"Dude," Lyle said, "you got the equipment." As HE AND JOE went over to get the bike, Cappy thought about killing people for money. Well, what was the difference between that and killing a guy for his bike? Maybe that was when he crossed some kind of line-the first guy he killed, he did almost out of self-protection. Later on, he did it because it was interesting.
He'd seen all kinds of killing on TV, ever since he could remember-crime movies and war movies, cop shows, people being killed every way you could think of. Machine-gunned and executed and shot with long-range rifles and stabbed and strangled and poisoned and electrocuted and beat with baseball bats, everything. Real airplanes flying into real buildings, guys blowing themselves up on the news.
You'd always get some news chick telling you how bad you should feel about it, but Cappy didn't feel much of anything, except interested, and neither, he thought, did the news chick. Or anybody else. It was entertainment, was what it was, and in real life, it was kind of more entertaining.
Like riding a bike too fast: you didn't know exactly what was going to happen. It was almost like he was killing people in a movie, except more. Like you see Bruce Willis cap somebody, that's how much he felt it, times ten. Times a hundred. He liked rerunning it, when he'd pulled one off, but he liked rerunning Bruce Willis movies, too.
The thing is, it was intense.
But, Lyle Mack was right. How would you get in touch with the people who needed the work done? Maybe you could find some big Mafia guy and contract out for it. Have to think about it. "HERE WE GO," Joe Mack said, as they turned down an alley. He pointed out the garage: "The white one with the red doors. I'll drop you off right in front of it. Nobody can see us, unless they're right in the alley. Got to get in and out quick, though."
Cappy nodded. "I can do that." He reached under the seat and pulled out a Penney's bag with the handgun in it. "See ya."
He seemed really calm, Joe Mack thought, as he dropped him. Joe Mack could hardly hold on to the steering wheel, and every time he closed his eyes, he saw the smiling faces of Mikey and Shooter, followed by a fade-in of the dead faces. It was creeping him out. He planned to drink a lot that night, so he'd get some sleep.
In fact…
He fished a pint of bourbon out from under the seat and took a pull. Looked both ways for cops, and took another one. AT THREE O'CLOCK in the afternoon, the sun was already dipping toward the horizon. Weather came out of the parking garage, looked both ways, took a left, down toward the I-94 entrance. She'd take it only a mile or so to the Cretin Avenue exit, then head south.
She was tired. She needed to get home and take a nap. The surgery she'd done hadn't been difficult, but the stress around the operation was taking a toll that she really hadn't expected. It wasn't the work, it was the talk afterward. The fact was, they could go in and dissect the dura mater from Sara's brain in a half hour or so; they could finish the bone cutting, take out the dura mater, leave it with Ellen, close up, and Ellen would be good.
Sara would die. In medical papers, they would say that a patient was sacrificed so the other could live. Sacrificed. Nice. The idea of making that decision made her skin crawl. Separating the dura mater, so that each baby could drain blood back into the venous system, was the time-eater. The neurosurgeons were advancing toward each other a millimeter at a time, sorting veins, saving everything they could.
But if something went too wrong… JUST NEEDED A NAP, she thought. The surgery could resume in the middle of the night, if Sara's heart function improved. Or, if it worsened enough that they were compelled to let Sara go, and attempt to rescue Ellen.
As she came out of the parking garage, she glanced in her rearview mirror and saw the biker break away from the curb a block behind her; paid no attention, saw the stoplight ahead turn yellow, and floored the accelerator, clipping the red light as she went through. She kept the speed up down the block to the next light, and caught an odd motion in her rearview mirror; the biker had flat run the red light, and had almost been taken out by a car coming through.
Asshole.
She made a right and was on the long sweeping entry ramp, accelerating as she went. She liked to drive fast, and felt, as a surgeon, with a surgeon's reflexes, that she was entitled to; and she'd had that race training, although there had been some knocks and bumps over the years… unforeseen circumstances, she claimed in her own defense… like when she drove through the garage door. She smiled, thinking of Lucas as he came running out of the house. He'd wanted to kill her, but had pretended to be totally calm about it, and understanding. COMING DOWN THE RAMP, she saw the biker again, leaning into the turn, coming fast. Since she'd be getting off quickly, she stayed in the right lane.
She merged with traffic, pushed her speed to sixty-five, and in her left mirror saw the single headlight weave between cars in the right and the right-center lanes, two hundred yards back but coming very fast now. Too dark to see much.
As the bike came up beside her, she glanced back, saw the face shield, black leathers. He was on her back quarter-panel when he took his left hand off the clutch and pulled something from beneath his jacket.
She could feel him focused on her window, still coming, saw him lift his hand, in a peculiar way, and of the thousand things that might have occurred to her, only one rang true: she was a cop's wife and she thought, Gun.
She flicked the car left, into his lane, and at the same instant she hit the brakes on the Audi, hard, and the bike flicked left and surged past her, the rider, snapping his head around, dropped whatever it was, tried to grab it with his clutch hand, lost it, and she still thought, Gun, and she yanked the wheel left and fell in behind him, and with a surge of road rage, floored the accelerator again.
She hadn't had time to process it, but instinct told her that this was one of the guys from the robbery, one of the guys who killed Don, and now they were after her: and she was not the turn-the-other-cheek sort.
Though the Audi was fast, it was no match for the bike. The rider glanced back, saw her coming and took off, the front wheel lifting off the ground. She got the impression of a small man. The people from the hospital were supposed to be fairly big… but there was no doubt about what he'd tried to do, not in her mind.
She stayed with him for a few hundred yards, but he sliced up the white line between two cars and was pulling away when the Cretin Avenue exit came up.
She swerved onto it, up to the top, turned right, stopped beside the golf course, unsnapped her seat belt and turned to watch traffic, as she pulled out her cell phone and punched in 911.
"Is this an emergency?"
"My name is Weather Karkinnen, and I'm a surgeon. A man just tried to kill me. He's on I-94 going east toward Snelling on a motorcycle. He's going really fast…" LUCAS SHOWED up fifteen minutes later.
Weather had driven around the golf course to the clubhouse. She parked, went inside, told the restaurant manager that she was waiting for police. The first cops arrived two minutes later; in the interval, she'd called Lucas.
"I'm pretty sure," she told him on the phone. "Whatever it was, the gun, if it was a gun, he dropped it, and then he took off."
"You know where he dropped it?" Lucas asked.
"Just after 280. Right there… maybe three or four hundred yards east," she said.
"Okay. Any chance he saw where you went? That you're at the club?"
"No. I called nine-one-one, and then came right here to wait for the police," she said.
"Stay there, stay inside. I'm coming." WHEN THE FIRST St. Paul cops showed up, they were skeptical. When she explained that she might have seen the face of one of the robbers who took down the hospital, they became interested. When she mentioned that Lucas was her husband, and that she had some familiarity with assholes, and this particular asshole may have dropped a gun on the highway, they got busy.