"You said I owed you, and I should call if I ever got anything. I got something."

"Yeah?" Weather would be walking out the door already. "What you got?"

"I'm not in the lawn business anymore, I'm working at the Cobra Lounge over in St. Paul. It's not the greatest place, but I'm trying to get back on my feet, you know-"

"That's great, Gerry. So, what you got?"

"You know this woman that got strangled? Aronson?"

"Yes."

"I just saw the picture on TV, but they didn't say anything about her selling it."

"What?"

"She was on the corner, man." Haack's voice dropped a half-octave and got cozy. Man-to-man.

"What? What're you talking about?"

"She was doing the hokey-pokey for money," Haack said.

"You know that for sure?"

"Yeah. I know a guy she dated a couple of times. Cost him a hundred bucks a time, nothing but blow jobs and straight fucking. Nothing kinky. They sit around here and talk about it at night."

"You say you know him?"

"Well, yeah. You couldn't ever tell him who let on. They'd kill me." Now his voice was nervous, as though he were having second thoughts about the tip.

"Nobody'll know," Lucas said. "What's his name?"

AFTER TALKING TO Haack, Lucas stole another ten minutes to go back through the file on Aronson. Swanson noted that he'd searched state and national records on her and checked her fingerprints with the feds, and she'd come up clean. Still, if Aronson had been on the corner, somebody should have picked it up.

He'd worked himself into a fury by the time he arrived at the restaurant. "How in the hell can you have a criminal investigation going on for a year, and you don't know the chick is hustling?"

"It wasn't going on for a year. It was a halfhearted missing-persons investigation for a couple of weeks after she disappeared, and then it wasn't anything," Weather said. "And maybe she was an amateur. You said she'd never been arrested."

"But you gotta know that stuff," he said. "You gotta talk to enough people that you find it out. Now there's a question about these other women. Are they pros? One of them claims that she's still a virgin-not that anybody got out his flashlight and looked. If they're pros, then we've got a whole other problem than the one we started with."

"Is that bad, or is that good?"

He thought about it and said, finally, "Too early to tell. Actually, it might be good. If the guy is hitting on hookers, we've limited the number of people we have to look at, and I've got pretty good connections in the area."

"So twelve hours into the investigation, you're already a genius. And you look like you're enjoying yourself, pissed off as you are."

"Hmph." He remembered the mayor's announcement. "Did you watch any TV tonight?"

"No. Were you on?"

"No, but there were a couple of stories… The thing is, I might be out of a job in a few months." He told her about it, and the unlikeliness that he'd be reappointed by a new chief.

"So if we do get pregnant, we won't have to find a nanny," Weather said.

"That's not exactly how… You're jerking my chain. This is serious."

"If you really want to keep the job, you can figure out a way to do it," Weather said. "But maybe it's time to try something else."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Something else. You've done one thing all of your life. Maybe you could do something…"

He picked up her direction. "Kinder and gentler."

"Yeah. Maybe," she said. "You were sorta good at business." Lucas had briefly been the nominal CEO of a computer company that produced simulations for police 911 systems. He'd hired another guy for the job as soon as he could, and had gone back to the police department.

"Nothing I've ever done is as brutal as what corporate execs do all the time," Lucas said. "I've never fired anybody. Never taken a perfectly innocent hardworking guy and screwed up his life and his family and his kids and his dog, because somebody needed to put an extra penny on the fuckin' dividend."

"Communist," she said.

LATER THAT EVENING, Lucas sat up in bed and sighed.

"Oh, go on," Weather said. She pulled a blanket up to her chin.

"What?" But he knew.

"Go on, see if you can find this guy. The one getting the blow jobs."

"Not much of a night for finding guys," Lucas said, his eyes drifting toward the bedside clock.

"Lucas, you've been twitching ever since we got in bed," she said.

"Del was gonna be out late," he said, tentatively.

"Then call him. I'm working tomorrow so I've got to go to sleep anyway. I won't if you keep twitching. Go."

Lucas pretended to struggle with the idea for a moment, then kicked back the sheet, crawled across her to reach the telephone on the nightstand, and called Del's cell phone. Del answered on the first ring. "What?"

"You awake?"

"I hope so. If I'm not, I'm dreaming that I'm standing in a puddle of slush at Twenty-ninth and Hennepin, with snow blowing down my neck."

"It's snowing?"

"Yeah. The snow pushed the rain right out of the picture."

"I'm in bed with Weather. We're warm and naked," Lucas said. Weather reached beneath his chest and gave one of his nipples a vicious pinch. "Ow. Jesus Christ…" He bounced away from her.

"What?" Del asked.

"Never mind," Lucas said, rubbing his chest. "You know the Cobra over in St. Paul?"

"My home away from home," Del said.

"There's a guy who hangs out there, a Larry Lapp. Julie Aronson was playing his bagpipe at a hundred bucks a toot. That's what I'm told."

"Do tell. Want to look him up?"

"Yeah. Meet me there in half an hour," Lucas said.

"If you meet me there in half an hour, and you're really naked and warm in bed right now, you're a crazier fuck than I ever knew. It's bad out here."

"See you then," Lucas said.

As he dropped the phone on the hook, Weather asked, "Playing his bagpipe? Where do you guys come up with that trash?"

"That was really bad," Lucas said. "Pinching me. It still hurts."

"Aw. What are you going to do about it?"

He looked at the clock. He was ten minutes from the Cobra. "I'm gonna have to turn you over my knee," he said.

"Fat chance," she said.

THE WEATHER WAS as bad as Del had said it was. A bitter winter wind was blowing the snow directly into the car's windshield as he headed north along the river, and created an illusion of a funnel; Lucas felt as though he were staring into the small end of a tornado. Ten minutes later, he spotted Del standing under a streetlight, and parked next to him.

"The place is cursed," Del said, as Lucas got out of his Tahoe. Del was wearing his winter street outfit, an East German Army greatcoat with home-knitted mittens and matching toque. He was looking across the street at the Cobra. The place was a storefront with venetian blinds covering the windows, Busch and Lite signs in the window, and a gold-on-black sign that said "Cobra" and flickered from a bad fluorescent tube.

"Cursed? You mean Minnesota?"

"I mean the Cobra. I bet there've been ten businesses in there in the last fifteen years," Del said. "Nobody makes it."

"That snake place," Lucas remembered. "Is that how the Cobra got its name?"

"Yeah, I think so. I knew that guy who owned it, the snake place. Herpetology Grand. He said snakes were the coming yuppie pets, the next new thing. They were beautiful, clean, quiet, and they only ate once a week. Plus there was a big markup on them. He wanted me to invest; he was going to start a whole chain of them."

"What could possibly have gone wrong?" Lucas asked, as they crossed the street.

"You had to feed them live gerbils," Del said. "Turns out that yuppie women can't get tight with the idea of feeding live gerbils to big snakes. You know, as an everyday thing."

THE COBRA WAS as dim inside as out, a narrow entry past the bar with its red leatherette stools, a couple of tables in the back with a color TV, a shuffleboard bowling game, and what appeared to be a little-used dartboard. The smell of beer and peanuts and smoke. A unisex toilet in the back showed down a back hall, next to a lighted sign that said "Caution, Alarm Will Sound: Emergency Exit Only." Two customers sat at a table in the back, watching a Lakers game. A third huddled over the bar. Lucas pointed at a stool and said, "Beer?"