He slumped back against the dirty wall, staring at her, made gargling sounds, his hands stretching down toward the earth, and then he slumped over sideways and fell on his side, and spewed blood.

She squatted, listened to him die, then wiped the knife on his shirt and spit on him: “That’s for Frances,” she said.

She walked away, down the empty alley, carrying the knife. Got in the car, drove six blocks in silence, until Loren said, “He’s gone. I felt him go.”

“Yes."

"Pull over."

"Why?” But she pulled over. “Because I’m gonna fuck you,” Loren said. And he did, and when the orgasm washed over her, it smelled purely of fresh blood.

THE DAY WAS slipping from gray into dark, the sun going down to the southwest over the Mississippi, and the rain kept coming-a cold, driving torrent that pounded the windows.

Lucas Davenport sat at a desk, in a dim room, staring at the lap-top screen and listening to Tom Waits, the sound tumbling out of a nineties boom box. Waits was working through “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” and the bluesy piano fit with Lucas’s mood.

Across the street, a woman tiptoed into her bedroom, stopped to look into a baby bed. Smiled silently; then unbuttoned her blouse, slipped it off her narrow shoulders, hung it on a chair, then reached back between her shoulder blades to pop her brassiere.

A pair of Canon image- stabilized binoculars sat on the desk next to Lucas’s laptop. Lucas picked them up and watched as she dug through a chest of drawers. Must be cool in the apartment; her nipples were nicely erect. She was a brown- haired girl, of the brown- eyed tribe, with a long supple back that showed every vertebrae down to the notch of her butt. She’d kept herself in shape.

She came up with a T- shirt and then a heavy blue sweatshirt and pulled them over her head. Her pregnancy was progressing well, Lucas observed. She must be about four months along now, and was faithful about her biweekly visits to the obstetrician.

Bummer. If she was putting on a sweatshirt, no bra, she wasn’t going out. Heather was intensely fashion- conscious, a woman who wore high heels to Starbucks. Neither was she tarting herself up, so Siggy was not on his way over.

Sigitas Toms, Siggy to his pals and the cops, had been the Twin Cities’s largest- volume cocaine dealer, pushing the stuff through his contacts in the real estate, stockbroking, and used- car businesses. He’d been netting two million a year, tax free, at the end, with money stashed all over the United States and Europe.

When he was busted by the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and St. Paul police, he’d told the arresting officers that he wouldn’t be going to prison. They all had a good laugh at that, Siggy included. He was the affable sort, right up to the time he pulled your dick off with a pair of wire cutters.

Two hours after he bailed out of jail, he vanished. He’d been under a loose two- man surveillance at the time, one BCA guy and one St. Paul detective. From the jail, he’d gone home to a warm front- porch greeting from Heather. An hour later, hair still wet from what the cops assumed was a postcoital shower, he’d emerged from the house, carrying a slip of paper-a shopping list. Pampers, baby powder. He climbed into his Lexus and drove to the Woodbury Target store.

The watchers weren’t too worried when they lost him in the bed and bath department, pushing his cherry red cart between the high stacks of towels and bath mats and sheets, because there’s only one way out of a Target, the front, and that was covered, right?

Besides, you’d naturally lose a guy for a minute or two in a Target… but when they couldn’t locate him in a minute or two, they got anxious, and began running up and down, frightening the shoppers- or guests, as Target called them in the letter of complaint that they sent to the director of the BCA and the St. Paul chief of police.

Turns out, Target does have a back door, but not for customers. Siggy hadn’t had permission to use it, but callously had anyway; a cold blooded criminal, for sure.

He’d had a car waiting and nobody had ever seen him again. Well. Somebody had seen him, just not the cops.

HIS WIFE, HEATHER, nйe Anderson, pled ignorance of everything. She thought Siggy was a humble car salesman, she said from the steps of their highly leveraged two- point- eight- million- dollar teal- and- coffee- painted McMansion. Doesn’t everybody have a house like this? The house had been part of Siggy’s three- million- dollar bond. When he skipped, the court found out, there was an unremarked second mortgage, and with the slump in housing prices, the two mortgages were underwater. Or, as they say in California, upside down. If the court foreclosed, it’d mostly be foreclosing on air.

So there was Heather, twisting her hands in regret. There was the Ramsey County attorney, mumbling into his torts. And somewhere, was Siggy-a tear for poor Siggy, growing a beard in Mexico or Paraguay or Belize, drinking salty margaritas and cerveza blanca and watching the tourists walk hand in hand down the beach in flip- flops, pining for the old homestead in Woodbury, with its driveway ring of hosta plants, basketball net to the side, its legal writs.

HEATHER WAS PUSHED out of the house eight months after Siggy disappeared. A buyer was found, a radiologist, but the radiologist backed out at the last minute, pleading that he’d received a phone call from a man who told him that if his family moved in, his children would be taken from their grade schools, and their eyes would be put out with a red- hot poker.

So the house sat there, empty, while Heather moved to a second floor apartment on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul. Her mother lived in the apartment next door, rolling around on a powered chair with a tank of oxygen. Heather’s mom was dying of congestive heart failure and wouldn’t make it through the year. She might not even make it through the month.

When the old lady croaked, Lucas suspected, Heather and the child would be off to a warmer climate, like Zihuatanejo, or Monaco, where nobody would care about Siggy and his cocaine business in the Twin Cities.

THE BCA HAD taken an apartment above a drugstore across the street from Heather’s and, for three months, kept up a regular watch. Then priorities changed, and the watch became sporadic. Lucas and Del took it over, as a hobby. The drugstore apartment was quiet, and Lucas could work there, and the couch was soft, and Del sometimes came by for a nap.

Lucas’s group had broken the Toms case, and had made the arrests; had argued, through the prosecutor, that no bail should be allowed, that Toms was a flight risk.

They’d lost the argument, and then Toms had bitch- slapped the BCA and the St. Paul cops at the Target store.