He took the photographs into the kitchen and, one by one, burned them, the pictures curling and charring in the flames from the stove burner. When they were gone, reduced to charcoal, he crushed the blackened remains to powder and washed them down the kitchen sink.

That night he forced himself to lie in bed for fifteen minutes, then crept to the window and looked down the street. There was a patchwork of lighted windows, and many more that were dark. He watched, and after a while crawled back to his bed, got both pillows and put one on the floor and the other upright against the wall, where he could lean on it. It would be a long night.

After three hours, the maddog dozed, his head falling forward. He jerked it back upright and peered groggily through the window. Everything was about the same, but he couldn't watch much longer. There were only two lights still on, he had noted them, and he was simply too tired to continue.

He got up, carrying the pillows, and flopped facedown on the bed. Paradoxically, as soon as he was willing to allow himself to sleep, he felt more alert. The thoughts ran through his brain like a night train, hard and quick and hardly discernible as independent ideas. A mishmash of images-his women, their eyes, Lucas Davenport, the fight outside McGowan's, the broken turn signal.

From the mishmash there came an idea. The maddog resisted it at first, because it had the quality of a nightmare, requiring a broad-scope action under the most intense stress. Finally he considered it and paraded the objections, one by one. The longer he turned it in his mind, the more substantial it became.

It was a winning stroke. And the surveillance? What better alibi could he find? Would he have the courage to attempt the stroke? Or would he sit there like a frightened rabbit, waiting to have his neck wrung by the hunter?

He bit his lip. He bit so hard that he found blood on the pillow the next morning. But he had decided. He would try.

CHAPTER 29

Lucas sat on a tall three-legged stool, hunched over his workbench, manipulating pieces of white two-inch polyvinyl-chloride pipe, wing nuts, bolts, aluminum tubes, and lengths of the Thinsulate batting normally used as insulation in winter coats.

He had hoped to settle the maddog himself. Instead, the investigation was moving into a tedious rook-pawn endgame. The outcome would probably be determined by laborious maneuver rather than a coup de maître.

Nevertheless, he would prepare for the coup, should one unexpectedly present itself.

His first attempt at building a silencer cost him blood.

"I don't know," he said aloud. It should work, but it looked awful. A foot-long length of PVC pipe split lengthwise, screwed back together with wing nuts but with gaps down the split. Through the gaps, the tightly wound batting protruded in soft puffs. Deep inside, the aluminum pipe was pierced with dozens of hand-drilled holes.

He attached the assembly to the barrel of one of his cold street weapons, a Smith amp; Wesson Model 39 in nine-millimeter parabellum. He turned on a miniature tape recorder, jacked a round into the chamber, pointed the weapon at a stack of St. Paul Yellow Pages, and pulled the trigger. There was very little noise from the shot, but there was a mechanical clank as the telephone books jumped and simultaneously the silencer twisted in his hands and came half apart. A sharp edge on the PVC pipe sliced into the side of his middle finger.

"Son of a bitch," he said. He turned off the tape recorder and went upstairs, looked at the cut, which was superficial, washed it, bandaged it, and went back down the stairs.

The tape recorder had picked up the sound of the shot, along with the clank when the silencer pulled apart, but he would not have identified either of the noises as a shot.

The silencer was a mess. The internal tube had been knocked out of alignment with the gun's barrel, either by the blast of gases ahead of the slug or by the slug itself. It hadn't changed the slug's trajectory much. He made some mental notes on alterations to the silencer. The main requirement was that it had to be easily detached from the gun and just as easily disassembled. Accuracy counted not at all.

When he had finished examining the silencer and decided on the alterations he would make, he dug the slug out of the telephone books and looked at it. It was a handgun hunter's hollow-point and was so deformed that it would take an expert to identify its exact caliber.

Lucas nodded. He had the right ammunition, but he needed time to work on the silencer.

He had yet to make the blank.

Midmorning. Gray light filtered in through the kitchen window as he tried to wake up with coffee and an aging bagel. The Smith, with silencer modified and reattached, was in a disreputable-looking gym bag he'd found in a back closet. The gun/silencer combination was grossly illegal. If, somehow, it was found in his car, he would claim that he'd taken it off the street.

A car door slammed close by and he picked up the cup of coffee and stepped into the hallway and peered out the front windows. Carla Ruiz coming up the driveway, a taxi pulling away. He stuffed the gym bag under the kitchen sink, walked back to the bedroom, and pulled on a pair of sweatpants. The doorbell rang and he pulled a sweatshirt over his head, went out to the door, and let her in.

"Hi," she said softly, her face down, looking at him only in brief lateral glances.

"What's wrong?"

"I thought we should have some coffee."

"Sure," he said curiously. "I've got some hot water." He led her into the kitchen, dumped a heaping teaspoon of instant coffee into an oversize ceramic cup, and handed it to her.

"Jennifer Carey came over last night," she said as she sat down. She unbuttoned her coat but left it on.

"Oh." Lucas sat down across the table.

"We had a talk."

Lucas looked away from her into the front room. "And did you decide my future? Between the two of you?"

Carla smiled a very small smile. "Yeah," she said. She took a sip of coffee.

"Good of you to let me know," Lucas said sourly.

"We thought it was the polite thing to do," Carla said, and Lucas had to laugh in spite of himself.

"What did you decide?"

"She gets custody," Carla said.

"You don't mind?"

"I mind, kind of. It makes me angry that you were sleeping with us alternately, one down here, one up in the North Woods. But I figured our relationship wasn't long for the world. We live in different places. I weave, you shoot people. And it seemed like she had a better prior claim, with the baby and all."

"What about what I want?"

"We decided that didn't matter too much. Jennifer said you'd wiggle and squirm, but eventually you'd come around."

"Now, that pisses me off," Lucas said, no longer smiling.

"Tough," Carla said.

They stared at each other across the table. Lucas flinched first. "I may tell Jennifer to take a hike," he said.

"Not with her being pregnant," Carla said, shaking her head. "No chance. That's Jennifer's judgment, and I agree. I asked her what she'd do if you went with somebody else. She said she'd go over and have another talk with the somebody else."

"Jesus," Lucas said. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back and massaged the back of his neck. "What'd I do to deserve this?"

"Slept with one too many women," Carla said. "It's actually pretty flattering, when you think about it. She's good-looking and smart. And in her own screwed-up way, she's in love with you. In my own screwed-up way, I'm not-though I'd still like to use the cabin a couple of times a year. Until I can afford my own."