Three of them, hard men carrying nylon bags, wearing work jackets, Carhartts and Levis, all of them with facial hair. They walked across the parking structure to the steel security door, heads swiveling, checking the corners and the overheads, steam flowing from their mouths, into the icy air, one of the men on a cell phone.

Weather Karkinnen had taken a half-pill at nine o'clock, knowing that she wouldn't sleep without it. Too much to do, too much to think about. The procedure had been researched, rehearsed, debated, and undoubtedly prayed over. Now the time had come.

And then her eyes opened.

At the hospital, the yellow door popped open and the three big men swarmed through.

Then the old guy on the floor made a peculiar wiggle.

The old man, his hands taped again, was still groaning as they loaded the bags. That done, they went to the door, glanced down the hallway. All clear. The bags went under the blanket on the cart, and the three big men pushed the cart past the security-camera intersection, back through the rabbit-warren to the utility closet, replaced the orderly uniforms with their winter coats, picked up the bags.

There were no cameras looking at the security door, or between the door and their van. The hard men hustled through the cold, threw the nylon bags in the back, and one of them climbed in with them, behind tinted windows, while the leader took the wheel and the big man climbed in the passenger seat.

Weather had seen the man with the bottle, but paid no attention. Too much going through her head. She went on to the physicians' parking, got a spot close to the door, parked, and hurried inside.

The tall man got back to the utility closet, pulled off the raincoat and pants, which he'd used to conceal his physician's scrubs: if they'd been seen in the hallway, the three big men with a doc, somebody would have remembered. He gathered up the scrubs abandoned by the big men, stuffed them in a gym bag, along with the raincoat and pants, took a moment to catch his breath, to neaten up.

Weather thought, as she walked away from the elevator, No point looking at the kids. They'd be asleep in the temporary ICU they'd set up down the hall from the operating room. She went instead to the locker room, and traded her street clothes for surgical scrubs. Another woman came in, and Weather nodded to her and the other woman asked, "Couldn't sleep?"

The old man in the pharmacy was moaning, the woman trying to talk, and the old man heard the woman fall down against a chair, after trying to get up, and then somebody was rapping at the service window and they both tried to scream, and they were loud, but muffled. He was chewing at the duct tape on his mouth, and finally it came loose from one side and he spat it away from his face.

The operating room had been reworked for the separation operation. Maret had stripped out all the general surgery stuff, put in more lights, brought in the custom table. The table had been made in Germany, and lined with a magic memory foam that would adapt to the kids as their bodies were moved this way and that.

Weather pushed into the OR and found three surgeons working with the baby-doll — a life-sized, actual-weight dense-foam model of the Raynes twins. They had it on the table, and were rolling it against the foam.

"So... no change," Maret said.

Another doc pushed into the room, followed by a second one. They had all kinds — anesthesiologists, radiologists, neurosurgeons, cardiologists, plastic and orthopedic surgeons, and a medical professor who specialized in anatomical structures of the skull, as it pertained to craniofacial reconstruction. They had twenty nurses and surgical assistants.

Above the table, in an observation room behind a canted glass wall, people were beginning to filter into the stadium seating.

The Raynes twins were a rare and complicated medical phenomenon. Craniopagus twins comprise only about one percent of conjoined twins. Because of the rarity of the condition, experience with separation surgery was limited. One of the twins, Sara, suffered from defects in the septum of the heart — the wall that divides the right side of the heart from the left side — and the defects were already causing congestion in the circulatory system.

Weather did aesthetic, reconstructive and microsurgery. Her availability in Minnesota, and a paper she'd done on a thumb reconstruction, had caught Maret's eye when he began to consider the Raynes twins.

Weather had turned away from Maret and the argument — "Remember to pee" — when they heard a commotion outside the operating room.

Alain Barakat stood at the back of the emergency operating room, mask dangling around his neck, watching the work: the surgeon was cursing at the nurse, who was fumbling the gear, and they were all watching the blood pressure dropping and the surgeon was saying, "Get it in there, get it in there, get some pressure on it," and the nurse stood on a chair and lifted the bottle of saline and somebody else said, "Two minutes for the blood." The surgeon said, "I don't think we have the time, I don't think we've got it..." and the anesthesiologist said, "We're losing him man," and the doc said, "Fuck this, I'm going in," and he cut and cut again and again, going in through the beginning of a brutal black bruise on the old man's belly, and the anesthesiologist said, "Hurry it up, man," and the surgeon said, "Ah, Jesus, I've got no blood, I got no blood here," and he hurled the scalpel into a corner and it clanged around and he said, "It must've been his goddamn kidneys, let's see if we can roll him..." and the nurses moved up to help with the roll and the anesthesiologist said, "Man, he's arresting..."

The separation team was standing around, repeating what Yamaguchi had said, when Thomas Carlson, the hospital administrator, came hurrying down the hall. Carlson was wearing his white physician's coat, which he often did on public occasions, to remind people that he had an MD in addition to the MBA; but for all that, not a bad guy, Weather thought.

Weather and Maret went together to tell the Rayneses. The parents were waiting in what the team called the "separation lounge," once a meditation room, which had been converted for family use and for team conferences.

Of the two Rayneses, Lucy was the most demanding of information, had studied the details of the separation, used terms like 'superior sagittal sinus' and 'calvaria,' read medical papers on other separations. She'd spoken to the media on a number of occasions, both televised and print. Larry, on the other hand, mostly talked about timing, and the children's development; and often, to Weather, seemed to simply want to get it over with it. He wasn't stupid, but swept along in a current too strong for him, part medical science, part circus. He wanted to go home.

By the time she got back, most of the team had drifted away. The OR nurses were shutting the place down. Weather stopped to talk with her surgical assistant, when one of the team's cardiologists, Alan Seitz, who'd been called to the ER, came ambling down the hall, looking distracted. "What?" Weather asked.

Lucas Davenport cracked his eyes at nine o'clock and did the calculation: Weather should be done with the initial part of the operation. Starting weeks earlier, she'd placed expanders under the kids' shared scalp, to stretch the skin. The extra skin would be used to cover the wound left by the separation. She'd be removing one of the expanders, as the first step in the operation, and also making the first cuts down to the skull itself. If it had gone off as scheduled, at seven-thirty, she'd be drinking a cup of coffee, while the bone-cutter went to work.

The brothers Lyle Mack and Joe Mack, Mikey Haines, Shooter Chapman, and Honey Bee Brown sat in the back of Cherries Bar off Highway 13, looking at an old tube TV balanced on a plastic chair, the electric cord going straight up to a light socket. The room smelled of sour empty beer bottles and wet cardboard. Three nylon bags full of drugs sat on the floor behind them, and Lyle Mack said, "You dumb fucks."

Haines and Chapman got four pizzas and two cases of Miller, and shuffled out through the back, off the loading dock. Their 2002 Trans Am was leaning against a snowdrift, and Lyle Mack stood on tiptoe, looking out of the garage door windows, watching as the two got inside, still watching until the car turned the corner.

Out in the Trans Am, Haines said, "Hope Honey Bee's got Home Box Office."

Lucas finished dressing, checked himself in the mirror: charcoal suit, white shirt, blue tie that vibrated with his eyes. Weather said, "And now, something occurred to me this very minute. When I was going in the parking ramp, a van was coming out really fast. We almost ran into each other."

Lyle Mack sat in his tiny loading-dock office and thought about it for a minute, then got on the cold phone and called Barakat. He said, "We gotta talk."

Alain Barakat hung up and wandered into the kitchen. Glanced at his watch; had to get back.

He dropped in an armchair and propped his head up with his hand. Thought about the blonde, and about the goods: Lyle Mack said he had the goods. Fire in the blood; needed the goods, despite what he'd said. Why had he said he'd get them some other time? He needed them now...

The Minneapolis police department is in the city hall, which is an ungainly, liver-colored building that squats in the Minneapolis glass-and-steel loop like an unseemly wart. Marcy Sherrill was slumped in her office chair, door closed to a crack. Lucas poked his nose in, called, "Hello?" He got what sounded like a feminine snore, so he knocked and tried again, louder this time. "Hello?"

"So what do you think about this Don Peterson guy?" Lucas asked. "What'd you get?"

Honey Bee had once been a professional hairdresser, so she offered Joe Mack a choice of styles: greaser, punk, industrial, skater, Mohawk or military sidewall.

They backed away from each other when they heard Lyle Mack coming back. Lyle pushed through the swing door, took in Joe and said, "Whoa."

Caprice Marlon Garner dreamed of flying alone out of Bakersfield, up though the mountains, straddling his BMW, wind scouring his shaved scalp, sand spitting off the goggles, slipstream pulling at his leathers; and then down the other side, in the night, toward the lights of Tehachapi, then down, down some more and boom! out into the desert, running like a streak of steel lightning past the town of Mojave, blowing through Barstow to the 15, then up the 15 all the way to the lights of Vegas, coming out there at dawn with the lights on the horizon, the losers heading back to L.A. in the opposite lane...

Sometime in the early morning, the Minnesota cold got to him, and he stirred in his sleep. Eventually he surfaced, groaned and rolled over, the images of California dying like a match flame in a breeze. He'd kicked off the crappy acrylon blankets, and the winter had snuck through the ill-fitting windows, into the bed. He'd unconsciously pulled himself into a fetal position, and now the muscles of his back and necked cramped up like fists.

The only bathroom light was a single bulb with a pull string. Cappy pulled on it, and looked at his face in the medicine cabinet mirror. Picked up some new lines, he thought. He was developing a dusty look, with a slash from the corner of his nose down toward his chin. Didn't bother him; he wasn't long for this world, Cappy thought.

After coming back to Minnesota, he'd stopped in his hometown, looked around. Nothing there for him. He looked so different than he had in junior high, that it wasn't likely that even his father would recognize him.

Minnesota was grinding him down. Before the last cold front came through, he'd taken the BMW for a ride down the highway, and in fifteen minutes, even wearing full leathers, fleece and a face mask, he'd been frozen to the bike like a tongue to a water pump.

Cappy sat in the back of Cherries and looked at Lyle Mack and said, "So that fuckin' Shooter told you I kill people."

Then they got practical, and Lyle Mack called Honey Bee on her cell phone: "You still at Home Depot?"

They'd sent Cappy down the street to wait at the Log Cabin Inn, and picked him up after Honey Bee got back. Honey Bee would open the bar: "You didn't start the wienies. They're still gonna be cold when we open."

Honey Bee had a horse ranch thirty miles south of St. Paul, though as ranches went, it was on the small side — forty acres. But Honey Bee liked it, and so did her three horses. The Macks were not horse persons themselves; their attitude was, if God had meant people to ride horses, He wouldn't have invented the Fat Bob.

They rode along in silence for a while, looking at the winter countryside, then Lyle Mack said, over his shoulder to Cappy, "One thing I gotta tell you. If they're sitting on the couch in front room, it's a purple couch, we gotta get them off it. We can't shoot them on that couch. Honey Bee would have a fit. We need to get them up on their feet."

Honey Bee's house wasn't much, an early twentieth century clapboard farmhouse with a front porch that was no longer square to the rest of the structure, and a round gravel driveway big enough to circle a pickup with a two-horse trailer. The barn was newer, red metal, with a loft for hay. A detached garage was straight ahead, an exercise ring off to the left.

Same time, same station, doing it all over again.

But of course, he did. The whole thing had been his idea. He'd seen a chance to steal a pharmacy key, and he'd taken it, without even knowing why at that moment. Or maybe he'd known why, but not how...

Now here he was, freezing his ass off, trying to set up an assassination. Not simple anymore. Not uninteresting, though, if only he'd been working with a competent crew. The whole concept of crime was interesting: the strong taking from the weak, the smart from the stupid. A game, with interesting stakes... if only he hadn't been working with the Macks.

Thirty people milled in the hallway outside the special operating theater. Like most of the other docs, he'd found an excuse to look the place over — the special double operating table, the intricate anesthesia set-up, the newly painted, sign-posted floor, an attempt to better choreograph the movements of the massive operating team, to keep the sterile and the non-steriles separate, even as they walked among each other.

Lucy and Larry Raynes were with the children, who were still awake, but about to be moved to the operating theater. Sara saw Weather and her eyes misted up. She was still a baby, but she recognized the woman who'd caused her pain in the past. She began to cry, softly, and then Ellen started, not yet knowing why.

An hour later, the twins were rolled into the OR, sedated, but not yet fully anesthetized. As the two anesthesiologists worked to position them, to rig them with the drip lines and to take a final look at the blood chemistry, to check their monitors, Maret wandered over to Weather and said, "It's time. No problems with the pharmacy this morning."

The observation theater was packed: team members had the first choice of seats, but after that, it was first-come first-seated, as long as you had the right ID. Barakat looked around: the watchers weren't just residents, but included a lot of senior docs on their own time. He was at the back, in the highest row of seats.

All skin has its own toughness and flexibility, and from post-puberty to old age, there was so much variation that you never knew quite what you'd get when you made the first cut. Sometimes it was saddle leather, sometimes tissue paper. Older people often had papery skin, and so did the young, though it was different.

Separating the twins was not a matter of simply cutting bone and then snapping them apart. The venous drainage inside the skull had to be carefully managed, or blood pressure would build in the babies' skulls and damage their brains, and likely kill them.

Weather stripped out of the sterile gown, head-covering, shoe covers and surgical gloves, and tossed it all into disposal baskets and walked down to the lounge where the twins' parents were waiting.

Weather was in the gallery when the operation started going sour. The first indication was simple enough, when the anesthesiologist said, "We're looking at a little thing with Sara's heart, here."

"Another five thousand, and all you have to do is make the one ride," Lyle Mack told Cappy. They were back in Cherries, Cappy an hour out of bed. "We've got a bike spotted for you, a Yamaha sports bike. Almost new, perfect condition. Owner's a RUB, he keeps a spare key in a magnet box shoved up under a flap behind the seat. Joe will drop you at his garage. The guy doesn't come home until eight o'clock. You ditch the bike after the ride, Joe'll pick you up. Clean, quick."

As he and Joe went over to get the bike, Cappy thought about killing people for money. Well, what was the difference between that, and killing a guy for his bike? Maybe that was when he crossed some kind of line — the first guy he killed, he did almost out of self protection. Later on, he did it because it was interesting.

"Here we go," Joe Mack said, as they turned down an alley. He pointed out the garage: "The white one with the red doors. I'll drop you off right in front of it. Nobody can see us, unless they're right in the alley. Got to get in and out quick, though."

At three o'clock in the afternoon, the sun was already dipping toward the horizon. Weather came out of the parking garage, looked both ways, took a left, down toward the I-94 entrance. She'd take it only a mile or so to the Cretin Avenue exit, then head south.

Just needed a nap, she thought. The surgery could resume in the middle of the night, if Sara's heart function improved. Or, if it worsened enough that they were compelled to let Sara go, and attempt to rescue Ellen.

Coming down the ramp, she saw the biker again, leaning into the turn, coming fast. Since she'd be getting off quickly, she stayed in the right lane.

Lucas showed up fifteen minutes later.

When the first St. Paul cops showed up, they were skeptical. When she explained that she might have seen the face of one of the robbers who took down the hospital, they became interested. When she mentioned that Lucas was her husband, and that she had some familiarity with assholes, and this particular asshole may have dropped a gun on the highway, they got busy.

Lucas turned back to Weather. "We've got to lose you until we find the guy. We could put you in the University Radisson..."

Lucas called the cops' supervisor, an old friend named Larouse, who said he'd call with any news. "You want a car outside your house?"

The noogie made her laugh, at least a bit, and then Lucas went off to talk to the cops again, leaving her, and suddenly, for the first time in years, she flashed back to a winter day with a motorcycle crazy named Dick LaChaise, at Hennepin General Hospital in Minneapolis.

Cappy swore and tried to grab the gun, fumbled it, then heard the scream of an angry engine, looked back, and realized that the bitch was coming after him. He hit the accelerator, felt the rush as the front wheel lifted free, cut down a center line and was gone. He watched her lights and saw her swerve left, and she was gone up the off-ramp. He took the next one, quick right at the top, then a left, down through the dark streets, careful about the leftover snow, and the black ice at intersections. Three blocks from Central High School, four minutes after he made the attempt on Weather, he stuck the bike between a couple of parked cars, walked a crooked route down to Central, watching his trail, to where Joe Mack was waiting in his van.

Cappy drove back to his room, in an old house in St. Paul Park, and Joe said he was fine, took the keys and headed back to Cherries. Lyle was waiting in the back.

A snow flurry had just crossed the Mississippi when Virgil showed up. He got out of his truck and a squad car pulled to the side of the street and two cops rolled out, and Lucas stuck his head through the front door and yelled, "He's good."

Inside, Lucas introduced Virgil to Marcy Sherrill, who'd stopped to talk about the attempt on Weather. "She's a deputy chief over in Minneapolis," Lucas said.

Weather came in, carrying a coffee pot, followed by the housekeeper with a tray full of cookies, and Weather kissed Virgil on the forehead and messed up his hair, and said, "Your nose looks fine." And to Marcy: "The last time I saw him, he had this big aluminum thing on his nose. From a fight."

As they were shutting down for the night, with the kids asleep and the housekeeper in her apartment, Weather already gone back to the bedroom, Virgil was jacking triple-ought shells into his twelve-gauge and he said to Lucas, "There is a good reason for you to jump in. You're the second smartest cop in Minnesota. They can always use more of that."

In the winter, Weather slept in a variety of ankle-length flannel nightgowns, and on really cold nights, she wore socks, even though it was no colder in the bedroom on really cold nights, than on halfway-cold nights. When Lucas got back to the bedroom, she was wearing a man's wife-beater undershirt, that clung to her body and was low-cut enough to show the rim of her nipples at the top; and white bikini underpants.

Cappy was asleep when he heard the knock on the door. He came awake in a rush, startled — nobody ever knocked for him, or even knew where he lived. It didn't sound like a cop's knock — or what he thought a cop's knock would sound like. He looked at the clock: after eleven.