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complaints, the whining. Ansel was flying over a cocaine landscape, all the potentialities in his head—green hills, pretty women, red Mustangs, Labrador retrievers—were compressed into a ball of pleasure. His head lay on his shoulder, his long hair falling to the side, like lines of rain outside a window. Twenty minutes later, the dream was all gone, except for the crack afterburn that would arrive like a sack of Christmas coal.
    But he had a few minutes yet, and he mumbled, “Dex, I got something to talk about.” Lamb was working up another pipe, stopped, his eyes hazy from too many hits, too many days without sleep. “What chu want?”
    His wife came out of the back into the kitchen, scratched her crotch through her thin cotton underpants and said, “Where’d you put the bag, Dex?”
    “I need to find a guy,” Ansel said, talking over her. “It’s worth real money. A month’s worth of smoke. And I need a crib somewhere close. TV, couple beds, like that.”
    “I can get you the crib,” Lamb said. He jerked a thumb at his wife. “My brother-in-law’s got some houses, sorta shitty, but you can live in one of them. You’d have to buy your own furniture, though. I know where you could get some, real cheap.”
    “That’d be okay, I guess.”
    Dex finished with the pipe and flicked his Bic, and just before hitting on the mouthpiece, asked, “Who’s this guy you’re lookin’ for?”
    “A cop. I’m looking for a cop.”
    Lamb’s old lady, eyes big and black, cheeks sunken, a pale white scar, scratched her crotch again and asked, “What’s his name?”
    Butters looked at her. “That’s what I need to know,” he said.
    BILL MARTIN CAME down from the upper peninsula, driving a Ford extended cab with rusted-out fenders and a fat V-8 tuned to perfection. He took the country roads across Wisconsin, stopped at a roadhouse for a beer and a couple of boiled eggs, stopped again for gasoline, talked to a gun dealer in Ashland.
    The countryside was still iced in. Old snow showed the sheen of hard crust through the inky-green pines and bare gray broadleafs. Martin stopped often to get out and tramp around, to peer down from bridges, to check tracks in the snow. He didn’t like this winter: there’d been good snow, followed by a sleet storm that covered everything with a quarter-inch of ice. The ice could kill off the grouse, just when the population was finally turning back up.
    He looked for grouse sign, didn’t find any. The season was too new for bear sign, but in another six weeks or eight weeks they’d be out, he thought, sleek and quick and powerful. A young male black bear could run down a horse from a standing start. Nothing quite cleared the sinuses like bumping into a big old hungry bear when you were out on snowshoes, armed with nothing but a plastic canteen and a plug of Copenhagen.
    At two o’clock in the afternoon, heading south, he saw a coyote ripping at something in the foot-high yellow grass that broke through the snow beside a creek. Voles, maybe. He pulled the truck over, got out a Bausch and Lomb laser rangefinder and the AR-15. The rangefinder said 305 yards. He figured a nine-inch drop, maybe two inches of right-to-left drift. Using the front fender as a rest, he held a couple of inches over the coyote’s shoulder and let go. The .223 caught the mutt a little low, and it jumped straight up into the air and then came down in a heap, unmoving.
    “Gotcha,” Martin muttered, baring his teeth. The shot felt good.
    Martin crossed the St. Croix at Grantsburg, stopped to look at the river—the surface was beaten down with snowmobile trails—then made his way reluctantly out to I-35. The interstate highways were scars across the country, he thought: you couldn’t get close enough to see anything. But they were good when you had to move. He paused a final time at an I-35 rest stop just north of the Cities, made a call and then drove the rest of the way in.
     
     
     
    BUTTERS WAS WAITING