in her throat.”
“Did she fight?”
“A little bit, but it’s more like she was trying to get a grip on the floor of the van, or something.”
“Were her eyes open?”
“Oh, yeah, right until she died,” Cappy said. “They were like, huge. Like bubbles.”
Barakat scratched his throat and then said, “Makes me hard.”
“Yeah, me too, sometimes,” Cappy said.
“I don’t mean really . . .” Barakat said hastily.
“Well, either did I, but I’m saying, I know what you mean,” Cappy said.
They were both lying and they both k
new it. A spark of camaraderie, something not often felt by either of them.
BARAKAT SHOWED HIM a drawing of the hospital and gave him a key. “This only works for one door, which is this closet.” Barakat tapped the map. “I’ve got to let you in. I tried to get the outside door key, but they watch them. Getting out is just a push-bar.”
Cappy looked at the key. “So the key is just about useless.”
“No, not at all. If you’ve got to hide, you can get in there and pull the door shut. There are about a million doors and they’re all locked, most of the time. Could give you a break. The thing is, nobody uses the closet. It’s empty. You can leave your clothes there and put on the scrubs... Scrubs are hospital clothes.”
“Okay,” Cappy said. Barakat seemed really smart to him.
“I got an ID for you. I’ll show you where to clip it on,” Barakat said. “The picture doesn’t look too much like you, but you can say you cut your hair off. Nobody looks at the pictures anyway, if you keep walking.”
They talked about it for another fifteen minutes, then Barakat looked at his watch. “You know, you’re catching on pretty good. You are pretty smart. But we gotta get going. Get over there, on the fourth floor—you’ll go past some signs that say patient parking, and then physicians parking, and then you’re in general parking, probably on the fourth floor but maybe the fifth. Just wait. When I can get loose, probably a half hour after I get in, I’ll come open the door for you.”
“Okay.”
“If you really want to go,” Barakat said.
There was something in the tone of his voice that made Cappy look up. “I thought that was the deal. Get the chick.”
“That’s the deal, except for one thing,” Barakat said. “That is, it’s crazy dangerous. She’s got this cowboy-looking guy with guns who goes around with her. Her bodyguard. He’s always out in the hall. I got his name and checked on him, and he’s known to be a killer. So’s her husband.”
“Don’t mean much to me,” Cappy said.
“It should. It means they’re in the same business you’re in, and they’ve had more practice,” Barakat said.
Cappy thought about it for a minute, then raised his eyebrows. “Okay. Something to think about. So? You were leading up to something.”
“Look. It wouldn’t do you any good to kill me. Nobody knows I’m involved, or even suspects I’m involved, except you and the Mack brothers. I can’t tell anybody, or I go to prison forever.” He shuddered at the thought, and let Cappy see it. He didn’t mention Shaheen. “But. Instead of going after this woman, who’s going to be hard to get at, if something were to happen to Joe Mack? If Joe Mack died, there’d be no link.”
And he thought, If Joe Mack were dead, even if the woman remembered seeing him in the elevator, they wouldn’t be able to prove anything.
“Lyle would figure it out,” Cappy said. “He’d be pissed. Those brothers are tight.”
Barakat took the point: if Joe Mack were killed by Cappy or Barakat, maybe he could find a way to turn them in, without paying the penalty himself. He said, “What if something were to happen to Joe Mack and Lyle Mack?”
Cappy grinned at him. “You really are an asshole.”
“LISTEN TO ME, CAPRICE,” Barakat said, shaking a finger at him. “The Macks are dealers. I know these kind of people. Joe Mack will try to deal if he gets caught. What does he have? He has you and me—me for the hospital, you for the lady in the van. If he deals ... maybe he gets off with fifteen years. Maybe less.”
“I think they’re too scared of me.”
Barakat shook his head. “Scared now. Scared if they’re locked in a jail, with more bikeists in there?”
“Bikers ...”
“Bikers. They’ll have friends in prison,” Barakat said. “We won’t. They will deal us. That’s all I worry about now. I pray that Joe Mack is killed by the police, but I’m thinking, for both of us ... maybe we could make it happen.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“I have no money,” Barakat said. “I’m slave labor at the hospital, until I finish. Then there are possibilities. But one thing we know. We know that the Macks have a million dollars of medical-quality drugs. If you would help, if we could find Joe Mack ... I could get him to tell us where they are. I know they are not yet moved.”
Cappy thought again. Then, “How’d you do that? Get him to talk?”
Barakat spread his hands: “I’m a doctor. I have scalpels.”
“I GOTTA THINK about it some more,” Cappy said.
“But you’re not saying ‘no.”’
“Well, you got some good points,” Cappy said. “I hadn’t thought about ... you know, they could sell me out for doing the woman. I mean, hell, except for the guy they kicked at the hospital, I’m the only one who’s killed anyone.”
They both pondered it for a minute, then Barakat said, “This is a very interesting name that you have. ‘Caprice.’ In English it means an unpredictable action, does it not?”
“I don’t know,” Cappy said. “I don’t know if it’s a real word in English.”
“Yes, it is. I remember it, because it’s also a word in French—a kind of musical composition.”
“You can speak French?”
“Yes. And Arabic.”
“Huh.” Cappy was impressed. ‘All I know is, my old man told me I was named after an “eighty-two Chevy.”
Barakat smiled at the idea—naming your son for a car—then glanced at his watch. “If we’re going to go, we have to go now.”
“Better go,” Cappy said. “Tell the truth, I’d like to catch that bitch somewhere. She almost ran my ass over. Just couldn’t believe it; cut me off, then almost ran me over.”
Barakat laughed: “LA car talk,” he said.
He was quite taken with Caprice, and slapped the boy on the back as they went out.
INSIDE THE HOSPITAL, Barakat led him to the closet, showed him how to wear the orderly’s uniform, clipped the ID on his chest. “If anybody asks, you work in sanitation, and your boss, whose name is Rob Jansen, gave you a map and told you to spend the morning learning the hospital. Stay out of the basement. Jansen’s office is there.”
Easy enough to do.
Cappy ghosted down the hallways, patients, doctors and nurses, visitors, coming and going, all the time: people lying on gurneys, in wheelchairs, shuffling down the halls, sometimes towing bags of saline mounted on wheeled racks; people staring out of hospital rooms, watching television; beeps and boops from equipment, chimes from elevators, more laughter than you’d think.
He got a quick sandwich in the cafeteria, actually helped move a patient from one floor to the other, on a cart. Pushed a guy in a wheelchair to an elevator, took him to the cafeteria, the guy breathing oxygen from a bottle on the back of the chair, who said, when they arrived, “Thanks, son.”
He thought at first that the other orderlies would look him over, but nobody paid any attention to him; after a while, he began to get the feeling that he was effectively invisible. He asked about, and located, the special operating room for the twins. Barakat had told him about the overhead observation room, and he found that, looked it over. Thought: Can’t take her here.
There’d be too many people around ...
Started on an idea.
If he could wait in a doorway, on a hall where she’d pass by, he could shoot her, slam the door, block the door somehow, and run for it. The place was such a tangle of hallways that if he worked out an escape route in advance, he’d probably make it out ...
But that meant watching her for a while, so he’d know where she went. And watching her meant that a lot of other people would see his face around.
Maybe he could simply wait for the twins’ operation, and watch her. When she got ready to leave the hospital room, he could run down the stairs, shoot her when she came out—thirty feet or so—step back into the stairwell.
If he’d stashed a piece of two-by-four in the stairwell ahead of time, he could wedge it
between the door and the bottom step, and that would block the door as effectively as a padlock.
He could then run up or down the stairs, mix with the other uniforms, and disappear into the crazy maze of hallways.
Be out of the place in four or five minutes.
Maybe.
10
VIRGIL, LUCAS, and Shrake saw Weather safely into the hospital, all the way to the women’s locker room. “Do not go off by yourself,” Lucas told her. “Virgil can be there in one minute. Don’t get a Coke or a candy bar. Just call him.”
“I will,” she said, but she said it in a way that made Lucas turn back to her.
“Weather, if you don’t, I’ll be sincerely pissed off. I mean it,” he said. “There’s a guy in this hospital who might be trying to kill you.”
“I’ll call,” she promised.
A pretty blond nurse, carrying a load of fresh scrubs, had piled up behind them, and she said to Lucas, “We’ll take care of her.”
“I’d appreciate it,” Lucas said. “And I want you to rat her out, if she cheats. This is serious stuff.”
The nurse nodded, paused as she passed Virgil, and said, “How’re you doing?”
Virgil said, “How’re you doing yourself?”
“I’m doing fine ...”
Weather hooked her by the arm and said, “Don’t flirt with the hired help,” and they went inside, the nurse turning to wiggle her fingers at Virgil, who wiggled back.
Lucas said to Shrake, “She didn’t say, ‘How’re you doing?’ to us.”
Shrake said, “She was saying it to me, but that fuckin’ Flowers jumped in front of me.”
“I’m so hot,” Virgil said. He touched a thigh with a fingertip and made the steam sound: “Chhhh.”
Lucas covered his eyes in mock embarrassment, and Shrake laughed and said to Virgil, “You’re so fuckin’ gay.”