“Nah, not that,” Lucas said. “The main thing is, there’s an infinite number of assholes. You never know where the shit is coming from. You can’t get an edge on anything. You can’t know about the place. Here, if somebody hijacks a goddamn Best Buy truck and takes off fifty Sonys, we got an idea where they’re going. Out there . . . Shit, you could make a list of suspects longer than your dick, and that’d only be the guys that you personally know might handle it. And then there are probably a hundred times that many guys that you don’t know. I mean, a list longer than my dick.”

“We’re talking long lists here,” Sloan said.

“It’s strange,” said Lucas. “It’s like being up at the top of the IDS Building and looking out a window where you can’t see the ground. You get disoriented and you feel like you’re falling.”

“How ’bout that Bekker, though?” Sloan said enthusiastically. “He’s a fuckin’ star, and we knew him back when.”

• • •

Tommy Krey was sitting on a wooden chair in his attorney’s office. His attorney wore a yellow-brown double-knit suit and a heavily waxed hairdo the precise shade of the suit. He shook hands with Sloan and Lucas; his hands were damp, and Lucas smothered a grin when he saw Sloan surreptitiously wipe his hand on his pant leg.

“What can Tommy do for yuz?” the lawyer asked, folding his hands on his desk, trying to look bright and businesslike. Krey looked half bored, skeptical, picked his teeth.

“He can tell us what he and Michael Bekker talked about in jail,” Lucas said.

“What are the chances of knocking down this car-theft . . .”

“You’re gonna have to do that on your own,” Lucas said, looking from the lawyer to Krey and back again. “Maybe Sloan goes in and tells the judge you helped on a big case, but there’s no guarantees.”

The lawyer looked at Krey and lifted his eyebrows. “What d’you think?”

“Yeah, fuck, I don’t care,” Krey said. He flipped his toothpick at the basket, rimmed it out, and it fell on the carpet. The lawyer frowned at it. “We talked about every fuckin’ thing,” Krey said. “And I’ll tell you what: I been beatin’ my brains out ever since he went out to New York, trying to figure out if he gave me, like, any clues. And he didn’t. All we did was bullshit.”

“Nothing about friends in New York, about disguises . . . ?”

“Naw, nothing. I mean, if I knew something, I’d a been downtown trying to deal. I know that his buddy, the guy who did the other kills, was an actor . . . so maybe it is disguises.”

“What was he like in there? I mean, was he freaked out . . . ?”

“He cried all the time. He couldn’t live without his shit, you know? It hurt him. I thought it was bullshit when I first went in, but it wasn’t bullshit. He used to cry for hours, sometimes. He’s totally fuckin’ nuts, man.”

“How about this Clyde Payton? He was in for some kind of dope deal, he was around Bekker.”

“Yeah, he came in the day before I made bail. I don’t know; I think he was a wacko like Bekker. Square, but wacko, you know? Kind of scary. He was some kind of businessman, and he gets onto the dope. The next thing he knows, he’s busting into drugstores trying to steal prescription shit. He mostly sat around and cursed people out while I was there, but sometimes he’d get like a stone. He figured he was going to Stillwater.”

“He did,” said Sloan.

“Dumb fuck,” said Krey.

“How about Burrell Thomas?”

“Now, there’s something,” Krey said, brightening. “Bekker and Burrell talked a lot. Rayon’s one smart nigger.”

Burrell’s address was a vacant house, the doors pulled down, the floor littered with Zip-Loc plastic bags. They crunched across broken glass up an open stairway, found a burned mattress in one room, nothing in the other, and a bathtub that’d been used as a toilet. Flies swarmed in an open window as Sloan reeled back from the bathroom door.

“We gotta find Manny Johnson,” Sloan said.

“He used to work at Dos Auto Glass,” Lucas said. “Not a bad guy. I don’t think he’s got a sheet, but that woman of his . . .”

“Yeah.” Manny’s girlfriend called herself Rock Hudson. “She took twenty-five grand out of a high-stakes game down at the Loin last month. That’s going around.”

“She’s a piece of work,” Lucas agreed.

They found both Manny and Rock at the auto glass. The woman was sitting in a plastic chair with a box full of scratch-off lottery tickets, scratching off the silver with a jackknife blade, dropping the bad ones on the floor.

“Cops,” she said, barely looking up when they came in.

“How are you?” Lucas asked. “Doing any good?”

“What d’ya want?”

“We need to talk to Manny,” Lucas said. She started to heave herself to her feet, but Lucas put a hand in front of her head. “Go ahead with the tickets. We can get him.”

Sloan had moved to the door between the waiting area and the workroom. “He’s here,” he said to Lucas.

They went back together. Johnson saw them, picked up a rag, wiped his hands. He was at least seven feet tall, Lucas thought. “Manny? We need to talk to you about Burrell Thomas.”

“What’s he done?” Johnson’s voice was deep and roiled, like oil drums rolling off a truck.

“Nothing, far as we know. But he was bunked down at the jail next to Michael Bekker, the nut case.”

“Yeah, Rayon told me,” the tall man said.

“You know where we can reach him?”

“No, I don’t know where he’s living, but I could probably find him, tonight, if I walked around the neighborhood for a while. He usually goes down to Hennepin after nine.”

“Bekker’s chopping people up,” Sloan said. “I mean chopping them up. I don’t know if Burrell’s got trouble with the cops, but if there’s any way he could help us . . .”

“What?”.

Sloan shrugged, picked up a can of WD-40, turned it in his hand, and shrugged. “We might be able to take a little pressure off, if he has another run-in with the cops. Or if your friend out there, if she . . .”

Johnson looked them over for a minute, then said, “You got a phone number?”

“Yeah,” Sloan said. He fished a card out of his pocket. “Call me there.”

“Like tonight,” Lucas said. “This guy Bekker . . .”

“Yeah, I know,” Johnson said. He slipped Sloan’s card in his shirt pocket. “I’ll call you, one way or another.”

The drive to Stillwater cut another hour out of the day; the interview took ten minutes. Payton looked like an ex-college lineman, square, running to fat. He wasn’t interested in talking. “What the fuck’d the cops ever do for me? I’m a sick man, and here I am in this cage. You guys can fuck yourselves.”

They left him talking to himself, muttering curses at the floor.

“How’re you gonna threaten him? Tell him you’re gonna put him in jail?” Sloan asked as they walked back through the parking lot.

Lucas glanced back at the penitentiary. It looked like an old Catholic high school, he decided, inside and out, until you heard the steel doors open and shut. Then you knew it couldn’t be anything but the joint . . . .

Johnson called Sloan’s number a little after six o’clock. Burrell would talk and he’d meet Lucas at Penn’s Bar, on Hennepin. Johnson would come down, to introduce them.

“Um, I got some shit to do at home,” Sloan said.

“Hey, take off,” Lucas said. “And thanks.”

They shook hands, and Sloan said, “Don’t take no wooden women.”

Penn’s bar had a sagging wooden floor and a thin mustachioed bartender who poured drinks, washed glasses, ran the cash register and kept one eye on the door. A solitary black hooker leaned on the bar, smoking a cigarette and reading a comic book, ignoring a half-drunk, pale-green daiquiri. The hooker picked up Lucas’ eyes for a second, saw something she didn’t like, and went back to her comic.

Farther toward the back, four men and two women stood around a coin-op pool table. Layers of cigarette smoke floated around them like the ghosts of autumn leaves. Lucas walked past the bar to the back, past the pool table, past a beat-up pay phone hung in an alcove next to a cigarette machine. He looked in the men’s john, came back, walked around the crowd at the pool table. The men wore jeans and vests, with big wallets chained to their belts, and looked at him sideways as he went through. Johnson wasn’t there. Neither was anyone who might be Burrell.