Feeling alone, tired, and a little sad, I peeled off my clothes and climbed into bed. After a couple of minutes I got up again, went out to the telephone, and called the Wee Blue Inn, a very bad bar in Duluth. Weenie answered. Weenie is the owner. He's also LuEllen's phone drop.

"This is the guy from St. Paul," I said.

"Uh-huh." Weenie didn't go in for the intellectual discourse.

"I need to talk to your girlfriend."

"Ain't seen her," he said. He said that no matter who called. LuEllen might be sitting across the bar from him.

"If you do, tell her to call me," I said.

"Business or pleasure?"

"Business."

"She got your number?"

"Yeah. She's got my number."

The next two days were beautiful. Blue skies, light, puffy clouds. I spent them on the Mississippi, in the hill country south of Red Wing, working on landscapes and thinking about Longstreet. In the evenings, back in St. Paul, I trained at the Shotokan dojo, then walked up to the center of town to an Irish bar off the main drag. A newspaper friend, who once drank too much, still hangs out in the bars, drinking Perrier lime water at two dollars a bottle. He claims bars are his m‚tier.

"Or maybe they're my forte. Either m‚tier or forte, I get them mixed up when I've had too many lime waters," he said, looking longingly at my bottle of Miller. "You think I ought to change to lemon waters?"

"Don't do anything hasty. You'll wind up in the gutter," I said, dabbing at my fat lip. The pure thing about Shotokan is that when you fuck up, you find out right away.

"Just a lemon water. I could handle it."

"Then it'll be orange waters, and two weeks from now you'll be shooting black tar heroin into your carotid," I said. We talked about the state income tax for a while, and then I asked him about corrupt towns.

"They're all corrupt," he said glumly, scrawling wet rings on the bar with the bottom of his bottle. With his lined and wrinkled face, he looked like an aging English setter. "But they don't think of themselves that way. That's why the politicians get so mad when a reporter goes after them. They convince themselves that the payoffs were really campaign contributions and if they used the money to buy a hat, well, that was just an accounting error. There's nobody more righteous than a guilty Lutheran with a reasonable excuse."

"Have you ever heard of a place down the Mississippi called Longstreet?"

We both looked into the mirror behind the bar. Through the bottles, my hair was looking grayer, and the crow's-feet at the corners of my eyes were cutting deeper. Too much sun probably. Too much time on the river.

"Longstreet," he said, nodding. "Yeah. Don't know much about it. You got something going down there?"

"No, no. I went through there my last time down to New Orleans," I lied. "The place looked kind of. funky. Good light, for one thing. Interesting people. I thought I might stop off the next time I go down. Do some painting. But there's an air of violence about the place."

"Hmph." He was looking at me. I don't know how much he knew or suspected about my sidelines, but it may be too much. "There's violence in all the river towns. But the southern ones are the worst. Jim Bowie and the duel of Natchez, shootin' and cuttin' on the levee. Or maybe it was a sandbar." He took another hit on his lime water. "Stay away from the dogcatcher."

"What?"

"The only thing I remember anybody ever told me about Longstreet is, stay away from the dogcatcher. I took his advice. I stayed away from the whole fuckin' town." He raised a finger to the bartender and pointed at his empty lime water bottle.

Late at night, after the days on the river and the evenings in the bars, I sat in front of a computer and went back and forth with Bobby. Bobby's strong on data bases, and there was no shortage of material.

From the federal government he got military and tax records, Small Business Administration loan reports, and criminal rap sheets. All of those are closed, of course, but with the right computer keys, anything is available.

From the state government he got more tax reports and personal driving histories. From the courts he got lawsuits and divorce proceedings. The big credit agencies had records on everybody. So did the insurance companies. He pulled credit card numbers and used them to access billing records. You can learn a lot from bills. Two of the targets, for example, made a couple of trips every year to the gambling parlors in Tahoe. The city clerk showed a whole series of shop-by-mail charges with a supplier of exotic sexual aids.

Got that stuff from Delaware.

Anything good?

The council's in up to its chin. Will transmit now.

Go.

As he pulled the information out of the bases, he shipped it to me. Most of it was junk we'd never use. But in this kind of situation you never knew what was relevant, and what was worthless, until afterward. So I printed it out, punched holes in the left-hand side of the printer paper, and bound it in loose-leaf notebooks. I work with computers all the time, but when I browse, I want paper.

In the middle of the third night after I got back from Memphis, I was making clouds in my sleep, nightmare clouds that never came out right. There's a way of making quick, beautiful clouds with watercolor. You lay down a wash of cobalt blue on a good white paper like a 240-pound cold-pressed D'Arches. While the wash is still wet, you bleed in some gray where the shadowed portions of the cloud will be. Then you crumple a paper towel and lightly press it into the wash. When you pick it up, you leave behind a perfect feathery summer cloud.

But in my sleep it wasn't working. I'd pick up the paper towel and find a face. I don't know whose face. A man's. Dead, I think. I struggled with it for a while, then felt myself being pulled up to consciousness. My eyes popped open, and I was awake and sweating.

Something was wrong. The apartment building is old and creaks and groans with temperature changes; those noises were all solidly filed in my subconscious. Something else was going on. I listened, trying to keep my breathing unchanged, and heard nothing but a deep and continuing silence. I turned my head a fraction of an inch to the left, toward the clock. Four in the morning. I'd been in bed an hour.

At the foot of the bed, and off to the right, I could barely make out the lighter rectangle of the open door. As I watched it, a dark shape seemed to slip through. For a second I thought it was my imagination. Then a narrow-beam flashlight sliced through the dark and crossed the bed before it cut out again.

I was trapped under the sheet and a light blanket. If I did a roll, I might make it off the edge of the bed between the bed and the wall, but from there I didn't know where the next move would be.

"Hey, Kidd." The voice was soft, amused, and distinctly feminine.

I sat up, furious, the adrenaline still pumping. "Goddamn it, LuEllen, you scared the shit out of me."

"Aw, poor baby."

I punched the bed light. LuEllen was grinning at me from the foot of the bed. "What the hell are you doing here?" I asked.

"Well," she said, with a barely audible sniff, "I thought I'd probably find you in bed with that Charade person-"

"Chaminade-"

"Whatever." She made a gesture to indicate that the name was of no importance. "I wouldn't want to disturb you in the midst of a rut, so I tried to be a little discreet."

"Jesus Christ, you almost stopped my fuckin' heart," I growled. "How'd you get in?"

"Professional secret. You got nice locks, by the way." She dropped the miniature steel flashlight into the pocket of her maroon jacket. LuEllen doesn't wear black, because it's noticeable. If you get pinned by a cop's spotlight, a deep red comes off better. And in shadow, where she does her best work, a maroon or burgundy is no more visible than black. "Weenie said you wanted something. Business."