Read Storm Prey for Free Online Page A

nurse.”
    “How am I going to find out? I’m not a mind reader,” Barakat growled. “What am I supposed to do, walk around asking people who saw the killers coming out of the ramp? How am I supposed to know that? That somebody saw somebody?”
    “Just listen ,” Mack said patiently. “People will talk about this for weeks—just listen. You don’t have to fuckin’ investigate.”
    Long silence. Then, “If she’s a nurse, she was working the day shift,” Barakat said. “There are probably a hundred Audis out in the ramp right now. So, I can keep an eye out tomorrow. If she’s a shift worker, she should be coming in about the same time. That’s all I can do.”
    “And listen around,” Lyle Mack said. As an added attraction: “The goods we got for you. It’s the best I’ve ever seen. It’s like a hundred percent gold.”
     
     
    ALAIN BARAKAT hung up and wandered into the kitchen. Glanced at his watch; had to get back.
    He was tired: he’d just worked the overnight shift, and was continuing straight through the day, with only the hour-long lunch break. He’d already used half of that, and had come home hoping to find a package inside the push-through mailbox.
    Hoping against hope.
    The box was empty. Lyle Mack still had the goods. The knowledge of that would drive him crazy, he thought: and sooner or later, he would be over there begging for it.
    Barakat lived in a modest brick house in St. Paul’s Highland Park, a street of tidy houses and neatly shoveled sidewalks and kids and yellow school buses coming and going. His father had bought the house for him, but carefully kept the title for himself, part of the family’s move out of Lebanon. They were investing in real estate—houses and farmland—socking away gold coins, buying American educations for the kids.
    The price of American houses had never gone down, his father had told him. A year later, when prices started going down, the old man had title to at least thirty houses in the hot markets of California and Florida. He was losing his shirt and he’d cut Barakat’s allowance to five thousand a month. He said, “You’re a grown man now and a doctor. You can be rich if you work.”
    “I don’t want to be a doctor,” Barakat had said. “I don’t want to be in St. Paul. This is not Lebanon, Pops, this is like the North Pole. It was minus twenty here the other day.”
    “Men have to work. That’s what men do. Finish the residency, then go where you like. Move to Los Angeles. What I know, is, I’m cutting back. You live on five thousand a month, or you go hungry.”
    But Barakat couldn’t live on five thousand; couldn’t feed the habit for five thousand. The financial problem had led to his involvement with the Macks, a solution he’d suggested himself. The whole thing had seemed so simple.
    Now this.
    And the blond woman.
    If the blond woman was the same one he’d seen in the elevator—and he’d have bet she was, she had to have been coming down from the parking ramp, and the timing was right—then he had a problem, too. He had no reason to be back there at that time of day—the emergency room was at the far end of the hospital, and nothing at the back end was even open. If she’d picked out one of Lyle Mack’s guys, and was asked if she’d seen anyone else ...
     
     
    HE DROPPED in an armchair and propped his head up with his hand. Thought about the blonde, and about the goods: Lyle Mack said he had the goods. Fire in the blood; needed the goods, despite what he’d said. Why had he said he’d get them some other time? He needed them now ...
    Think about the blonde.
    Arriving at that time of the morning, she had to be staff, and medical staff, not administrative. If she’d been an emergency case, she would have gone down the street, instead of up the ramp. If she was a nurse, she had a rich husband—nurses didn’t drive Audis.
    A doc? Maybe. There were lots of women docs.
    His brain switched tracks again. Mack had the