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Bukowski.”
    “Oh, yeah, the very same.”
    If you were in law enforcement, you knew who Judge James Bukowski was, even if you didn’t know him as Wild Jim. He’d always been a little left of the dial, but after six DUIs and a narc charge, he’d decided to take his Wild West show elsewhere three years ago; obviously down by the river. “Does he live around here?”
    “Sure. In one of those seven-figure lofts by the Mill City Museum. But he likes camping better, I guess.”
    “I’ll be damned,” Gino said, shaking his head.
    “Like I told you, we get all kinds down here. We’ve got him in the tank if you want to talk to him later.”

CHAPTER 5
     
     
     
    IT HAD BEEN A YEAR SINCE SOMEONE HAD TRIED TO KILL Grace MacBride. In the span of her thirty-some years, this was quite an impressive hiatus, but it hadn’t been long enough. She still carried the Sig and the derringer every time she left her house; she still wore the knee-high riding boots that would make it difficult for someone to slash the arteries in her legs; and she was still constantly, painfully aware of every detail of her surroundings. Every time she abandoned one of these defenses in a pathetic shot at normalcy, something bad happened. This particular pair of boots was getting worn; a little soft at the ankle, a little run-down at the heel. She would have to replace them soon.
    Get over it, Grace. She said that to herself every morning when she woke up, because, truthfully, she was living such a wonderfully ordinary life now. Get up, dress, feed the dog, eat breakfast, go to work. This was the routine of hundreds of thousands who lived in this city, and even if some of them were carrying, she’d never seen one other in a pair of riding boots they were afraid to take off.
    “I’m pathetic, Charlie, you know that?”
    The dog at her side wagged his whole body at the sound of her voice. Apparently the stub that was left of his tail wasn’t expressive enough.
    Whatever had taken Charlie’s tail and his courage had done so long before Grace had rescued him from an alley, and if anything, his paranoia exceeded hers. No matter how urgent the need or how intense the excitement, he usually went out of any door slowly, cautiously, sniffing the air for imaginary danger. The woman and the dog were incredibly alike. The single exception was the back door of Grace’s house, which opened onto a small rectangle of yard enclosed by an eight-foot fence of solid wood. This was a secure place, populated by a single magnolia tree that Grace babied with a hose, and Charlie babied with a hose of his own.
    In the mornings, they went out the front door, over to the garage, into the Range Rover, then off to the Monkeewrench offices on the third floor of Harley Davidson’s Summit Avenue mansion, the dog’s favorite place in the world.
    It was only the third week in June, barely the first kiss of summer in an average year, and already Minnesota had racked up a record number of blistering dry days that had lowered the rivers and left burgeoning crops wilting in dusty fields. Every farmer in the state knew that the cycle of drought and flood was a problematic yet normal course of events that those who lived off the land had learned to expect over the centuries; but the media lived in the cities, and such extremes spelled ratings, turning every anchor desk into a doomsayer machine. Suburbanites were quick to jump on the bandwagon when watering restrictions turned their Kentucky bluegrass brown, and no-wake zones on the lakes and rivers kept them from the thrill of high-throttle boating.
    Normally there was no weather condition that kept Minnesotans inside. They stood in the streets, videoing tornadoes that bore down on their houses; they broke the ice to swim in frozen lakes; they stripped to the furthest point that Lutheran decency would allow and jogged around the city lakes in summer. But not this year. This year the jogging and biking trails were almost always empty,