That was it. Other than the Caddys, it was all about taking numbers, passing the years.

Then, four years earlier, Gene Calb had offered to expand their relationship-an expansion that would give Singleton free working space for his cars and a thousand dollars a week, with an up-front payment of ten thousand dollars.

Ten thousand down, and a thousand dollars, cash money, no taxes, every Friday. All he had to do was keep an eye out…

The money had changed everything. For one thing, his mother had begun to take an interest in him. Then, one night up at the casino, he'd introduced her to Deon Cash and Jane Warr.

And then Katina had shown up.

SINGLETON HEARD KATINA coming out of the shower, heard her clumping around, getting into her pants and shoes. She came out of the bathroom like a rocket, kissed him quick, once on the mouth, once on the penis, gave him a quick suck and then said, "Wally's gonna have to wait."

"C'mon, thirty seconds," he said.

"Fifteen seconds." She sucked on Wally for fifteen seconds, and then hurried away, laughing, and was gone.

SINGLETON AND KATINA Lewis had fallen in bed a couple of months after they met, which was at Calb's. Katina came in with her sister, Ruth, who was showing her around before Katina made her first run across the border. Ruth didn't care for Singleton, but Katina was immediately attracted. Their daddy liked to work on old cars, she told Singleton later. Ruth didn't care about that-she was closer to her mother, and to Jesus.

Katina saw a relationship with Singleton. She'd already mentioned love, that she might be falling into it, with him. She'd told him over dinner at the Bird, and then peered over the little red votive candle on the table.

Singleton had felt something blossoming within him, as he looked across the table at the woman. After all this time, a woman really cared for him? Somebody who would hang out with him, and cook and make babies? How did that happen?

He'd reached across the table, and had taken her hand; tears rolled down his face, and she said something like, "It's okay."

Later, feeling a little unmanly about the whole thing, about the tears, he'd started to apologize for himself and she'd laughed and squeezed him and said, "Loren, you did just perfect. Just perfect."

Somehow, he thought, he had.

SINGLETON HAD WORKED until seven that morning and had come home to find Katina in his bed. He'd crawled in with her, though he hadn't been too tired. Now, at ten o'clock, he was sleepy; he closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep.

Deon and Jane,he thought. Hanged.

Fear tickled through his chest. He tried to shut it out, flopped this way and that, wrestling with his pillow. Maybe somebody was coming for him, he thought.

A hangman.

Katina didn't know anything about that.

RUTH AND KATINA Lewis stepped inside the body shop's overheated office, took off their mittens, and Ruth pulled the door shut behind her. Gene Calb was working behind his desk. He was a balding, heavyset man in his mid-forties, with a weathered face and thick, scarred mechanic's hands. A pair of reading glasses perched on his thick nose. He looked over the glasses and said, "Guys. You musta heard."

"A little while ago, in town," Ruth said. "Jane and Deon, but people said they were hanged?" Ruth stuffed her mittens in her coat pocket, and unzipped the parka. Ruth Lewis felt like her sister, but didn't look like her. She was a slender woman, where Katina was round, and she had flinty green eyes behind steel-colored, wire-rimmed glasses, while Katina's eyes were softer, paler. Ruth's hair was close-cropped, an ascetic's 'do; Katina wore her hair full. Ruth's cheeks were rosy from the cold, like her sister's, but unlike Katina, she wore no lipstick or jewelry-a pretty woman determined to do nothing with her looks.

Ruth was the older sister and the boss, Katina the subordinate.

Calb said, "Hung in a grove off the ditch road. That Letty kid found them this morning." He looked at the clock. It was just 11:45. It seemed like the morning had stretched on forever, since he'd heard the news at ten.

"So what are we doing?" Katina asked. She always reminded Calb of a clucking hen, a busy, mildly overweight woman, but with a sensuous underlip. She was supposedly a member of some Catholic religious group, but apparently one that didn't have anything against sex: Katina had been sleeping with Loren Singleton, and Singleton was looking as happy as he ever did, if a little peaked. "Do we do anything? "

"I'm closing down," Calb said. "For the time being. Until we find out what's going on."

"That's not acceptable," Ruth said.

"I… " A car went by on the highway, and Ruth and Katina and Calb all turned their heads that way-you always looked at a car on the highway in Broderick. A Highway Patrol car with extra passengers.

"Ray Zahn," Ruth said.

"Loren told me that a couple of big shots flew in from St. Paul, and Zahn's driving them around," Katina said.

Calb shook his head. "I'll tell you what, guys; they're gonna hook Deon up with me, and I don't know what I'm going to tell them."

"Tell them as much of the truth as you can," Ruth suggested. "That you hired Deon to drive for you, on the recommendation of an old army buddy in Kansas City, that you rehab trucks from all over the Midwest, and that he picks them up."

"That's not exactly… "

"He does that," Ruth interrupted. "You could give references."

"Yeah. He's done that," Calb said. "What about you guys?"

"We can't stop," Ruth said. Her chin was set, tough, square. "We need to keep working."

"I'm sorry, but we gotta stop, until we find out what's going on," Calb objected. "This may be coming out of Kansas City. If that's what it is, maybe we can give some stuff to the cops, and they can settle it, but before then… "

"Ray, we can't," Ruth said urgently. "We haven't made enough runs lately. The Ontario net just came back up, since Jeanette died."

"I can't help that," Calb said. "I talked to Sister Mary Ann yesterday, when she came in-she seemed pretty happy."

"She did fine, but the mix wasn't that good. We can't stop," Ruth said.

"Hey-I'm shipping a load of junkers out right now. George is on his way in with his truck and we're getting them the fuck outa… excuse the language. I'm sorry." He was genuinely worried that they might be offended. Ruth had once been a nun.

"I don't care about the language," Ruth said. She switched a smile on, and then off. "All I care about is that we keep working-and we won't stop. If we have to pile up the junkers on your doorstep, that's what we'll do."

"Ah, Jesus Christ on a crutch," Calb said, forgetting himself again.

THE DEAL WAS complicated, but profitable for everyone.

A man named Shawn Davis from Kansas City, Missouri, working with old drug-dealing friends in St. Louis, Des Moines, and Omaha, would spot and steal late-model Toyota Land Cruisers, 4Runners, and Tacoma pickups. No Nissans, no Fords, no Chevys. Nothing but Toyotas. That kept parts and paint supply simple.

The stolen vehicles would be driven, individually, from Davis's place in Kansas City to Calb's body shop, in Broderick. Calb had been in the Army with Davis, and they'd done some chickenshit black market stuff in Turkey, selling U.S. government meat. They trusted each other, to a point. The stolen cars were driven north by Deon Cash, who was Davis's cousin, or Joe Kelly, a friend of Cash's.

As Cash or Kelly was driving north, one of a group of religious women-as a group they were called the "nuns" by the Custer County people, and some of them were-would pick up a late-model, but high-mileage, last-legs Toyota in Canada, usually from a dealer auction. The nun would nurse the wreck across the border into Minnesota, and deliver it to the body shop.