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So somebody else could be in this. Somebody who played real rough. Finally he said, “Look, it’s complicated…”

Susan took a last drag on her one cigarette, twisted, and flipped it into the fireplace. When she turned back, she took her time, letting the firelight play over the very serviceable curves of the only intelligent eligible woman in Glacier Falls who would take a chance on a silvertip loner like Harry Griffin.

Griffin started over, speaking carefully. “It’s like this with Broker and his wife. You know how when there’s a crisis-say a building catches fire-everybody runs. Except there’s two people who go back into the fire to take care of the casualties…”

Susan sat up straight. She had never felt his eyes range in on her quite this way, like hard iron sights. She nodded her head slightly.

“Well,” Griffin continued, “it’s good we have people like that around when all hell breaks loose. But maybe it’s not such a good idea if they get married to each other and have a kid.”

Deliberately, Griffin stood up and stared at her, to let it sink in. She knew him as an intense guy; and now she’d hit a new wall in him. Macho guy loyalty. Whatever. She sobered a bit, seeing the warning frown in his eyes. Shucks, so much for afterglow. And he was standing in a certain way, this quiet power stancing, cautioning her away from the subject. Then he turned and walked from the main room toward the bathroom. A moment later, Susan heard the shower start to run.

Susan hugged herself in front of the fire. She looked down and saw a faint tickle of goose bumps rise on her forearms. It was the first time he’d revealed a part of himself that actually worried her.

Chapter Twenty-four

The alarm went off, and Sheryl Mott got up in her efficiency apartment on Lincoln Avenue in St. Paul. Five- fuckin’-thirty in the morning. Still dark out-and this is after doing a six-hundred-mile round trip yesterday, missing work…she gingerly touched the rash on her cheeks from Gator’s Brillo-pad four-o’clock shadow.

Mission Impossible theme music was playing in her head. Your assignment, if you choose to accept it…

Her assignment today was Dickie Werk, Werky for short.

Richard M. Werk maintained an office in the Ramsey Building, a liver-colored brownstone near Mears Park in downtown St. Paul. He employed a secretary, two legal clerks, and an “investigator.” Simon Hanky, the investigator, was a vetted OMG soldier whose main job was to keep an eye on Werky and clean up messes. Sheryl had some history with Hanky, and he was one scary fella.

Werky rented space to three young, eager, world-saver attorneys who rallied to the defense of disadvantaged inner-city youth who had difficulty finding gainful employment in a tough economy…and were forced to support themselves by robbing and selling dope. And stabbing and shooting people.

Sheryl rolled her eyes, shook her head, planted her feet on the chilly hardwood floor, and pushed up off the bed.

Werky was the kind of overly self-dramatizing guy who never outgrew snarfing his first line of cocaine in law school, blowing his brains out listening to Warren Zevon’s Lawyers Guns and Money at max volume. He ate too much, sweated too much, talked too much and had this absolute, and potentially fatal, fascination with rubbing up against hard-core criminals.

She had heard him blab at a party once; comparing himself to Robert Duvall playing Tom Hagen in The Godfather. How he only had one client. Wink, wink.

But pulsing in all that corpulent narcissism was a brilliant legal mind totally devoted to getting Danny T.’s convictions overturned. So the gang indulged Werky’s affectations. So far.

Sheryl sighed and headed for the bathroom. A few minutes later she was worried she had a mild kidney infection. Goddamn Gator wouldn’t use condoms. Made her stand around after so he could see his jizz…

Back on task. Werky.

How to proceed. After Seattle had exploded in her face, Sheryl didn’t indulge nobody anymore.

She didn’t trust Werky’s office help or his do-good office mates.

She didn’t trust the office phones.

Neither did Werky. He handled his One Client’s real business affairs exclusively by cell phone in his car. Had a whole stash of cells. Use them one time and toss them. So she’d have to catch him in his car.

She took a shower, washed and blow-dried her hair, put on minimal makeup, a long denim skirt, a mock turtleneck, and a long leather coat that reached down past the tops of her tall leather boots.

No sense in giving Werky ideas by showing skin.

She tucked Gator’s stolen paperwork into her purse, went down to the street, and started the Pontiac. Then she stopped at the Grand and Dale drugstore, bought a pack of Merit filters. Two blocks down, she picked up a tall cardboard cup of Starbucks with a couple shots of espresso. Then she joined the steel-and-glass bumper-to-bumper escalator of commuters going down Grand Hill into St. Paul. She inched through the business district and turned into the parking garage next to the Ramsey Building. Drove to the contract parking level in the basement. Some things don’t change. Werky still had a parking stall with his name on it.

The stall was empty.

She parked one floor up in hourly, took the stairs down, and walked a figure eight in the crowd of sleepy-eyed nine-to-fivers getting out of their cars and marching into the skyways. She kept a sharp watch on the parking stall.

Two Merits later: bingo. The shiny black Escalade wheeled in on a plush squeal of Michelin radials. Sheryl took a deep breath. The OMG gang had matured around dope from street thugs into serious big-time crooks. Trick was to be nimble, like a fly zipping through a sticky spiderweb. Get in and out fast. And not get wrapped up and eaten. She walked up to the tinted driver’s-side window and tapped.

The window zipped down an inch. An eye appeared in a thick puddle of a glasses lens.

“Yeah?” said the eye.

She watched the eye cross-reference a databank of faces, names, levels of trust and threat, and quickly reach a decision:

“How you doin’, Sheryl?”

“Hiya, Werky.”

“What’s up?”

“Need you to look at something.”

The eye fluttered, amused. “Like your tattoo? You still got it?”

Mastering an impulse to puke all over his fancy wax job, Sheryl said, “You gonna make me stand out here in the cold?”

The door locks snapped open. Sheryl walked around the front of the SUV, opened the passenger-side door, and slid into the deep leather bucket seat.

Same old Werky, piled up like Jabba the Hutt’s pinstriped baby brother. He licked his gummy lips and said, “You’re looking well, Sheryl. Threadbare but righteous. Sorta like the Little Match Girl.”

Sheryl resolved to keep her cool. She had once known a Las Vegas hooker who swore that men were all just physical extensions of their dicks. Werky fit the pattern; short, sixty pounds overweight, and lopsided with a head too small for the rest of him.

She removed the sheaf of papers Gator had lifted from Broker’s house from her purse and handed them to him.

Seeing the documents, Werky’s demeanor changed. Focusing fast, he flipped through the pages, his voice concentrating in a meditative “Hmmm.” Sheryl sipped the remains of her coffee and waited. Another, longer “Hmmmm” followed by an impressed: “No shit.” Now Werky had tilted his thick glasses down his nose, looking over them as he scanned the warrant, the memo, the Visa statement, and the Washington County pay voucher. “The missing puzzle piece. Perhaps,” he said slowly. When he looked up at her, his eyes darted fast and alert. “Where’d you get this?”

Sheryl gave him a brief, ambiguous smile.

“So,” he said.