Couple of cops watched a couple of black guys in a little Korean car slide all over the iced-up road in the middle of a blizzard. Poulson said, "Shit, I don't know if they're drunk or foreigners."

Holm didn't want to laugh but she couldn't help it sometimes. He phrased things just the right way. Missed his true calling-stand-up comedian. Audience full of white good-ol-boys and he'd bring the roof down.

Poulson had a point about drunk or foreign. Lots of students from overseas came here for some reason. From Nepal and Kenya, ending up in a farm town of about twelve-thousand in southwest Minnesota. How'd that happen? And then all the Somalians coming over from the Twin Cities, where there were a ton of them. These women in hijabs everywhere. Laundromats. Video stores. Wal-Mart. Working in the grocery stores. They wouldn't touch your pork or your booze, had to call someone over to ring it up.

Poulson had laughed about it. "I need to try that one day. Paperwork's against my religion."

"Lutherans are built on paperwork, remember? Nailed to the church door?"

"Not American Lutherans."

The car they were watching slid again while trying to stop at the light between the taco shop and the liquor store. Wiggled its tail.

"Didn't think he was going to make it. See that?"

Hard enough to see anything. A near whiteout, the snow blowing sideways, piling up against the sides of buildings and all the cars at the dealership, the trees heavy with snow on the west side, starting to bend. A few trucks on the road. The plows weren't out yet but they should've been. Poulson and Holm had pretty much figured it would be a quiet shift. Holm had brought magazines, most of them about raising babies.

She was three months along and everyone in the department knew it, and they knew it was Ray Bleeker's kid, and they knew Ray Bleeker was twenty years older, unhappily married, and last year's bullshit was already carrying over into the first week of the new one. Still, they had decided to keep the baby and make a go of it. Didn't matter if Ray's wife was going to get half of everything, didn't matter that they worked together.