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so much to do . . .’
    â€˜No, there isn’t. It’s Friday night. There’s really only one thing to do, which is for you to hold Ben till he falls asleep, and me to unload the rest of the gear and cook dinner while I tell you about my day. Doesn’t that sound cozy?’
    â€˜For sure,’ she said. ‘You do have such cozy days.’ She liked it, though – it was what she wanted to do. Ben burrowed his hot unhappy head into the hollow above her collarbone and bitched about the rotten luck that had brought him this bellyache. After a few minutes of protest, he brought forth the big belch that eased his pain. When he quit squirming and fell asleep, I started some burgers on the grill outside and reminded Trudy that the great thing about ceasing to be the family milk fountain was that it meant a lady could have a glass of wine before dinner.
    â€˜Hey, yeah. Ooh, insane, bring it on,’ Trudy said, and put Ben back in his crib. I broke out the bottle of Shiraz I’d been saving for this occasion, and we toasted her return to the land of grown-ups. Over dinner, I finally did share some details about the bizarre scene at the other end of the block from Maxine’s house.
    â€˜So much crime in one house, incredible.’ She sipped and thought. ‘That couple . . . the few times I noticed them, they just looked like a pair of losers.’
    â€˜Didn’t they? I’m not very surprised about the grow house, but I’d never have guessed them for a big-time meth lab. What Ray’s describing – that takes capital. And they certainly didn’t look like cold-blooded killers.’
    â€˜No. Maybe hot-headed grudge-holders, though.’ She shivered. ‘I hate the thought of leaving Ben in the same town as all of that, much less the same block.’
    â€˜You know any babysitters living in mansions? And grow houses get found in some very nice neighborhoods these days.’ She knew I was right about that. Real-estate markets were churning, and good houses were available for rent. And if they can, growers rent in quiet residential neighborhoods, which are the best cover for a cannabis crop.
    The meth lab was something else. Crystal meth hit Minnesota hard in the nineties, and by the turn of the century its users were swamping law-enforcement budgets in small towns, pouring into the court systems and crowding the prisons. The drug quickly took hold in rural areas and small towns because it was cheap and could be manufactured out of readily available chemicals – in country kitchens and even the trunks of cars. Hey, just follow the recipes on the Internet, the kids told each other gleefully, and you can buy the cold remedies in any drugstore. And the rush? Oh baby, sick, sick.
    It flooded the brain with dopamine and enhanced sexual pleasure, so it appealed especially to the young, and was so powerfully addictive that just a few samples could hook people for life. The dependency was devilishly hard to break, and the effects catastrophic – it gave people hallucinations, rotted their teeth, and aged pretty young girls into crones with devastating speed. And they didn’t care. A good hit of meth, they assured the appalled health-care providers trying to rescue them, felt like ten of the best orgasms you ever had, all at once. Narcs are not people who are easily disgusted, but I have seen a meth lab and its clientele turn seasoned officers somber and pale.
    The Minnesota legislature, spurred on by their alarmed constituencies, passed laws requiring cold remedies based on ephedrine and pseudoephedrine to be kept behind the counter, sold one to a customer, and signed for by the holder of a bona fide ID. When the kids got smart and started fanning out to buy cold remedies in all the small towns around, they passed another law that drugstore chains had to keep system-wide records and check them often. The penalties for infractions were big