Out on the street, Jenkins said, "Ten percent. I'd almost be willing to do it, to get the piece off the streets, but the little cockroach would make another one."

"First stop, and Justice Shafer is right there," Lucas said. "That's a hell of a coincidence."

"That happened to me one time," Jenkins said. "One-stop shopping."

"When did it happen to you?" Lucas asked.

"Well, it didn't exactly happen to me, but it happened to a guy I knew," Jenkins said.

"Never happened to me," Lucas said.

Back in the car, he got on the phone to Dan Jacobs at the security committee. "I don't want to yank your weenie when everybody else is, but I've got some news about your pal Justice Shafer."

Lucas told him about Terry's, and Jacobs said, "That's pretty interesting. The Secret Service and the ATF are doing research on him, down in Oklahoma, and they're getting worried. Some of these gang guys say Shafer's never been accepted because he's sort of a pussy-never proved himself."

"Uh-oh."

"I'll call them with this. They'll send a guy around to talk to ' Terry?"

Their second stop was a two-man weapons outlet in a warehouse district in Eagan, south of the Twin Cities core, a concrete-block building filled with hunting knives, compound bows, crossbows, samurai and fantasy swords, a barrel half-full of Louisville Slugger baseball bats, a shelf of lead-weighted fish-whackers, and a rack of used guns; but mostly knives. To one side, a customer in camo cargo pants was methodically pounding a six-inch target with carbon-fiber arrows, on a four-lane archery range.

The two owners, who were brothers, named Jenkins-they agreed with Jenkins that they weren't related-both checked the photographs, and swore they'd never seen either man. Lucas asked, "What's the advantage of the crossbow over the compound bow?"

The customer, who was shooting a compound bow, said over his shoulder, "You don't have to know nothing to shoot a crossbow."

Jenkins asked one of the Jenkins brothers, "If I were to ask you where I could get a switchblade, you wouldn't know, would you?"

The Jenkins brother looked puzzled: "Well, sure. Right here. What do you want?" He walked down the counter and tapped the top of a case. Inside, a half-dozen switchblades nestled on red velvet.

Jenkins was taken aback: "Switchblades are legal?"

"Well, sure, in Minnesota," Jenkins said. "You can order them on the Internet."

"I didn't know that," Jenkins said. "Is there a police discount?"

The fourth and fifth dealers hadn't seen either Cohn or Shafer, but the sixth one, their last stop of the day, had seen Shafer. The dealer, Bob Harper, worked out of his house. "He said he'd heard of me down in Oklahoma, a boy named Dan Oaks outa Norman. He thought maybe I'd have some premium.50-cal, but I didn't. Wouldn't have sold it to him anyway."

"Why not?" Lucas asked. He wrote "Dan Oaks" and "Norman" in his notebook.

Harper was a thin man gone old, but still hard, with shiny cheekbones and killer eyes, two dry wattles hanging under his chin. "Cause I'm not stupid. Some skinhead from Oklahoma shows up on my doorstep looking for.50-cal, the week before the Republican convention? I don't need that kind of publicity."

In the car, Lucas called Jacobs again, gave him Harper's name, and the name of the Oklahoma dealer. "I don't know what Shafer's doing, but he sure as hell isn't hiding out," Lucas said.

"Okay-hey, thanks for the time, Lucas. This has been a help. Could you keep spreading those photos around? We need to talk to this guy."

"No problem."

"All done?" Jenkins asked. He pushed the button on his new switchblade, and the blade jumped out and snapped into place.

"All done," Lucas said. "You know, you're gonna reach in your pocket for your cell phone and you're gonna hit that button, and blade's gonna jump out and cut your nuts off."

"I'll give it to Shrake," Jenkins said. "If it cuts.his nuts off, maybe he'll stop dating Shirley."

"We really ought to do something about that relationship," Lucas said. "I mean, if he won't give it up, maybe put a legal notice in the newspaper, so nobody could accuse us of covering it up."

Jenkins dropped him at the office. Carol had gone home, and Lucas looked at all the paper that she'd printed out from New York, on Cohn, looked at Cohn's picture for a while-this was a different personality than Justice Shafer; this was a serious guy-and then slipped it in a file and walked out to his car.

Great late summer day. He trolled once through St. Paul, looking at all the cops around, saw shoulder patches from Virginia and Illinois. Like a big storm coming in, he thought, everybody watchful and hoping for the best.

He got home, kissed Sam, kissed Letty, kissed Weather, got a banana from the housekeeper, and Weather asked, "Whatever happened to the assassin?"

He told her about his day, and she said, "Well, you're done with that, anyway. One less thing to worry about."

Cruz and Cohn spent Saturday morning cruising the Lyman High Hat, a boutique hotel on Loring Park in Minneapolis, a place that featured forty-dollar cheeseburgers and fifty-dollar-a-glass house champagne.

Cohn, in a baby-blue golf shirt and tan slacks, walked through the front doors, past the desk to the restaurant, past the maitre do", took a quick look around, as though checking for friends, and then walked back out to the car. He'd already surveyed the nearby streets, and the park, stopping now and then to look at a printout of a Google satellite view of the area. He'd seen both McCall and Lane, walking separately, McCall in a neat blazer and pressed slacks, with an Obama button, Lane improbably in cargo shorts and a golf shirt, his hard, knobby legs looking as though they'd been carved from hickory.

"Let's see the door again," Cohn said to Cruz, when he got back in the car.

"There's a light and a video camera covering the loading dock; they both record and live-monitor," Cruz said. She was flipping through a notebook with handwritten notes. "The only people who look at the monitors are the desk crew, and they don't have time for it. You won't be breaking in, so even if they see you, they'll think you're staff. You'll wear hats, keep your heads down. You go in, the staff stairway is to your left. No cameras in the stairwell. There are cameras in the hallways, but they're direct-recorders and aren't live anywhere."

"So if we come out of the stairwell with masks…"

"You're good. They'll look at you afterwards, but by then, it's too late."

"Where did you get the uniform?" An idle question: he didn't really care. The talk was his way of nailing down the terrain.

"Macy's. It's a tuxedo jacket and pants with a red dress shirt," she said. "Now, when you're in the hallway, you'll see the cameras hanging down from the ceiling-they're smoked-glass bubbles, about six inches across. You get to the door, then McCall turns his back, takes off his mask, knocks ' If they look through the peephole, they'll see a black guy with the room service uniform. If they open the door on a chain, you kick it and go in, and McCall pulls the mask back on. If they open it, you go in."