They got the car turned around, pointed back toward the highway a quarter-mile away, and then Cappy got one of the grenades out of the back.

"You're sure you know about this?" he asked Barakat.

"One hundred percent," Barakat said. "As long as you don't let the handle fly off, you're perfectly safe."

"Safe."

"Perfectly. When you throw it, throw it like one of your baseball players."

They walked to the ice together. Barakat stopped at the edge, and Cappy asked, "Won't the water put it out?"

"I don't think so. It's not like a match."

They both looked at the grenade, which Barakat said looked like a pomegranate, but Cappy didn't know what a pomegranate was, so they agreed on tomato, and Cappy said, "Pull the pin…"

"Throw the handle and everything," Barakat said. "Like a baseball."

"All right. Here goes." Cappy gripped the grenade around the handle and yanked the pin out. Stood there for a moment.

Barakat said, "Throw it. Throw it."

Cappy threw it, but it was heavier than he thought, hit the edge of the ice, skidded, and slipped over the edge into the water. Barakat started running away, and he called, "Run."

Cappy was running when the grenade blew. It wasn't too loud, but loud enough, and kicked up a twenty-foot plume of water. "Jesus," Cappy shouted. "Let's get the fuck outa here."

Laughing, they ran back to the car and drove away. LATER, AT BARAKAT'S HOUSE, they were playing basketball, not because they wanted to, but because they couldn't help it. Too much cocaine: too cold to go out. Plus, a basketball game on TV, the volume on 84, and the Eagles on the iTunes, volume at 11. The ball was a wad of two sheets of typing paper, the basket was purely virtual-a blank spot above a door. The idea was to hit the blank spot with a shot, which was too easy unless they stayed right in each other's faces, and after a couple of points, it turned into war, a raucous fight to get the paper wad in the air, the two of them tumbling over chairs, tables, an ottoman, Cappy blowing a nosebleed, spraying blood around the room, Barakat driving down the lane between the couch and an easy chair…

When they quit, Cappy was leading 18 to 14, but he collapsed first, flat on the carpet, and groaned, and laughed, and said, "I'm fucked," and he also thought it might have been the best twenty minutes of his life, except for those nights roaring up the 15; the best night with somebody.

Barakat said, breathing hard, "I will tell you something, Cappy. This is serious. I know how I can get out from all this police business."

"Yeah?"

"Yes. I thought of it now, one minute ago. There is this man, from my town in Lebanon, his name is Shaheen."

"Shaheen."

"Shaheen. He is nothing, but he thinks he is a big man. He is another doctor, but he is not so much. But." His heart was pounding from the game, and the cocaine, and he stopped to take a half-dozen deep breaths.

"But," Cappy said, prompting him.

"Shaheen has an accent. More accent than I. And he is nothing. I am thinking, if Shaheen dies, and if in his room there are some drugs from the hospital, what do we think?"

"We think he is the man the cops are looking for, inside?"

"That's what we think," Barakat said.

They breathed together for a while, then Barakat asked, "You have a girlfriend?"

"No. Nope. Not so much."

"Are you a virgin?"

"Nope. 'Course not."

"Hah. I know a place in Minneapolis," Barakat said. "These girls."

Cappy rolled up on his side. "Hookers?"

"That's too bad," Barakat laughed. "One of them, she told me that she was a therapist."

"I don't know what that is, exactly," Cappy said.

"Like a doctor… like a psychiatrist. You know, to give you mental help."

"I could use some mental help."

"These girls, they like cocaine. They like amphetamine. They like marijuana, but we don't have marijuana. They like money."

"Don't have much money," Cappy said.

"There is this American song," Barakat said. "I don't know it, but one part says, 'The candy man don't pay for pussy."'

"Yeah?"

"We got some candy," Barakat said. He staggered to his feet. "We got lots of candy."

"What about Shaheen?" Cappy asked.

"Girls first. Then Shaheen," Barakat said. CAPRICE GARNER'S old man had beat him like a bass drum from the time he was a baby until he was fourteen, when he ran to California, thinking to become a beach bum or a movie star. He got as far as Bakersfield and a job as a roofer, a skinny kid with a thousand-yard stare and bad scars on his face, back, and soul, and then he fell drunk off a roof one spring morning and broke both of his legs.

With no medical insurance, he took what he could get, the legs fixed at a charity hospital, sweating out the summer in a concrete-block apartment with both legs in casts, no air-conditioning. The guy next door was a biker, took pity on him, brought him beer, crackers, cheddar cheese, and summer sausage. Back on the job, and still under the influence of the biker, Cap saved his money and bought a used Harley Softail and a window air conditioner.

Did the biker thing.

Let his hair grow down to his shoulders. Bought a high-end leather jacket and chaps at a Harley rally. Pierced an ear for a silver-skull earring, pierced a lip for a steel ring, bought himself a rich selection of do-rags. Got a tattoo on his back, ten inches across, a motorcycle wheel with the words Razzle-Dazzle.

Took some shit because of his youth. Had one guy who kept talking about taking Caprice into the desert and gang-fucking him, to break him in, the guy said. The guy laughed about it, but Caprice thought there might be something underlying it, so he killed him.

Went to his house with a street gun, and when the guy answered the doorbell, shot him in the heart and ran away in the night, the guy's girlfriend screaming from the kitchen.

Nobody figured that one out. But he was riding as an indie, and anybody might try to ride over an indie. He did the reasonable thing and got himself the Judge.

People who pissed him off tended to disappear, and bikers got careful when they were around him. Nobody knew, but they knew. He encountered Shooter Chapman, a fellow Minnesotan, in a friendship ride for cancer or heart health or kidneys or some shit like that, where the old guys all had flags on the backs of their trikes. BY THE TIME he was old enough to be invited into a gang, he no longer wanted it: the brotherhood, the drinking, the ranking, the rules. He likedbeing alone. He could trust being alone. He dumped the Harley after he'd killed the man for his BMW, and the new long-distance ride, with the German name, set him further apart from the gangs.

Then one day he glanced at himself in a Burger King mirror, saw a piece of yellow cheese stuck to his lip ring.

He was a fuckin' joke, he thought, staring into the mirror. He needed to hone his act, he needed to get down to what he was.

He traded the high-end leathers for a fifties jacket that he found in Hollywood, black leather so old and sand-worn and sweat-soaked that it had turned brown. Got rid of the earring and the lip ring. Shaved his head. Threw away his do-rags. Bought a pair of Vietnam-era military goggles with round lenses and olive-drab canvas straps that made him look like a frog. Liked the look.

He got it so stripped down, so plain, so wicked, so weathered that when he walked into a biker place, everybody stopped talking to look at him. They knew he was out there, the place they talked about going, but never really did. He liked that, too.

Like the day a bunch of Angels rode into LA from San Bernardino, then hooked north up the PCH toward Santa Barbara, riding like a bunch of old women on their Harleys, graybeards with old fat chicks, Arrive Alive, Drive 55, and he'd blown their doors off, riding one-handed through the pack like a fuckin' guided missile at 110. He'd replayed that scene in his mind any number of hundreds of times…