"Yeah."

"And you know how some of the magazines put out, uh, pinups as screens avers?"

"Yeah."

"Well…" A pinup appeared on the screen, one leg lifted coyly, but her almost impossibly perky breasts in full view.

"Yeah?" Lucas waited. The woman was pretty but nothing special.

Until her breasts took off and began flying around the screen on their own, like the flying toasters.

"Flying hooters-Davenport Simulations' answer to the Flying Toasters," the kid said.

"If Davenport Simulations' name appears anywhere on this product, I'll be forced to take out my gun and kill you all," Lucas said.

"Some people might feel it's in poor taste," the kid in the chair conceded.

"Does this mean you wouldn't be interested in the swimming pussys?" asked Sloan.

"I'll pass," Lucas said.

He started away and then turned. "What does Ice think about these things?"

The programmer in the chair shuddered: "She doesn't know. If she knew, she'd hunt us down and kill us like vermin."

"Which reminds me," said one of the others. "She called and asked if you were around. She said she'd try you at the police department."

"When was this?"

The other man shrugged. "Ten, fifteen minutes ago. She's at home-I got her number." He handed Lucas a slip of paper.

"Okay." Lucas stuck the paper in his pocket and walked through the back to the stairs, took them to the second floor, then on up a shorter flight to the roof.

Haywood was pacing the perimeter of the building when Lucas came through the roof door.

"Anything?"

"A bunch of juvie skaters coming and going, that's about it," the cop said. He was wearing a black, long-sleeved shirt and blue jeans, with a black-and-green Treebark camo face mask. He'd be invisible from the street. "There's a little coke getting served outside the Bottle Cap, down on the next block."

"Nothing new there," Lucas said.

The night was pleasant, cool, with the stars brighter away from the heavy lights of the loop. Lucas handed him a sandwich and they sat on the wall along the edge of the roof and unwrapped them. Haywood alternately chewed and scanned the streets with a pair of Night Mariner glasses, not saying much.

Lucas finished his sub, then took the cellular phone and the note from Ice out of his pocket and punched the number in. She answered on the second ring.

"Ms. Ice, this is Lucas Davenport."

"Mr. Davenport, Lucas." She sounded a little out of breath. "I think somebody is here. Looking at me. At my house."

Ice lived in a brick two-story in St. Paul's Desnoyer Park, a few blocks from the Mississippi. Only the upper floor was lit: when Del touched the doorbell, he said, without looking back, "Nothing."

Lucas was in the back of Del's van, invisible behind the tinted glass, a radio in one hand, a phone in the other. His.45 was on the floor; he could see almost nothing in the dark. Behind them was a hurricane fence, and on the other side, the Town and Country Club golf course. "The guy on the porch can't see anything," he said into the phone.

"Should I go down?" Ice asked.

"No, no, just wait. He'll be up, if the door's open."

"It should be…"

"Hang on," Lucas said to Ice. And to Del, on the radio, "Go on in. Straight ahead to the white door, through it, then a hard right up the stairs."

"Jesus, I love this shit," Del said. He was wearing a Derby hat, a white shirt pulled out at the waist, pants that were too large and too short, and a cotton jacket. A guitar case was slung over his shoulder. In the dark, from a distance, he might pass for a musician in his twenties. "I'm going in."

Del pushed through the front door, his right hand crooked awkwardly in front of his belly. He was holding a Ruger.357, trying to keep it out of sight from the street.

When he disappeared into the house, Lucas crawled to the other side of the van and looked out, then quickly checked the street through the front and rear windows. There were only a few lights on. Nothing moved on the street. Lights went on, then off, in Ice's house. Then Del's voice burped from the radio. "I'm at the stairs. Not a sound. I'm on my way up."

Lucas said into the phone, "He's coming up," and to himself, He's gone…

Mail hadn't decided what to do about Ice. Actually, he thought, he'd like to date her. They'd go well together. But that didn't seem possible, not anymore. He was beginning to feel the pressure, to feel the sides of the bubble collapsing upon him. He was beginning to think beyond Andi Manette and her body.

When he became aware of it-became aware of the barely conscious planning for "afterwards"-a kind of depression settled on him. He and Andi were working something out: a relationship.

If he moved on, something would have to be done about her and the kid. He'd started working through it in his mind. The best way to do it, he thought, would be to take Andi out, and upstairs, and out in the yard, and shoot her. There'd be no evidence in the house, and he could throw the body in the cistern. Then the kid: just go down, open the door, and do it. And after a while, he could dump some junk into the cistern-there was an old disker he could drag over, and other metal junk that nobody would want to take out. Then, when somebody else rented the place, even if they looked in the cistern, there'd be no attempt to clean it out. Just fill it up with dirt and rebuild.

Getting close to the time, he thought.

But it depressed him. The last few days had been the most fulfilling he'd known. But then, he was young: he could fall in love again.

With somebody like Ice.

Mail was parked a block from Ice's house, in the driveway of a house with a For Sale sign in the front yard. He'd been driving by when a saleswoman pulled the drapes on the picture window so she could show the view to a young couple from Cedar Rapids. Mail looked in: there was no furniture in the place. Nobody living there. When the saleswoman left, he pulled into the driveway, all the way to the garage, and simply sat and watched the lights in Ice's house. He knew the layout of the neighborhood from fifteen minutes circling the golf course. If he wanted, he could probably get down the alley and come up from the back of the house, and maybe force the back door.

But he wasn't sure he wanted that. He just wasn't sure what he was doing-but Ice's image was in his mind.

He was still waiting when the guitar player arrived in a blue mini-van. And he was waiting when the guitar player left with Ice. An odd time to leave, he thought.

He followed them, staying well back.

Ice and Del came down the sidewalk together, Ice wearing a Korean War-era Army field jacket and tights, smoking a cigarette. She flicked the cigarette into the street, blew smoke, and climbed in the passenger side of the van.

As they headed across the interstate back toward the company offices, she half-turned to talk to Lucas. And he thought how young she was: her unmarked face, the way she bounced in the front seat, out of excitement, engagement.

She was emphatic. "Three people saw him, two of them out front, one of them around by the alley; he was going through in a van, and Mr. Turner, who's the guy behind me, saw his face up close. When I showed him the composites we made, he picked out the one where we aged Mail's face. He was sure. He said Mail was the guy in the alley."

"He saw you on television," Lucas said. "I thought he'd go after the company. I didn't think he'd come after you in person."

"Why me?"

" 'Cause of the way you look," Del said bluntly, after a couple seconds of silence. "We've got an idea of the kind of kid he is. We thought he might go for you."