The bar, when I was inside, was nearly as dark inside as the street outside. The man I’d followed in was close enough to the bar that I could sit there and surveil him, but the two men he was with had their backs to me.

After one sip, I left the draft beer I’d ordered on the bar and went to the cigarette machine. I rooted in my purse, acting frustrated.

I crossed to the table where the three men sat. “Excuse me? Could any of you give me four quarters for a dollar?”

“Sorry, babe,” Madison said coolly.

“No, I got it,” said one of his companions. He was, I saw, a very tall man. His exact height was hard to gauge, but his legs stretched a long, long way under the table.

“Thanks,” I said, laying a weathered single on the little round table and taking the quarters from his hand.

I went back to the cigarette machine, bought a pack of Old Golds, and headed toward the ladies’ room. But instead of going into the bathroom, I went out the side door, which was hidden from view of the bar.

I stood at the driver’s-side window of the Vega and Shiloh rolled it down.

“Two blond guys,” I said. “One’s really, really tall and has long hair, clean-shaven otherwise, blue eyes. The other guy is average height, I think. Looks a lot like his friend, except the hair’s a little paler and cut short. He’s got a tattoo on his left forearm.”

“A barbed-wire pattern?”

“Yeah,” I said, pleased. “Both guys are clean-shaven. The tall guy was wearing-”

“Good,” Shiloh said, waving me off. “I don’t need to know what they were wearing.”

“Now what?”

Shiloh jerked his head toward the passenger side of the car. “Now we go back to Minneapolis.”

“Really?” I was disappointed. It didn’t seem like a whole night’s work.

“Really,” he said. “You did good.”

Genevieve and I worked out together about a week later. In the locker room, she wanted to know how I had liked my first stakeout.

“How’d you hear about that?” I asked her.

“I ran into Radich again. You know how it goes: You don’t see someone for months, then you see them twice in a week.”

“It was okay. Dull,” I said. I hadn’t thought it was, but that had been Shiloh’s assessment, and I wanted to sound sufficiently jaded.

“Oh. I thought you might want to work in Narcotics, since you’re getting your foot in the door,” she said.

“I wouldn’t call one stakeout a ‘foot in the door.’ ”

“What about the raid?”

“What raid?”

Genevieve studied my face. “They’re going to raid the lab. Radich said he was going to talk to your sergeant about borrowing you again to go along. I guess he hasn’t yet.”

“Lundquist didn’t mention it to me.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything-”

“In case Lundquist says no? Don’t worry, I can deal with that.”

“Radich probably hasn’t asked him yet, is all. Lundquist won’t say no. They’ll have enough people anyway; this is just something nice for you, so you can learn. Because you helped them out.”

“What help? I sat on Shiloh’s lap and pretended to be his girlfriend.”

“Did it bother you they asked you to do that? Nelson couldn’t have done it.”

“I was okay with it.”

“Shiloh was okay?”

“Yeah, he was fine. What were you going to say about him and Kilander the other night?” I asked.

“Kilander?”

“About their, what, ‘history of unfriendliness’?”

“Oh, that. Nothing serious,” she said. “I don’t remember all the details, but when Shiloh had just got here from Madison, he went in on some kind of raid on a club in north Minneapolis. The whole case was kind of shaky. It ended up being Kilander’s to prosecute. And I guess he needed Shiloh to…” I could see her mentally reviewing her list of mild, noninflammatory words. “… to be cooperative in his testimony. Don’t ask me what about, I don’t remember.

“Shiloh didn’t like the whole case, thought it was flimsy. He wasn’t about to color his story in any way.” Genevieve yanked open her combination lock. “Kilander would have had a very unhelpful witness on the stand. Instead he decided not to call Shiloh at all. And lost the case.”

“What did the MPD guys think?” A cop’s opinion was more important than a prosecutor’s, at least to me.

“Well, obviously the story got around-that’s how I heard it. And someone sent away for some ACLU membership stuff and had it sent to the station in Shiloh’s name, like that’s supposed to be really embarrassing. I doubt it was Kilander. Not his style.” Genevieve laced up her boots. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s always good to know the department gossip,” I said lightly.

When I got to the squad room, there was a message waiting from my sergeant, Lundquist. See Lt. Radich.

If it’s hard to surveil a farmhouse, it’s also hard to sneak up on one, for the same reasons. In fact, Radich had explained, we weren’t going to be subtle. Instead, this would be a dawn raid. We’d come through the door on a no-knock warrant and catch everyone sleepy and unprepared.

It was five twenty-five in the morning, and I was riding out toward Anoka in the same green Vega that Shiloh and I had used before. This time I was sitting next to Nelson.

We rode mostly in silence. I felt more comfortable with Nelson than with Shiloh. He was the kind of cop I was used to, with a buzz cut and a blunt way of speaking. He related to me like another cop would. He hadn’t seen me naked forty-five minutes after we’d met in an airport bar.

I’d been working on the street until 1 A.M. and hadn’t even tried to get a few hours of sleep. The fact that I was going to stay up all night had worried both Radich and Lundquist. But they must have read in my face how badly I’d wanted to come along, because in the end they had let me go. At the moment I didn’t feel sleepy at all. I felt like I had washed down several dozen wasps with too much black coffee.

As I was checking my weapon by the side of the car, Shiloh came over to me.

“I guess I should thank Radich for thinking of me again,” I said.

“No, this was my idea,” he said mildly. “Look, I came over to tell you something-”

“He explained everything,” I interrupted. “I’m going to stay behind Nelson and just cover him; you and Hadley are going in the front and he and I will take the back.”

“That’s not it,” Shiloh said. “This is something I learned from a psychologist. If you ever get scared, not that people like us ever do,” and he paused to let me know that was a joke, “you can put your hands on a doorway-car door, anything-and imagine that you’re leaving your fear there.”

I put my weapon in its holster.

“It’s something you can do and not be obvious about when there’re people around,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said shortly.

He wasn’t deceived by the surface politeness of my response.

“I didn’t mean I think you’re scared.”

“I know.”

He looked away, toward the house. “Just do it like we talked about it. This one isn’t going to give us any problems.”

Radich had said much the same thing earlier; now Shiloh had said it. I guess something had to go wrong under that much karmic prodding.

Two of them were sleeping on a couch in the first-floor living room. Shiloh and Hadley went directly upstairs, hearing the muffled sound of running feet above. Nelson got the tall man from the bar up against the wall-seeing him standing, I could now gauge him at an impressive six-foot-six or -seven-and started handcuffing him. The couch’s other occupant, a skinny blond woman in her early twenties, made a bolt for the nearest exit, a window.

Even before Nelson jerked his forehead in the woman’s direction, I went after her. The woman was pretty quick; she had jerked the sash window up and gotten her head and shoulders out by the time I reached her. When I did, she hung on to the windowsill so hard that its edge sliced her palm. She shrieked.