"How about Jerry?" Lucas asked.

Kelly shook his head. "Didn't even bother to transport him. He's still here."

Lucas stepped forward and looked in the room: Reasons was as Lucas had left him, sprawled faceup on the carpet.

"So what about you?" Kelly said, pressing.

"Found him in the street waving a gun, so we picked him up," one of the cops said, and then, to Lucas, "Sorry," and he stepped behind Lucas and popped off the cuffs.

"Did you see the man?" Nadya asked.

"I chased him about a fuckin' mile," Lucas said, rubbing his wrists. "Then we sort of got tangled up…"

"What?" Kelly demanded of the uniforms, incredulity riding his voice. "You had two guys running and you busted this one?"

"Ah, there was no way for them to know," Lucas said. "They couldn't see the other guy and there I was running around in the dark, no ID. Nothing but a gun. They did okay."

"Maybe not," one of the uniformed said. He handed Lucas his. 45. "I sorta let off a couple of rounds."

"Yeah." Lucas remembered. He looked down at his left shirtsleeve, put his little finger through the nine-millimeter hole.

"Ah, fuck me," the cop said, turning away.

"We can talk about it," Lucas said. "Just everybody keep their mouths shut for a while, and… we can talk about it."

"Go," Kelly said to the uniforms. "But don't go too far."

"What about Jerry?" one of them asked.

"Jerry's dead," Kelly said.

"Jesus, I just talked to him this afternoon."

"Most of us did," Kelly said. "Go."

"Are you all right?" Lucas asked Nadya.

"Yes, I am all right. If Jerry hadn't been here, I would have been…" She tipped her head toward the doorway. And she didn't look all right; she looked scared to death; as they talked, she started to shake, and Kelly put his arm around her, squeezing her. "There is nothing between me and death, but luck and sex and coincidence."

"You believe in coincidence."

"Yes," she said, sadly.

"So what happened?"

"A man came to the door. He said he had a pizza, but I ordered no pizza. But Jerry was standing in the bedroom door and… he was leaving, we had been in bed already… and he went to the door and opened it and I came behind him to say I ordered no pizza, and the man there, bang. But not so loud a bang. I saw Jerry start to fall and I ran back to the bed and got his pistol and the man came to the door and I shoot at him three times, and he shoots at me two or three times and hits the lamp…"

"You didn't hit him?"

"No. I know the pistol well enough to fire it, but I am not intimate with it, and everything was so fast that he came to the door and I shoot, shoot, shoot, with no thinking. Then he ran, and I ran to the door, and then you came."

"Ah, brother…"

Kelly: "What the fuck is going on?"

"We don't know," Lucas said. To Nadya. "How good a look did you get? Could you identify him?"

She shook her head. "I see almost nothing. Nothing! I see the hat, I see the shoot, I run to get the gun and I shoot and shoot and then he was gone."

"Goddamnit."

"But," she said, holding up a finger. She turned and pointed at a blaze orange glove on the floor. "This is his glove. This belongs not to us, and I saw it when he was at the door… saw the orange. He must have lost it."

"We're gonna bag it, check it for DNA," Kelly said, as Lucas stepped over to look at it. It was a cheap, fuzzy, synthetic-cloth glove like the ones deer hunters used.

"You saw the guy," Kelly said to Lucas.

The phone rang and Nadya said, "I will get that," and edged around Reasons's body.

"Yes. White guy, white hat, one of those paper pizza hats, blond, I think, wearing a white shirt when I saw him first," Lucas said. "The girls down in the lobby said he was pulling on a black jacket when he went by them… He was carrying a pizza box. The whole fuckin' time, he was carrying a pizza box."

"All right. We'll check the pizza places, see if somebody picked up a pizza."

"Probably a dummy to cover the gun."

"Yeah, I think."

Nadya started shouting into the phone, in Russian, then she turned toward Kelly and Lucas and pointed at the phone and Lucas said, "Shit, it's somebody. You got a cell phone?"

Kelly handed him a cell phone and he called Harmon and when Harmon came up, as cool as ever, Lucas said, "We've got a phone call coming into room seven forty-five at the Radisson exactly now, and we need it traced… Shit."

Nadya was shaking her head, and hung up.

To Harmon, Lucas said, "You gotta trace that call. We got a big problem here…" He explained quickly and Harmon said, "This is a whole new thing. I'll check out guys, but I'm pretty sure that nobody that we're watching is in Duluth."

"Hang on," Lucas said.

To Nadya, "What was that all about?"

"I must call the embassy," she said. "This was a Russian, a man. He said that I should leave, or I will be killed, like Nikitin. He said this action is none of the concern of, of, my people. He called us the siloviki. This, I do not think, was an American. This siloviki, used this way, meaning members of the KGB, this is a new usage."

"So you're saying…"

"Maybe this is not the local Americans. Maybe… I don't know. This siloviki, this is a word Oleshev would have used."

"This is Harmon," he said, handing her the phone. "Tell him about it." She took the phone and stepped away.

Lucas said to Kelly, "We're gonna need the feds in a major way. This thing is out of control."

"You're saying Reasons was killed by a Russian. A Russian Russian. By mistake."

Lucas said, "I don't know anymore. For a pro, like you know, an international spy hit man, the guy kinda fucked up."

"I don't see that. There was no reason to think that Jerry would be here," Nadya said, the phone at her side. "Besides that, he was good enough."

"Yeah…" The orange glove caught his eye. "But would an international assassin wear a goddamn used blaze orange hunter's glove? Where would he even get one at this time of year?"

They thought about that for a minute, then Lucas: "Climbing down from the international intrigue for a minute… Has somebody gone to tell Mrs. Reasons?"

Nadya, hand to mouth: "Oh, my God." Lucas could hear Harmon's voice: "Hello? Hello?"

Chapter 19

Trey put her new apartment together in two long days. The apartment was off Cretin Avenue, in St. Paul, not far from St. Thomas University, in a well-kept gray-stucco building; two bedrooms, one of which she could use for an office. The rent was twelve hundred dollars a month, which was a lot, but the place felt right.

She bought used furniture for it-good used furniture, most of it from low-end antique shops-and a new bed from Sears. She squandered another two thousand dollars at four different Target stores, buying bathroom and kitchen equipment and a small but nice-looking stereo and twenty CDs, and a television. She went to a used-book store and picked up thirty paperbacks, the best books she remembered from high school and college; To Kill a Mockingbird, like that.

When she was done, the place looked almost like a home. All it needed was some living-in, some accumulation of detritus. Where do you buy a clamshell full of pennies and nickels? She would get it, she thought.

The day after that, at six in the evening, when she'd gotten her guts up, she drove down Summit Avenue to the brown-brick four-square house where she'd spent her teen years. There were lights on, and she drove on past, then two more times around the block. This was necessary, she thought. But what if they kicked her out without giving her a chance?

She'd dressed up a little bit; a nice skirt and blouse, a navy blue jacket. Her face still looked a little wild-the kind of weathering she'd had, you didn't get rid of in two weeks. Still: she was about a million percent different from the Trey of two weeks past.