He hustled up to the back door; Little opened it from the inside.

“Another surprise,” Little said, holding up a painting, turning it over in the thin light. Big squinted at it, then looked at Little: “We agreed we wouldn't take anything off the walls.”

“Wasn't on the walls,” Little said. “It was stuffed away in the storage room.

It's not on the insurance list.”

“Amazing. Maybe we ought to quit now, while we're ahead.”

“No.” Little's voice was husky with greed. “This time… this time, we can cash out. We'll never have to do this again.”

“I don't mind,” Big said.

“You don't mind the killing, but how about thirty years in a cage? Think you'd mind that?”

Big seemed to ponder that for a moment, then said, “All right.”

Little nodded. “Think about the SLs. Chocolate for you, silver for me.

Apartments:New York and Los Angeles. Something right on the Park, in New York. Something where you can lean out the window, and see the Met.”

“We could buy…” Big thought about it for a few more seconds. “Maybe… a Picasso?”

“A Picasso…” Little thought about it, nodded. “But first-I'm going back upstairs. And you…”

Big grinned under the mask. “I trash the place. God, I love this job.”

Outside, across the back lawn, down the bluff, over the top of the United Hospital buildings and Seventh Street and the houses below, down three-quarters of a mile away, a towboat pushed a line of barges toward the moorings at Pig's Eye. Not hurrying.

Tows never hurried. All around, the lights of St. Paul sparkled like diamonds, on the first line of bluffs, on the second line below the cathedral, on the bridges fore and aft, on the High Bridge coming up.

The pilot in the wheelhouse was looking up the hill at the lights of Oak Walk, Dove Hill, and the Hill House, happened to be looking when the lights dimmed, all at once.

The rain-front had topped the bluff and was coming down on the river.

Hard rain coming, the pilot thought. Hard rain.

Sloan carried a couple of Diet Cokes over to the booth where Lucas Davenport waited, sitting sideways, his feet up on the booth seat. The bar was modern, but with an old-timey decor: creaking wooden floors, high-topped booths, a small dance floor at one end.

Sloan was the proprietor, and he dressed like it. He was wearing a brown summer suit, a tan shirt with a long pointed collar, a white tie with woven gold diamonds, and a genuine straw Panama hat. He was a slat-built man, narrow through the face, shoulders, and hips. Not gaunt, but narrow; might have been a clarinet player in a fading jazz band, Lucas thought, or the cover character on a piece of 1930s pulp fiction. “Damn Diet Coke, it fizzes like crazy. I thought there was something wrong with the pump, but it's just the Coke. Don't know why,” Sloan said, as he dropped the glasses on the table.

At the far end of the bar, the bartender was reading a Wall Street Journal by the light from a peanut-sized reading lamp clamped to the cash register. Norah Jones burbled in the background; the place smelled pleasantly of fresh beer and peanuts.

Lucas said, “Two guys in the bar and they're both drinking Cokes. You're gonna go broke.”

Sloan smiled comfortably, leaned across the table, his voice pitched down so the bartender couldn't hear him, “I put ten grand in my pocket last month.

I never had so much money in my life.”

“Probably because you don't spend any money on lights,” Lucas said. “It's so dark in here, I can't see my hands.”

“Cops like the dark. You can fool around with strange women,” Sloan said. He hit on the Diet Coke.

“Got the cops, huh?” The cops had been crucial to Sloan's business plan.

“Cops and schoolteachers,” Sloan said with satisfaction. “A cop and schoolteacher bar. The teachers drink like fish. The cops hit on the schoolteachers. One big happy family.”

The bartender laughed at something in the Journal, a nasty laugh, and he said, to no one in particular, “Gold's going to a thousand, you betcha. Now we'll see what's what.”

They looked at him for a moment, then Sloan shrugged, said, “He's got a B.S. in economics.

And I do mean a B.S.”

“Not bad for a bartender… So what's the old lady think about the place?”

“She's gotten into it,” Sloan said. He was happy that an old pal could see him doing well. “She took a course in bookkeeping, she handles all the cash, running these QuickBook things on the computer. She's talking about taking a couple weeks in Cancun or Palm Springs next winter. Hawaii.”

“That's terrific,” Lucas said. And he was pleased by all of it. So they talked about wives and kids for a while, Sloan's retirement check, and the price of a new sign for the place, which formerly had been named after a tree, and which Sloan had changed to Shooters.

Even from a distance, it was clear that the two men were good friends: they listened to each other with a certain narrow-eyed intensity, and with a cop-quick skepticism. They were close, but physically they were a study in contrasts. Sloan was slight, beige and brown, tentative.

Lucas was none of those. Tall, dark haired, with the thin white line of a scar draped across his tanned forehead, down into an eyebrow, he might have been a thug of the leading-man sort. He had intense blue eyes, a hawk nose, and large hands and square shoulders; an athlete, a onetime University of Minnesota hockey player. Sloan knew nothing about fashion, and never cared; Lucas went for Italian suits, French ties, and English shoes. He read the men's fashion magazines, of the serious kind, and spent some time every spring and fall looking at suits. When he and his wife traveled to Manhattan, she went to the Museum of Modern Art, he went to Versace.

Today he wore a French-blue shirt under a linen summer jacket, lightweight woolen slacks, and loafers; and a compact.45 in a Bianchi shoulder rig.

Lucas's smile came and went, flashing in his face. He had crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes, and silver hair threaded through the black. In the morning, when shaving, he worried about getting old. He had a way to go before that happened, but he imagined he could see it, just over the hill.

When they finished the Diet Cokes, Sloan went and got two more and then said, “What about Burt Kline?”

“You know him, right?” Lucas asked.

“I went to school with him, thirteen years,” Sloan said. “I still see him around, when there's a campaign.”

“Good guy, bad guy?” Lucas asked.

“He was our class representative in first grade and every grade after that,” Sloan said. “He's a politician. He's always been a politician. He's always fat, greasy, jolly, easy with the money, happy to see you. Like that. First time I ever got in trouble in school, was when I pushed him into a snowbank. He reported me.”

“Squealer.”

Sloan nodded.

“But what's even more interesting, is that you were a school bully. I never saw that in you,” Lucas said. He scratched the side of his nose, a light in his eye.

Sloan made a rude noise. “I weighed about a hundred and ten pounds when I graduated.

I didn't bully anybody.”

“You bullied Kline. You just said so.”

“Fuck you.” After a moment of silence, Sloan asked, “What'd he do?”

Lucas looked around, then said, quietly, “This is between you and me.”

“Of course.”

Lucas nodded. Sloan could keep his mouth shut. “He apparently had a sexual relationship with a sixteen-year-old. And maybe a fifteen-year-old-same girl, he just might've been nailing her a year ago.”

“Hmm.” Sloan pulled a face, then said, “I can see that. But it wouldn't have been rape. I mean, rape-rape, jumping out of the bushes. He's not the most physical guy.”

“No, she went along with it,” Lucas said. “But it's about forty years of statutory.”

Sloan looked into himself for a minute, then said, “Not forty. Thirty-six.”