She knew one of them, vaguely, an ENT guy who thought he was also a plastic surgeon. He had, in Weather's estimation, bungled a nose job or two or three. One of them, a black woman who found herself with a nose the size of a peanut, had been referred to Weather for help. Weather had reworked the nose, but the result, while better, had still been poor.

In general, Weather decided, if some French doc had to fall on a robbery charge, he was the one she'd pick. Not because she really thought he'd done it, but because it might save somebody's nose.

Jenkins was reading The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Middle East Conflict, and she stood up and said, "Give me a half hour. I need one more consult."

"Right here?"

"Upstairs."

"I'll come along."

"Jenkins…"

"Look, if you get killed, Lucas is gonna pound me on my annual review. Okay?" THEY TOOK the elevator up two floors, and she left him sitting in a broken-down corridor chair while she went into the office of the head of surgery, a woman named Marlene Bach. Bach's secretary's desk was vacant, but Weather could see the other woman sitting in her office, her back to the door. She knocked: "Marlene?"

Bach turned in her chair and called, "Come on in, Weather."

Bach was a tall, thin woman, with a small head and dark hair, which gave her somewhat the aspect of a stork. She usually had a yellow No. 2 pencil stuck behind one ear, and had a reputation for efficiency and speed in the operating room. And, the OR nurses said, she listened to classic Whitesnake while she worked.

She had pinned a half-dozen large-format photos of a burn victim onto a corkboard on her office wall. The torso was nude, and the top half was covered with snarky black burns. Weather looked at them and said, "Electrical?"

"Yes. Blew him right off a power pole," Bach said. "He was hanging upside down for fifteen minutes before somebody went up after him."

"He gonna make it?"

"I don't know. He's forty-four, he's got fifty percent third-degree burns. Gonna be close." Rule of thumb: if the burns covered more of your body than your age deducted from one hundred, you'd probably die. Forty-four deducted from one hundred was fifty-six. Close.

"Looks like a lot of work," Weather said. She sat down and said, "Listen, I have a personal concern."

Bach nodded. "I heard. Somebody's trying to kill you. Or tried to, anyway."

"Yes. There's been some talk that the person in the pharmacy, who opened the pharmacy for the robbers, was a physician, and the witness thinks he might have had a French accent. And you know who I thought of…"

"Halary," Bach said. "You really think…?"

"Not really. But I was wondering what you think? You know him better than I do."

"He's a weasel, but I don't believe he'd do anything like that," Bach said. "For one thing, his wife's a dermatologist with a big practice out in Edina. He really wouldn't need the money."

"I didn't know that," Weather said.

"And he's not a bad ENT, if he'd lay off the plastic surgery," Bach said. "I know that thing with the noses irritated you."

"Not as much as it irritated the owners of the noses," Weather said. And she said, "Hmm. How about a guy named Albert Loewe? Supposed to be a…"

Bach was shaking her head: "Got hit by a car a month ago. In a supermarket parking lot. Broke both his legs. He was a mess, and he's still in casts."

"All right. Look, check this list. You know anybody else?"

Bach knew two more people on the list, a male nurse and a third doc named Martin, but she didn't know either of them well enough to make a judgment. "Let me ask around."

"Discreetly," Weather said. "This guy did try to kill me."

"I'll be very discreet," Bach said. "I'm too good-looking to die." She looked back up at the burn photos. "Unlike Bob. Bob's not too good-looking to die." OUT IN THE HALL, Jenkins asked, "You done?"

Weather said, "Yes. A burn victim. We'll be moving some skin around on him, if he makes it through the next couple weeks."

Didn't want to worry him, to think she was investigating. THAT NIGHT, at the dinner table, Lucas told them about the proposed raid on Mack's place. "If Weather weren't going to the hospital every day, I'd back off," he said. "We know who did it-it's the whole damn Mack family, plus Haines and Chapman. We'll never prove anything about those bags, but we know what they were, and why they burned them. The drugs went through Ike's place, and from there, probably over to the Seed headquarters in Milwaukee, and down to the Outlaws, and they're probably all over Illinois and the East Coast by now."

"Still gotta find the guy in the hospital," Virgil said.

"All we have to do is nail one of the Macks-any one of them-and we'll get him."

"Could be done with the hospital tomorrow," Weather said. "I cleared out two weeks, just in case. If we get it done, we could take off for a week."

Lucas's eyebrows went up, and he said to Letty: "Disney World."

She stopped with a fork spun full of spaghetti, halfway to her mouth, and said, "Instead of St. Paul in January? I'd buy that."

"You'd be willing to leave the case?" Weather asked Lucas.

"My main concern in this, is you. If we take off, and nobody knows where we are, what're the Macks going to do? They won't have any way to find you," Lucas said. "If you're done with the babies, we could take off."

"I think we will be," Weather said. "One way or another, we can't wait much longer."

13

BARAKAT WALKED down the hall in his stocking feet and took a seat in the ER next to an unconscious woman with a temperature of 104; a saline bag hung overhead and was dripping into her arm. Another doc was looking at her chart. Barakat sniffed at one of his shoes, said, as he pulled it on, "I require some shoe spray…" And, "So, what do you think?"

"You started the antibiotics?"

"Yes. She was here two days ago with a urinary tract infection and we gave her a prescription, but I think she didn't fill it. She has no insurance and probably no money, looking at her, so I think she tried to get along without the pills and it got away from her."

The other doc nodded and said, "No pain?"

"No. The woman who came with her said this one kept getting hotter and sleepier and finally fell asleep watching TV, and then she couldn't wake her up when it was time to go to bed."

The other doc nodded and snapped the chart shut and said, "Willing to bet you're right. Wish I could talk to her."

"If I'm right, she'll be talking in an hour," Barakat said. "No sign of lung congestion, so I don't think it's the flu…"

They talked about some other possibilities and then the other doc said, "You got a kinda froggy accent. Are they talking to you, too?"

"What? Froggy?"

"French accent," the doc said. "There's a cop asking around for French accents, and now one of the docs is asking around. Because of that guy who got killed, you know, in the pharmacy."

Barakat suppressed a shrug and said, "I have not heard. Anyway, my accent is already Lebanese, not French. The fucking French, they are the most responsible for destroying my country."

"Didn't know that," the doc said. He looked back at the patient. "Goddamn women get the weirdest diseases up there. You know? We oughta have a wazoo guy working full-time."

"You've seen the other one? Rosemary something?"

"Nope. What's that about?"

"Either a bad sprain or a broken navicular. She was in yoga class, doing some pose, and she fell and put her hand down. She's in imaging, should be back anytime. Barry has her chart…" CAPPY WAS WAITING in the parking garage. "We have trouble," Barakat said. He popped his car door and threw the briefcase in the back.

Cappy looked sleepy. "What kind?"