"Who the fuck are you?" Terry demanded. "You got no ID, you got no badge, you got no car, who the fuck do you think you are?"

"I'm under fuckin' cover," Andreno shouted at him. "Maybe you heard of that? And I gotta car. I just didn't want you in it."

One of the cops, trying to be reasonable, said, "The call was on the command channel…"

Lucas took a step back and put up his hands, palms out, as if pushing away from them. "All right, all right: let's start over. Okay? Let's start over. And let's take the cuffs off my guy, here, okay? Okay? Let's take the cuffs off."

They moved out to the front of the bar. One of the cops went around behind the bar and put together some Cokes and ice, and Lucas told Terry about the investigation.

"… I got this spy here, this Russian, and we think she's got somebody working with her. So after we come up with Spivak, she says, 'Well, let's do Spivak tomorrow, after we do the paperwork.' I think, I wonder why that is? Why don't we do him today? But I go along with it, because I already called Micky in. I tell Micky to keep an eye on Spivak, just in case. So he stakes out the place, and Spivak never comes out after the place closes. Micky starts to worry about it, so he stands up on the garbage can in back and peeks into the back room…"

"I see Spivak standing on two six-packs of whatever…"

"Bud Light," Terry said.

"Whatever," Andreno said. "His knees are shaking like crazy, he's about to hang himself, and I call Lucas. I'm standing in the back, still on the phone, and I hear Lucas talking to you, and the next thing I know, the back door bangs open and this guy comes outa there like a rocket ship. I go running after him but as I go past the door I see Spivak hanging by the neck, so I gotta stop and run inside and try to lift him up by the legs so he don't strangle, and then your guys got there. About an hour later."

"Two fuckin' minutes," one of the uniformed cops said. "And we looked for the guy. We knocked on doors down there to see if anybody saw anybody tearing out of there in a hurry, or anything."

"Nobody saw anything," said another cop.

"What pisses me off," Andreno said, "Is that when your guys got here, one of them points his pistol at me and says, 'Okay, drop him,' and Spivak is going aaagggaaaaaaghh."

They all looked at him for a moment and then Lucas started to laugh, and then another cop started and then the second one, and the chief rubbed his forehead and said, "Ah, for Christ's sakes."

Spivak was at the medical center with rope burns around his neck and on his face where the rope had cut against it. He had pulled muscles in his neck and back, and had a damaged larynx. He could talk-croak-but just barely, said the cops who'd brought him in.

His wife, a short, broad woman who might have been Spivak's sister, was in the hallway outside the hospital room where Spivak was being treated, and when she saw them coming, she said, "John Terry, I don't want you talking to him. You go away."

She was frightened and angry. Terry said, "I'm sorry, Marsha, but we gotta talk to him. This is a murder investigation. Two people have been murdered…"

"He almost got hung," she wailed, and then she started to cry, "You almost got him killed…"

Two more people came around the corner, a man and a woman, both short and stocky, both in their late twenties or early thirties, both Spivaks, Lucas assumed. One of them said, "Ma, what's wrong. Ma? Is he okay?"

"He's okay," she sniffed. "The police say it's a murder investigation…" and she cracked again and wandered over to a chair and sat down. The young woman said, "John, what the heck is going on here?"

"Carol, you just go take care of your mom. We need to talk to your dad for a minute. We don't know exactly what happened yet, but we're working on it."

"Did you catch anybody?"

"Not yet. That's what we're working on. You go sit down and we'll talk to your dad for a minute and then you can come in."

Spivak was propped up in a hospital bed, covered to the waist with a sheet, his neck wrapped in gauze, more gauze taped to the left side of his face, another blob stuck on his earlobe. When they walked in, he looked at Lucas and croaked, "What the hell?"

Lucas asked, "Did you recognize the guy?"

"No. Never saw him before." The words came out in spurts, as though each one hurt. "Tall guy. Black hair. Black eyes. Skinny. Big nose. Maybe forty. Black raincoat. Gloves. Waited in bar. Everybody gone. Asked him to leave. Pulled a gun. Made me tie rope up. Made me stand on beer bottles. Hung me. Had radio. Kicked out beer bottles when he heard cops was coming. Ran out back."

"American? Foreign?"

"American. I think. No accent. Shot me in ear."

"In the ear?" Andreno asked. "I saw blood, didn't hear no shot."

"Silencer. When I wouldn't stand on bottles. Shot my earlobe off. Bullet one inch from eye. Scared shit out of me."

"What did he want?" Lucas asked.

"Same as you. Wanted to know, who was in room."

"What'd you tell him?"

"Same as you. Don't know."

"You didn't know a single one of them?"

"No. Told you."

They went on for a while, but Spivak knew nothin' about nothin'.

Finally, Lucas said, "I'll tell you, Mr. Spivak, you're bullshitting us. There are already two people dead and you were almost a third. This guy is nuts, and he could come back if we don't catch him."

Spivak's eyes flicked away, and without looking back at Lucas, he shook his head.

They spent five minutes with the family, but the family claimed they knew nothing about any meeting at the bar, and pushed the cops off and disappeared into Spivak's room.

The chief said, "This is really screwed up."

Lucas asked, "How well do you know Spivak?"

He shrugged: "Well-I think he moved here from somewhere else when he was a kid, so I've only known him since kindergarten. That's what, fifty-four years?"

"He's a good guy?" asked Andreno.

Terry nodded: "Yeah, he's okay. He's just a guy. He runs a bar. He can be an asshole, sometimes. Most of the time, he's okay."

"Goddamnit. The problem is, there's something going on with this spy shit, and I don't know what it is," Lucas said. "Spivak isn't talking, and he knows some shit…"

Terry nodded in agreement. "I saw him look away. I'll tell you what, maybe you scared him. I'll go in and bullshit with him when you're gone. Tomorrow morning, see what he has to say. We've known each other a long time."

"I'd keep an eye on him," Lucas said. "This guy out there, whoever he is-he's not fuckin' around."

"I'll get them to put him down in intensive care. That way, he'll be behind the nurses' station and there'll always be somebody right there. I'll have guys stop by and we got an extra car, I'll park it out front."

"Good. Talk to him, then. Call me."

"Get this guy some ID," Terry said, tapping Andreno on the chest. "And tell him to watch his mouth. He wise-assed us so much some of the guys wanted to shoot him to stop the bullshit."

Andreno said, "You guys…" But Lucas waved him off.

"I gotta ask you a favor," Lucas said to Terry. "I'd like to put out a story-your newspaper, the TV, however-that you got a call from a passerby about something weird happening at Spivak's. Maybe somebody heard a scream. When you sent a car, you missed the bad guy, but a cop or a passerby saw Spivak hanging there and cut him down. Just have somebody else do what Micky did. Tell your guys to keep their mouths shut-tell the family that. I want to keep Micky a little secret."

"Gonna be tough. This is a small town," Terry said.

"If you jump right on the story, it oughta work. I'm not worried about rumors: I just don't want Micky on the TV news, where out-of-towners are gonna hear about him. These guys, these Russians, I don't think they have local sources. They won't hear the rumors."