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somewhere,” Lucas said.
    “Everything’s happened somewhere.”
    DEL WAS A battered man in his late forties, in jeans and a Pennzoil T-shirt with grease spots on it, rough-side-out Red Wing work boots, and an old, unfashionable nylon fanny pack, worn in front. He had a cell-phone-sized digital camera hung on a string around his neck and a .38 revolver in the fanny pack. He’d been working the streets around the convention center.
    “So what’s happening?” Lucas asked.
    “Ah, you know: kids and old people. There are some assholes out there, but most of them are hobbyists. They seem like my mom . . . you know, old. They’ve got these recycled chants from the sixties. ‘Hey, hey, John McCain, how many children have you slain?’ Like that.”
    “With a few assholes.”
    “A few,” Del said. “Vandals. Red-and-black flags. Slingshots. Guys who want to wreck the place for the pure pleasure of it. I could point out twenty people, if we picked them up and put them in the basement for a few days, the convention would be a sea of peace.”
    “Ramsey County sheriff is setting up a raid tonight, tomorrow night, pick some of those guys up,” Lucas said. “Or so I’m told.”
    “Here?”
    “No, over in Minneapolis,” Lucas said. “They’re pulling in some Minneapolis cops.”
    They talked about that for a while, and Lucas told Del about the guy with the sniper rifle, and Del shook his head and said, “That’s all we need.”
    “You having a good time?” Lucas asked.
    “Yeah, I am,” Del said. “I like talking to them; pretty good folks, for the most part. Even the assholes are interesting.”
    “I’d like to get out there; just to see it, you know?” Lucas said.
    Del was doubtful. “You look too much like a cop—or even a Republican.”
    “Not that. ”
    “Well—you got that vibe. You’d have to tone it down,” Del said. “Like, borrow clothes from me.”
    Lucas shuddered: “Maybe not.”
    He was, in fact, a clotheshorse, this morning wearing a light checked sport coat over an icy-blue long-sleeved dress shirt, black summer-weight woolen slacks hand-knit by an Italian virgin, and square-toed English-made loafers.
    * * *
    CAROL SHOUTED: “Lily Rothenburg on two.”
    Lucas said to Del, “I got a call coming here.”
    Del said, “Pick it up. I ain’t going anywhere, if it’s Lily calling.”
    “Fuck you,” Lucas said. He and Lily had once been a passing fashion, including a geometrical insanity in an earlier Porsche. Del knew all about it: Lucas shook his head and picked up the phone. “Lily?”
    “Lucas Davenport,” she said, “How’s every little thing?”
    “Well, we got a lot going on, so . . . pretty good,” Lucas said. “How about you? How’s the kid? If you’re divorced, I can offer you space in my garage.”
    She laughed and said, “From what I hear about Weather, it’d be more like the backyard. But, the kid’s fine and I’m not divorced.”
    “Del’s here, he says hi . . .”
    They caught up for a few minutes, then she said, “Look. We’ve got a problem—or, maybe, you’ve got a problem. We had an armored car robbery here two and a half years ago, and two guards were killed. They were off-duty cops. The robbery crew got away with a half-million dollars.”
    “Not that big, for an armored car,” Lucas said.
    “Well, there was more inside, but the thing went bad. Most of the money was behind a locked barrier inside the truck,” Lily said. “The idea was, if trouble started, the guards would put the keys in a solid-steel lockbox inside the back, which they didn’t have keys to, and then nobody could get at the money . . . that’s what they did. But somebody got pissed, we think, and started shooting, and all the shooters got were the receipts from a couple of big-box stores that hadn’t been put behind the barrier yet.”
    “How does that get to us?”
    “We think the leader of the crew was a guy named Brutus Cohn,” Lily said. “We got an anonymous tip.