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on, and called 911. Makes me think twice about going to sleep at night. You catch your old lady staring at you . . .”
    “Any defense? Long-term abuse?”
    “Not so far. So far, she says it was hot inside, and she got tired of him laying there snoring and farting. You know Donovan up in the prosecutor’s office?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Says he’d of taken a plea to second if it’d been only one whack,” Sloan said. “With whack-whack-whack, he’s gotta go for first degree.”
    A truck moved in front of them suddenly, and Sloan swore, braked, swung behind it to the right and passed.
    “The Louis Capp thing,” Lucas said.
    “We got him,” Sloan said with satisfaction. “Two witnesses, one of them knew him. Shot the guy three times, got a hundred and fifty bucks.”
    “I chased Louis for ten years, and I never touched him,” Lucas said. There was a note of regret in his voice, and Sloan glanced at him, grinned. “He got any defense?”
    “Two-dude,” Sloan said. Some other dude done it. “Ain’t gonna work this time.”
    “He was always a dumb sonofabitch,” Lucas said, remembering Louis Capp. Huge guy, arms like logs, with a big gut. Wore his pants down under his gut, so the crotch of his pants dropped almost to his knees. “The thing is, what he did was so simple, you had to be there to catch him. Sneak up behind a guy, hit him on the head, take his wallet. The guy must have fucked up to two hundred people in his career.”
    Sloan said, “He’s as mean as he was dumb.”
    “At least,” Lucas agreed. “So that leaves what? The Hmong gang-banger and the fell-jumped-pushed waitress.”
    “I don’t think we’ll get the Hmong; the waitress had skin under her fingernails,” Sloan said.
    “Ah.” Lucas nodded. He liked it. Skin was always good.
    Lucas had left the department two years earlier, under some pressure, after a fight with a pimp. He’d gone full-time with his own company, originally set up to design games. The computer kids he worked with had pushed him in a new direction, writing simulations for police dispatch computers. He’d been making a fortune when the new Minneapolis chief asked him to come back.
    He couldn’t return under civil service; he’d taken political appointment as deputy chief. He’d work intelligence, as he had before, with two main objectives: put away the most dangerous and the most active criminals, and cover the department on the odd crimes likely to attract media attention.
    “Try to keep us from getting ambushed by the fruit-cakes out there,” the chief said. Lucas played hard to get for a little while, but he was bored with business, and he finally hired a full-time administrator to run the company, and took the chief’s offer.
    He’d been back on the street for a month, trying to rebuild his network, but it had been harder than he’d expected. Things had changed in just two years. Changed a lot.
    “I’m surprised Louis was carrying a gun,” Lucas said. “He usually worked with a sap, or a pipe.”
    “Everybody’s got guns now,” Sloan said. “Everybody. And they don’t give a shit about using them.”
     
     
     
    THE ST. CROIX was a steel-blue strip beneath the Hudson bridge. Boats, both sail and power, littered the river’s surface like pieces of white confetti.
    “You oughta buy a marina,” Sloan said. “I could run the gas dock. I mean, don’t it look fuckin’ wonderful?”
    “Are you getting off here, or are we going to Chicago?”
    Sloan quit rubbernecking and hit the brakes, cut off a station wagon, slipped down the first exit on the Wisconsin side, and headed north into Hudson. Just ahead, a half-dozen emergency vehicles gathered around a boat ramp, and uniformed Hudson patrolmen directed traffic away from the ramp. Two cops were standing by a Dumpster, their thumbs hooked in their gun belts. To one side, a broad-backed blond woman in a dark suit and sunglasses was facing a third cop. They appeared to be arguing. Sloan said, “Ah,