between the skulls of the two babies--but sometime before nine-thirty, she slipped away.
She didn't feel her husband come to bed at one o'clock in the morning. He took care not to disturb her, undressing in the dark, lying as unmoving as he could, listening to her breathing, until he, too, slipped away.
AND THEN her eyes opened.
Pop.
Dark, not quite silent--the furnace running in the winter night. She lifted her head to the clock. Four-thirty She'd been asleep for seven hours. Eight would have been the theoretical ideal, but she never slept eight. She closed her eyes again, organizing herself, stepping through the upcoming day. At twenty minutes to five, she got out of bed, stretched, and headed to the en suite bathroom, checking herself: she felt sharp. Excellent. She brushed her teeth, showered, washed and dried her short-cut blond hair.
She'd laid out her clothes the night before. She walked across the bedroom barefoot, in the light of the two digital clocks, picked them up: a thick black-silk jersey and gray wool slacks, and dressy, black-leather square-toed shoes. She would have preferred to wear soft-soled cross-training shoes, like the nurses did, but surgeons didn't dress like nurses. She'd never even told anyone about the gel innersoles.
She carried her clothes back to the bathroom, shut the door, turned on the light again, and dressed. When she was ready, she looked at herself in the mirror. Not bad.
Weather might have wished to have been a little taller, for the authority given by height; she might have wished for a chiseled nose. But her husband pointed out that she'd never had a problem giving orders, or having them followed; and that he thought her nose, which she saw as lumpy, was devastatingly attractive, and that any number of men had chased after her, nose and all.
So, not bad.
She grinned at herself, turned to make sure the slacks didn't make her ass look fat--they didn't--switched off the light, opened the bathroom door and tiptoed across the bedroom. Her husband said, in the dark, "Good luck, babe."
"I didn't know you were awake."
"I'm probably more nervous than you are," he said.
She went back to the bed and kissed him on the forehead. "Go back to sleep."
Downstairs in the kitchen, she had two pieces of toast, a cup of instant coffee, and a yogurt, got her bag, went out to the car, backed out of the garage, and headed downtown, on the snowy streets, across the river to the Minnesota Medical Research Center. She might be first in, she thought, but maybe not: there were forty people on the surgical team. Somebody had to be more nervous than she was.
AT THE HOSPITAL, the yellow door popped open and the three big men swarmed through.
Two people were working in the pharmacy--a short, slender, older man, who might once in the sixties have been a dancer, but no longer had the muscle tone. He wore a scuzzy beard on his cheeks, a soul patch under his lower lip. First thing, when he came to work, he tied a paper surgeon's cap on his head, for the rush he got when people looked at him in the cafeteria. The other person was a busy, intent, heavyset woman in a nurse's uniform, who did the end-of-shift inventory, making sure it was all there, the stacks and rows and lockers full of drugs.
Some of it, put on the street, was worthless. Nobody pays street prices to cure the heartbreak of psoriasis.
Most of it, put on the street--on more than one street, actually; there was the old-age street, the uninsured street, the junkie street--was worth a lot. Half-million dollars? A million? Maybe.
The three hard men burst through the door and were on top of the two pharmacy workers in a half-second. The woman had enough time to whimper, "Don't," before one of the men pushed her to the floor, gun in her face, so close she could smell the oil on it, and said, "Shutta fuck up. Shut up." Soul-patch huddled into a corner with his hands up, then sank to his butt.
The leader of the three waved a pistol at the two on the floor and said, "Flat on the floor. Roll over, put your hands behind your back. We don't want to hurt you."
The two did, and another of the men hurriedly taped their hands behind them with gray duct tape, and then bound their feet together. That done, he tore off short strips of tape and pasted them over the victims' eyes,