Whitcomb heard the word, or enough of it, and turned and saw the tall dark-haired man staring at him from the corner table, and pushed Briar back and said, loudly, "You got a problem, fuckwad?"

The woman with the dark-haired man said something, an urgent twist to her face, and he said something back, and then the woman got up and walked rapidly toward the exit gate.

The dark-haired man threw money at the table, then stepped over to Whitcomb and said quietly, "If you don't take your hands off this young woman, you little fuckin' greasy pimp, or if you use that language on me again, I'm going to throw you in front of a fuckin' car."

The guy was drunk, Whitcomb realized. He realized it in a stupid, distant way, and the one thing he'd learned for sure as a cripple was that nobody fucked with cripples. Not deliberately. He flicked away Briar's neckline, and she rocked back and said, "Randy, maybe…"

Whitcomb snapped, "Shut the fuck up," and said to Cohn, "Listen, you fuckin' twat'"

Cohn yanked him out of the wheelchair so quickly that he might have been levitated by God.

Cohn knew he was drunk, knew this could be the end, but McCall was dead, and this fuckin' cripple… this pimp…

He snatched Whitcomb out of the chair with one powerful hand on Whitcomb's neck, and the other, as the cripple came up, on his belt. Two women screamed and he knocked a chair over with his leg and a table scraped across the brick patio with a metallic scream, and Cohn was blind now to everything but a hole in the air in front of him, leading out to the street.

He took six long strides to the fence that separated the bar patio from the sidewalk, yanking Whitcomb along, Whitcomb windmilling, another two steps through the patio gate and across the sidewalk to the curb, and then he heaved Whitcomb at the windshield of an oncoming minivan.

Whitcomb was unnaturally light, because of his withered legs, and he hit the hood of the car, flattened over the windshield, screaming, windmilling with his arms, then skidded off the far side and was hit by another car.

Cohn didn't slow down to watch, though he heard the satisfying thump of the second car. He turned back through the patio, walked into the bar, a woman's white face following him. Out of sight of the witnesses, he stripped off his black sport coat to show his white short-sleeved shirt, and quickly swerved out the side exit and down the street.

He could hear people shouting from the patio, but there was no pursuit as he turned the corner. He walked down the block and around, across the street, past a cluster of cops who were looking down at the screaming, talking on shoulder radios. Another half block, and he turned back into the same skyway they'd taken out of the condo.

Didn't feel good: there was still McCall back there, dead.

But he didn't feel as bad as he had, either.

Lucas and Del sat on a bench in the hotel's lobby while the St. Paul cops worked the crime scene. Del said, "I got the notification going. He's got parents and a couple of sisters."

"Okay."

Neither one of them spoke for a minute, then Del said, "I feel kinda bad that I don't feel worse. I didn't much like the guy. He was a stiff."

"Still one of us," Lucas said.

"You know what I mean," Del said.

"Yeah. Freaks me out, though. Three cops killed, this year, and we were involved in all three of them. That Indian dude up north, on Virgil's case, the guy in Hudson, now Benson."

"Yeah. What can you say?"

"Lot of guys gone down over the years," Lucas said.

"Yeah."

Another minute, then Lucas looked at his watch.

"What're you going to do?" Del asked.

"First thing, right at the crack of dawn tomorrow, soon as the TV people wake up, I'm gonna have a big-mother press conference," Lucas said. "I'm gonna paper the country with pictures of Cohn and this chick. Then, we're gonna find them and kill them."

"Sounds like a plan," Del said.

Chapter 14

Lucas woke at 5 a.m. after three hours of sleep. He came up feeling depressed, a mental cloud hanging overhead; a darkness. He shaved carefully, let a hot shower beat on his shoulders and back, getting in the mood to talk to the press. Thinking it over. And Benson ' gone. If he'd been in the room, would he have done any better? Why had they opened the door? Benson hadn't been ready, his vest undone, the shotgun dropped '

Weather, who would have been up in a half hour anyway, had rolled out and was brushing her teeth when he got out of the shower. He toweled off and then wrapped his arms around her and squeezed and said, halfheartedly, "Naked man attacks helpless housewife."

She gave him an elbow and grumped, "Back off," and, "You better get going," and a moment later, "I still can't believe it." She'd known Benson, from another case.

"I' ah, never mind," Lucas said, and he went and got dressed, a somber suit for a somber day.

The press conference was set for six, to catch the earliest news programs, especially locally and on the West Coast, where the unknown woman might have come from. That gave him time to eat breakfast before he headed out, time to again work through what he was going to say. Del and Shrake and Jenkins and Neil Mitford, the political operator, and Rose Marie Roux, the state public safety commissioner, would all be there, Rose Marie speaking for the governor, and both Mitford and Roux working the reporters off-camera.

Lucas ate Egg Beaters and bacon, with coffee, heard the paper hit the front porch and went and got it, glanced at the headlines. The killings had been too late to catch the paper, although they'd be all over the television broadcasts-one cop, one innocent woman, and one masked intruder, all dead in one of the most expensive hotels in the Cities, right in the middle of the convention.

The press conference, Lucas thought, on the way in, might not be entirely friendly. He took his truck instead of the Porsche, for the reduced flash, and wondered whether he'd screwed up. If they really believed that a murder gang was operating in town, maybe there should have been two cops in each room? And fewer rooms, if necessary? They simply hadn't had the manpower, with the convention in town-and maybe they hadn't had the faith that anything would really happen. Maybe he'd been a bit perfunctory in his briefing of Benson and the other guys.

But they were supposed to be pros-they were supposed to know how to handle a deal like this. They all knew that a cop had been killed in Hudson. Why had Benson unlocked the door? The killers had been able to kick the safety bolt, but wouldn't have been able to kick the cross lock, if the door hadn't been opened '

No answers yet: maybe he'd get some from the crime-scene people.

Rose Marie Roux, his boss, was getting out of her Buick when he pulled into the BCA parking lot. She waited for him, squinting against the early morning sun, and when he caught up with her, said, "The governor's going to call Benson's folks this morning."

"All right."

"You good?" she asked.

"Aw ' you know."

She nodded. She'd been a cop before she was a lawyer, and a politician. "Let a little of it out, when you're talking to the cameras. Get angry. Makes better tape-you'll get better distribution on the pictures."

He half-laughed-snorted-and said, "Pretty fucking pathetic when you have to pull that bullshit."