He backed out of the room, and said to Grace, "Give her some water."

"I do," Grace sobbed. "But then she… wets on the floor."

"Ah, for Christ sakes," Mail said. The door slammed, but the bolt didn't slide shut. Grace held her breath. Had he forgotten? No. The door opened again, and Mail threw in a towel.

Grace had seen it, when he'd taken her mother out of the cell, lying on the floor beside the mattress he used when he raped her. "Clean her up," Mail said. "I'll be back in the morning."

The door closed again, and they heard his footsteps on the stairs. They waited, unmoving, but he didn't return.

"That was great," Andi whispered. She pushed herself up and felt the tears running down her face and she actually smiled through her cracked lips. "Grace, that was wonderful."

"That's once we beat him," Grace whispered back.

"We can do it again," Andi said. She propped herself up and tilted her head back. "But we've got to find something."

"Find what?"

"A weapon. Something we can kill him with."

"In here?" Grace looked around the barren cell, her eyes wide but not quite hopeless. "Where?"

"We'll find something," Andi said. "We have to."

Mail took the van-the van was blue now, and the sign on the side doors was clear: "Computer Roses"-and rode it down to Highway Three and I-494, filled the tank, and put a little more than four gallons in the red, five-gallon plastic gas can in the back. Inside the convenience store, he bought two quarts of motor oil and paid for it all with a twenty.

He took forty minutes riding out to Minnetonka, thinking it over. Mail thought a lot about crime, about the way things worked. If he were in a movie, he'd break into the boat works, use a flashlight, go through the files, and then play a breathless game of hide-and-seek with a security guard.

But this wasn't a movie, and his best protection was simply timing and invisibility.

Irv's Boat Works was tucked into a curve in the road just off the lake, along with a shabby gas station, a grocery store, and an ice cream parlor, all closed..He drove by once, looking for movement, looking for cops. He saw two moving cars, one in front and one behind, and no cops. Nobody walking. The only light in the buildings was in an ice cream freezer.

He drove a half-mile down the road to an intersection, did a U-turn, and went back the same way. Another car passed; a house a quarter mile past the station was fully lit, although he didn't see anybody around. He drove out to a SuperAmerica store, parked, walked around to the back of the van, and let himself inside. He took just a minute to mix the motor oil with the gas, the fumes giving him a small mental charge: he hadn't done this since he got out of the hospital-he didn't need it anymore-but it still held something for him.

When he finished mixing, he went into the Tom Thumb and bought a cheap plastic cigarette lighter and a Coke. He already had a role of duct tape in the glove compartment. Back in the truck, he put the tape on the lighter so it'd be ready, opened the Coke and put it in the van's can-holder, and drove back toward Irv's.

The place was little more than a wooden shack, with a dock, gas pump, and launching ramp out back. Twenty aluminum fishing boats bobbed off the dock. Inside, he remembered a counter with a cash register, a half-dozen tanks for minnows and shiners, a few pieces of cheap fishing gear in wall racks, and a big, loose pile of green flotation cushions and orange round-the-neck life preservers. The whole place smelled of gas and oil, waterweed and rot.

Mail drove by once more, did his U-turn, looked for cars coming up behind, waited until one passed, and then followed it back to Irv's. Nothing out ahead. He swerved into the parking lot, stopped just outside the dusty picture-window where the fading red stick-up letters said, Irv's boat work with a missing final "s."

He left the engine running, walked quickly around to the back of the van, took a jackknife out of his pocket, and cut a grapefruit-size hole in the top of the plastic gas can. The smell of gas was thick. He picked the can up, ready to ease it out the door, when headlights came up. He stopped, listening, but the car purred past.

He climbed out, got the lighter off the passenger seat, turned it up full, taped the sparking-lever down so he had a miniature torch, then picked up the five-gallon jug and heaved it through the window.

The window shattered with the sound of a load of dishes dropped in a diner: but nobody yelled, nobody came running. He tossed the lighter after the gas, and the building went up with a hollow whoom. By the time he was out of the parking lot, the fire was all over the inside of the building.

Damn. Wished he could stay.

He watched the building in the rearview mirror, until it disappeared behind a curve. When he was a kid, he'd torched a house in North St. Paul and had come back to sit on an elementary school embankment to watch the action. He liked the flames. Even more, he'd liked the excitement and companionship of the crowd, gathered to watch the fire. He felt like an entertainer, a movie star: he'd done this.

And listening, back then, he realized that everybody could find a little joy in watching one of their neighbors get burned out.

On the way back home, under the night sky, he thought about Andi Manette. Maybe this break was for the better. He'd been fucking her a lot, he could use the rest.

Tomorrow, though, he'd need her-need one of them, anyway.

He could feel that already.

Lucas got up a few minutes after Weather, struggling with the early hour, the morning light pale in the east windows. Weather put breakfast together while Lucas cleaned up. When he was dressed, Lucas got the ring from his sock drawer, fiddled with it, then dropped it in his pants pocket as he had almost every day for a month.

In the kitchen, Weather was standing at the sink, humming to herself as she sliced the orange heart out of a cantaloupe. Lucas still felt like he'd been hit in the forehead with a gavel.

"Anything good today?" he asked. His morning voice sounded like a rusty gate, but she was used to it.

"Not especially interesting," she said. "The first one is a woman with facial scarring from an electrical shock." She touched her cheek in front of her ear, to indicate where the scarring was. "I'm going to take out as much of the scar as I can-all of it, I hope."

"Sounds like she needs a plastic surgeon," Lucas said. He pushed two slices of bread into the toaster and started looking for the cinnamon.

"Sometimes I am a plastic surgeon," Weather said. "We do have that child coming up; that will be interesting. Six operations, probably. We're going to have to rotate her skull backwards…"

He liked watching her talk, her enthusiasm for the work, even when he had no idea of what she was talking about. He'd seen a half-dozen operations now, gowning up and learning where to stand, how to stay out of the way. The precision of it astonished him as did her easy way of command, and he found himself thinking that he could have done the work and been happy with it.

Although there was an odd, steely ego that went with surgeons, Weather had it-she ran the operating room like a sergeant major might-and so did George Howell, Weather's mentor. Howell was a fiftyish reconstructive surgeon who often stopped by when Weather was working, and Lucas usually felt a small, controllable urge to stuff the guy in a sewer somewhere, though Howell was a good enough.

"Are you listening?" Weather asked.

"Sure," Lucas said, peering down into the toaster. "It's just that I'm near death."

"There's something wrong with your metabolism," she said. "How can you be doing six things at three o'clock in the morning, but you can't add two and two at six o'clock in the morning? You should have a physical. How long has it been?"