The Empress File

CHAPTER 10

The computer alarm was beeping when we got home, and I phoned Bobby.

Found on-line.

Where?

Animal control.

Dogcatcher?

Number is right; old 300-baud carrier.

Thanx; will check. Could you monitor line, look for access code?

Yes. Will call.

I dialed Marvel's house and got John.

"You ready?" I asked,

"All set. I'll go in as soon as the place opens and wait. Mary Wells parks her car in that lot sideways across the street. If you can get a window seat in that Coffee Klatch Caf‚, 'round about eight-fifty you'll see her go in the lot. Red Ford. She usually gets there between nine-oh-five and nine-fifteen. You can meet her in the street and walk up with her. I'll be ready."

"Marvel says the map books cost twelve dollars?"

"Yeah. Have a twenty ready; maybe a fifty would be better," John said. "I think she'd open the box anyway, but with a fifty it'd be a sure thing."

"All right. And you've got the focus figured out and all that."

"I've been working with it, and I'll check it again before I go in to make sure it's turned on, that it's on silent mode, that the radio's attached. It'll be peeking out of the briefcase."

"The briefcase handles."

"Yeah, we thought of that. They'll be out of the way. We've got them taped. And I'll go out to talk to this Brown dude as soon as we're out of the place."

"OK. I'll see you tomorrow morning. Let me talk to Marvel."

She must have been standing next to him because she was on the line a second later.

"Everything OK?" she asked.

"Bobby says there's a computer out at the animal control building. Ballem calls it with his computer and apparently does some work with it. You got anybody out there?"

"There's a girl I could talk to. but I don't know. She's not the most trustworthy."

"I'll try to raid it from here, but if I can't, we might have to go into the place. We could use another key."

"Oh, man, I don't know," she said doubtfully. "My friend's pretty shaky."

"Is she a secretary? What?"

"She's fuckin' Duane, is what she's doing."

"Ah, shit."

"It's no big love affair; she thinks she needs the money."

"Well, talk to her. But don't give her any hint of what's happening."

"I'll think of something," she said. "A story."

"Be careful, for Christ's sakes. Hill's goofy. If there's any question, back off. We'll try to go in without her help."

LuEllen didn't like it. The worst thing, she said, was that too many people knew that we'd be hitting a particular place.

"Our security," she said, "is fucked. You know what the state women's prison is like here? I don't need some two-hundred-pound baby-killer sitting on my face for three to five."

"If it looks bad, we won't do it," I said. "Let's check it out tomorrow. Right after our session with Dessusdelit."

"It's kind of remote. We'll be noticed if we hang around."

"Nah. I looked at the map, and the place is right on the river. We'll chug down the river, look it over with the glasses, chug back, and look it over some more."

We were off the boat early the next morning, walking through town to the Coffee Klatch Cafe. The morning was warm and humid: pleasant but with the thick, hazy feel that foretold an insufferably hot day. It'd be good to be on the river. We got the window seat we needed at the Coffee Klatch and lingered over coffee and cheese Danishes.

"John," LuEllen said, and I turned my head to the street. John was climbing the City Hall steps, carrying the briefcase. He was wearing the dark pin-striped suit we'd seen in the motel. He looked hot.

Ten minutes later LuEllen said, "There she is. Let's go."

We slid out of the booth, left a dollar tip, paid the rest of the bill at the counter, and hurried outside. We'd been in the cafe only fifteen minutes, but you could feel that the day had gotten hotter and closer. Across the street Mary Wells was climbing out of her car. We walked down to the corner, waited for a car to pass, and strolled across the street toward the City Hall.

"Radio on?"

"Just looked," LuEllen said. The hand-size transmitter was in her shoulder bag. We were ten feet behind Wells as she climbed the steps into the City Hall. We paused for a moment at the directory inside, then followed her up the second flight to the clerk's office.

"It's going to be a scorcher today." Wells was saying as we walked in. She was talking to a woman behind the service counter. John was standing at a table to one side, poring over a book of plat maps. Wells's eyebrow went up as she looked from John to the assistant; the assistant caught it and shrugged. John's briefcase, its mouth opened toward the safe on the back wall, was sitting on a flat-file cabinet.

"Could I help you folks?" the assistant asked, looking past Wells.

"Yes, I was told you sell Corps of Engineers navigation maps for the Mississippi."

"The map book? Sure."

Wells walked through a wooden gate on the public counter to a glass-enclosed private office at the back. The clerk dug in a drawer, found a map book, and said, "That'll be twelve dollars. There's no sales tax on government publications."

I dug out my billfold and handed her a fifty. "I'm afraid I don't have anything smaller."

"That's OK. I'll just be a minute."

She walked back to Wells's office and said something. Wells nodded, stood up, came out, and walked to the safe. LuEllen put her hand in her purse. Mary Wells turned the combination dial on the safe, pausing briefly to align each combination number, and took out a cashbox. We got the change for the fifty, and two minutes later we were back on the street.

"OK?" I asked.

LuEllen shrugged. "Seemed to be. I'll have to look at the film. She turned the dial slowly enough, though. If the camera worked, we should be clear."

We were back aboard the Fanny before ten. John called a few minutes later.

"It worked. If the camera was aimed right, we got it because the film advanced four frames."

"Good," I said. "We've got to talk to Dessusdelit, and then we're going out on the river. I'll see you tonight at the Holiday Inn."

When Dessusdelit came over the levee wall, I turned to LuEllen and said, "We're on," and fled toward the head.

"OK. So after she cuts the deck, as soon as you pick it up, I say, 'What'd you do to this ball?' " LuEllen said, following me.

"Yeah. Right after I pick it up. And you've got to put something extra in your voice – like awe. Like gee whiz. Don't overdo it, but I'm not good at this, so you've got to turn her around. Just glancing your way won't be enough. Maybe you could hold the ball in that light beam," I said, nodding at a shaft of sunlight coming in the bow windows.

"OK. here she is."

I went on back to the head, stripped off my tennis shirt, and turned on the water, while LuEllen went to the door.

"Come on in," I heard LuEllen say cheerfully. Dessusdelit twittered a few words, and LuEllen led her to the same chair she'd sat in the day before.

While I splashed water on my face and neck, LuEllen got down the crystal ball and passed it to Dessusdelit, "just to warm it up." I wandered out of the head a minute later and posed in the galley, rubbing my wet face with a towel, yawning. Dessusdelit was wearing a bright print summer dress and beige low-heeled shoes. Even with the color, she still looked like a venomous sparrow, spooky, nervously glancing this way and that, as though a predator were about to jump out of a bush. She had the crystal ball cupped in her hands, rolling it, staring into it.

"You in a mood for a reading?" LuEllen asked me.

"Sure, I guess," I said lazily.

Dessusdelit knew something about tarot, so we couldn't fool her with a fake spread. LuEllen kept her working with the crystal ball while I got my deck from the cupboard. It was a common deck, the Waite-Rider. There are hundreds of tarots in circulation, but you can buy a Waite-Rider anyplace that handles occult stuff. It's a standard, which is a good thing, because when I needed the second identical deck, I had no trouble finding one. The second deck was in a little cardboard box we'd taped under the edge of the table.

"It's amazing," LuEllen said as I sat down across from Dessusdelit. My knee touched the box under the table. "We must have caught Miz Dessusdelit at a critical juncture. When she handles the ball, it lights up like a Christmas tree: money and adventure."

She paused, artlessly, and let a wrinkle crease her forehead, as if a new thought had just occurred to her. "And romance?" LuEllen looked down at Dessusdelit. "Do you think that peculiar flux and intensity could have something to do with romance?"

Dessusdelit blushed. "Well, I wouldn't be. there isn't anything-"

"Could be something wicked this way comes," LuEllen said. I jumped; LuEllen surprises me sometimes. She'd just quoted a piece of Macbeth, which later became a Ray Bradbury title. Dessusdelit obviously recognized at least the sound of it, and I wondered if it were the Shakespeare or the Bradbury.

While Dessusdelit was mumbling over LuEllen's suggestion, I thumbed through the deck and put the Queen of Cups on the table, faceup.

"Significator," I said. I glanced at LuEllen. "Would you pull the blinds just a little and kill the lights? I'd like it a little dimmer to help focus the concentration."

LuEllen started pulling blinds, and I put the deck, less the single card, in front of the mayor. "I want you to shuffle. At least seven times, and after that, as long as you want," I told her. She took the deck and began riffling the cards. When she was done, she placed it squarely in front of me.

"Do you want to cut it?" I asked.

"Should I?"

"That's purely up to you. Look inside yourself, and make a decision."

Dessusdelit closed her eyes, and after a moment her hand came out, groped for the deck, and cut it.

"Good," I said, picking up the deck.

"What'd you do to this ball?" LuEllen blurted suddenly. She'd been juicing it with the laser. When Dessusdelit turned her head to look, the crystal was fluorescing like a piece of cold fire.

"My God," Dessusdelit said.

"It just never stopped," LuEllen said.

As Dessusdelit turned, I switched the decks. The new deck was identical to the first but thoroughly stacked.

"You know what it is?" Dessusdelit volunteered. She turned back to me, her voice dropping to a whisper. "It's the tarot, focusing the energy in the room."

We all looked at the deck in my hand. "This is getting scary," LuEllen said. I agreed. Dessusdelit's voice had such a deadly intensity that the hair stood up on my arm.

I shook it off and did a spread. The Empress came up immediately, overlying the significator, the card that represented Dessusdelit. She grunted, and I realized that she knew more about the tarot than she'd let on. I rolled out the rest of the spread, and she grunted several more times, little under breath ummph noises. For the possible future, she got the Wheel of Fortune, upright, which generally means good luck; for the environment card, the Queen of Pentacles, which stands for success in business and the accumulation of property; and as the final outcome, the Ten of Pentacles, upright. The wealth card.

"Something's going on here," I said. "I've never seen a reading so consistent across the board."

I began the interpretation, and she nodded and then reached out to the spread. "But this." she said, tapping the future card. Death riding a white horse.

"I told you about the Death card," I said. "It doesn't mean Death; it means change. Usually welcome change."

"Yes, but it's a frightening image."

"Does the image strike you as particularly strong this morning? Did the image catch your eye, rather than the philosophical position behind the card?"

"Well."

"There are times when you must look at the image. You know, the tarot speaks on a lot of different levels. Sometimes it's on a mystical level that seems far beyond anything I can interpret," I babbled. She was listening intently. "On other occasions it's as simple as the picture printed on the card."

"It did seem sort of special."

Of course it did, with my implicit prompting.

"I don't know what it might mean, though," I said, putting new doubt into my voice. "A dark knight, a black knight, arriving on a white horse. That hardly seems to fit modern times – especially coupled with the wealth cards we see everywhere else. I don't know."

Jesus, I thought, am I overdoing it? Behind Dessusdelit, LuEllen was biting her lip.

I picked up the Death card and placed it in front of Dessusdelit. The room had grown tense, and Dessusdelit sat frozen for a moment, studying Death. Then, with a sudden release of breath, she pushed her chair back and stood up. Her eyes were wide and distant, as though she were stoned.

"Let's get some light in here," LuEllen said suddenly. She pulled a shade, and daylight cut through the gloom. "Boy, I've never seen anything like this." She looked down at her hand. "The crystal has stopped."

Dessusdelit leaned over and peered at it, nodded.

"I need a drink," I said. "Miz Dessusdelit?"

"No, no, thank you. I think I need to go home and lie down."

She looked one last time at the dark knight on the white horse. When she was gone, LuEllen looked at me and grinned.

"That was strong," she said.

"Yeah. I hope I don't get in trouble with the tarot gods for fuckin' with the cards." She frowned, and I grinned at her. "No sweat. Let's get out on the river."

The animal control compound was three-quarters of a mile south of the marina, at the far end of the town's small industrial district. Going downriver, we passed the tall white cylinders of a grain elevator with a barge dock, a series of warehouses surrounded by chain-link fences, a lumberyard, and then a stretch of empty riverbank, overgrown with brush. The animal control complex was the last sign of life before the river turned and slid out of sight. From the water we could just see the tops of the buildings. A couple of dogs were yapping, but there was no other sound except the boat motor and the water cutting around the bow.

"Goddamn it," I said. "I thought we could see in there."

"Why don't we go on down, tie off, and climb that little hill?" LuEllen asked, pointing across the water. A short, steep hill poked up just beyond the corrugated metal roofs. "We could take the glasses up with us, and we'd be looking right down on it."

"All right. Let's see if we can find a place to tie off," I said. We drifted down until we were a quarter mile below the complex, where the river began to turn away from the town. The near bank had been reinforced with concrete mats and made a decent landing. We tossed some foam bumpers over the side to protect the boat's hull, climbed the revetment, and tied off on a handy tree. A faint, twisting game trail rambled along the top of the levee, winding back toward town. We followed it toward the base of the hill, LuEllen in the lead.

Twenty yards down the levee she did a half hop and jump, blurted, "Jesus H. Christ," and took three hasty steps back toward me. "Big fuckin' snake," she said.

"Probably a garter snake," I said. "Sunning itself."

"Bullshit. I know garter snakes."

We eased up the path, and LuEllen picked up a stick and swept the grass on either side of the trail. A few seconds later we saw the snake again, sliding through the grass. It had a wide reddish brown head and brown bands across a thick body. The snake turned, froze for the blink of an eye, then uncurled into a tussock of dead grass.

"Copperhead," I said.

"Ugly." She shuddered.

"Poisonous. First cousin to a rattlesnake. We better take this slow," I said. "If there are copperheads, there could be rattlers around, too."

With the snake sighting, it took another ten minutes to climb to the top of the hill. LuEllen, a city girl, was thoroughly spooked.

"If they know you're coming, they'll get out of the way," I said, trying to reassure her.

"They're going to know we're coming," she said, using the stick to whip the weeds in front of us.

The crest of the hill was free of heavy vegetation, and though it wasn't particularly high, it rose above everything but the grain elevators. The view of the river was terrific, and a fire ring with blackened stones suggested that the hilltop was a popular camping spot. A dozen old beer cans were strewn in a small depression just below the summit, along with plastic bags and a rotting half roll of toilet paper. We climbed past the garbage pit to the grassy patch at the top and stopped to catch our breath.

LuEllen had turned to say something, her mouth half open, when three shots banged out below us.

"Jesus," LuEllen said, dropping to her knees.

The shots continued, a series of three, then a couple more, a measured pause, then another three. By that time I was kneeling on the ground beside her.

"Target practice," I said. "Down by the dogcatcher's."

Crouched, we eased across the crest of the hill down next to a butternut tree on the far slope. Duane Hill and another man were standing forty yards away and seventy feet below us inside a rectangle made by a chicken-wire fence. Two lumpy burlap bags lay next to Hill's feet. The second man, a short, balding redhead who ran to fat, was loading the magazine into a heavy black automatic. A.45, I thought. I put the glasses on him. I wasn't positive, because I'd seen only bad newspaper photos of him, but I thought it was Arnie St. Thomas, the city councilman who ran the loan-sharking business.

"What are they doing?" LuEllen asked, puzzled. "And what's that noise?"

The noise was an ooka-ooka-ooka pumping sound coming from the animal control building. I had no idea what it was.

"I don't know and I don't know," I said. "Target practice, I guess. I hope they're not shooting up here."

The sound of laughter drifted up to us. The bald man suddenly dropped into a Weaver stance and fired four shots in sets of two: tap-tap, tap-tap. After the second set he straightened and called, "Whoa-oh."

LuEllen said, "There's something down there."

"What?"

"There's something in the cage. They're shooting at something," she said.

I scanned the wire enclosure but saw nothing. "I don't see anything."

Hill picked up the bag next to his feet and carried it down toward the end of the enclosure closest to the bottom of the hill, unwrapped a string, and shook it. Three cats fell out. Two were small, little more than kittens. The third was a big old tiger-striped tomcat. The torn had a dazed, frightened look about it and slunk toward a corner of the pen.

"Goddamn them," LuEllen said in a fury. She moved a little away from the tree, but I pulled her back.

"Guns," I said.

Hill walked back toward the other man. When he was six feet away, he whirled, Wyatt Earp style. A gun came out from under the back of his shirt, a chrome-plated revolver, and he fired almost without hesitating. The first shot missed, but the second shot blew up one of the kittens. The second kitten froze, but the old tom streaked toward the opposite corner of the fencing and hit it about four feet off the ground.

"Come on, come on," I muttered. The cat crawled up the chicken wire, and Hill had swiveled to take it when the bald man let go with the.45. At the first shot Hill went down, yelling, but the bald man fired three more shots. The cat was climbing, almost over the top, but the third shot took it in the shoulder and knocked it over the wire into the grass just outside the fence.

"You cocksucker," Hill yelled back at the bald man, but the bald man was laughing.

"You like to shit your pants, Duane," he called.

"You fuckin' peckerwood," Hill shouted back, and he was laughing too. Then quick as a snake, he pivoted, stretching and going flat at the same time, landed on his stomach, his arms outstretched, and he blew up the second kitten with a single shot.

There was another bag by the bald man's feet. He bent over to pick it up.

"Let's get out of here," said LuEllen, ashen-faced with anger.

"Look at the locks," I said. I handed her the glasses, and she put them to her eyes. There was only one real building in the complex, though there had appeared to be more from the river. The other roofs we'd seen from the water turned out to be simple shelter tops, mounted on poles over a series of stacked holding cages.

The main building was constructed of concrete block, painted white, with a green steel door. Small dark windows with metal casements punctured the two sides we could see.

"Standard shit," she said. "We can take it. We can probably use the power rake if we had to; there's nobody to hear it."

"All right."

"We could do it from the boat. Wear some boots or something so we wouldn't have to worry about snakes, walk back along the levee. Make sure there's nobody up here."

She was still looking through the glasses when a young black woman stepped out of the building door into the hot sunshine. She called to Hill, telephone, and Hill started back toward the building.

"Bring a couple more bags," the bald man called after him. He shook the bag in his hand, and three more kittens tumbled out.

On the way back to the boat LuEllen turned suddenly and said, "I'm glad I saw that."

"Why?"

" 'Cause now I'm not going to feel bad about taking those motherfuckers out. Prison's too good for those assholes."

Back at the marina, we hooked up, and I called Bobby.

Any traffic?

Code word: Archball. May not help.

Why?

No auto-answer. Manual entry only.

Shit. How about the exchange monitor?

Set. Any call to engineer will ring here instead.

Probably tomorrow or next day.

We ready.

To get into a computer from the outside, the computer has to be on-line with the phone system. The Longstreet crowd, though, had a primitive setup: Instead of simply calling and getting right into the computer, somebody at animal control had to answer the phone, then switch the caller over to the computer. They probably didn't intend it as a security measure, but that's what they got. There's no better security for a computer than keeping it unplugged and plugging it in only for people you know.

"We've got to go in?" LuEllen asked, looking over my shoulder.

"If we want the computer, we've got to go in."

"Let's do it," she said. "Let's run down to that Wal-Mart, buy some boots, and go for a midnight cruise."

"That's a lot of enthusiasm," I said.

She nodded, and I knew what she was thinking about. My cat is an old beat-up tom who roams the alleys and rooftops of Lowertown in St. Paul. One of these days he'll be squashed by a car or killed by one of the river dogs. I'll feel rotten about it, and so will LuEllen. She always worked solo and moves around too much to have a pet. But she and the cat get along famously, LuEllen lying on the couch, the cat on her stomach, both of them sound asleep in good fellowship. And I couldn't get the picture out of my mind, that old tom making a run for it, Hill and his asshole friend shooting him down.

The sun was still hanging up in the hot, hazy sky when we drove out to the Wal-Mart on the edge of town, bought the green gum boots, and tossed them into the trunk. We ate at the Holiday Inn, stopped in the bar, and eventually ducked back to John's room. He was alone.

"I set you up," I said. "Told Dessusdelit that her future involves a black knight on a white horse, bringing welcome change."

"The Beemer's white, and I sure as shit am black," he said. He stepped over to the credenza, picked up a film cartridge, and flipped it to LuEllen. "Hope these are good."

"I'll look at them tonight." She glanced at her watch and turned to me. "We better get going. It'll be dark in half an hour."

"So tomorrow-"

"I'll talk to Brown about the land option," John said. "I hope Bobby's ready."

"I just talked to him. He's all ready. Is Marvel ready to move?"

"Harold's got the capitol crowd fixed. He told them that some heavy-duty crime is going down, that big money is being stolen, that something could happen this weekend. If he comes up with enough specifics, the attorney general will send in the state bureau of investigation."

"On a Saturday? For sure?"

"Any day of the week, any time of day, on six hours' notice."

"Can we trust them?"

"I think so. Crime is just crime, and most of the time they probably couldn't give a shit. But this is politics. This is a deal."

We pulled out of the dock just as the sun was disappearing over the highest of the old Victorian mansions up on the hill. The marina manager was leaving as we unhooked, and stopped by.

"Midnight cruise?"

"Little romance maybe," LuEllen told him, rolling her eyes at me.

"Well, good luck with that." The manager laughed, and he watched as we backed away, into the current.

We took our time going downriver, floating, easy. LuEllen stayed below, in the head, processing the film. I let the boat slip below the animal control complex, riding downriver for a dozen miles or more.

I could live out there on the Mississippi, I think, if I weren't eaten by the worm of Art. I could live there for the names alone. Longstreet was the only big town between Helena, Arkansas, and Greenville, Mississippi. Just in that stretch of 120 miles, from Helena to Greenville, you roll through Montezuma Bend, Horseshoe Cutoff, Kangaroo Point, Jug Harris Towhead, Scrubgrass Bend, Ashbrook Neck, and a few other places where you'd like to hop off the boat and look around.

The last of day's light was dying in the sky when I brought the boat around, took it back up-river, and eventually warped it against the revetment wall below the animal control complex. I killed the engine and the lights, dropped onto the main deck, and hopped ashore with the bow and stern lines. LuEllen came up, carrying the boots, as I finished tying off.

"Better take some repellent," she said, tossing me a spray can. "The mosquitoes'll be fierce."

"How'd the pictures come out?" I asked as I sprayed my hands and rubbed my face and the back of my neck.

"Not sure," she said, frowning a bit. "Three frames look good. On the fourth, her thumb might be in the way. I can't tell on the wet neg, I didn't want to take the chance of scratching it. But holding it up to the light. we could have a problem."

"Goddamn it," I said.

LuEllen shrugged. "If we've got three digits and she's only blocking the fourth, it just means it'll take a little longer to get in. We might have to try a dozen combinations, but we'll get it."

"When can you print?"

"Tonight, when we get back. I can't do it on the river because of the engine vibrations."

The night was still warm, but we wore dark long-sleeved shirts and jeans and the gum boots instead of shoes. I carried my portable in its black nylon case, and LuEllen had a daypack over her shoulder. We walked without talking, LuEllen using her miniature flashlight sparingly as we moved through the darkness. At the bottom of the hill she stopped, leaned her face close to my ear, and said, "Wait three minutes." I thought she was going up the hill, but instead, we simply stood in the dark.

When your eyes adjust from light to dark, the night vision seems to fade in, like a black-and-white slide coming into focus. What was pitch-dark when you first come out of bright lights is suddenly nothing more than twilight. It works the same for your hearing, although most people aren't aware of it. When you stand stock-still in a dark place, the noises that once resided in the background suddenly come to the fore. You notice the roar of far-off trucks climbing a grade, the motors and air conditioners, the insects in the trees, the sound of the wind. Human voices are an absolutely distinct sound; even from a long distance, when you can't make out the individual vowels and consonants, the rhythm or the rise and fall of the pitch tell you that you're hearing another human.

We heard all the background sounds, picked them up one at a time. No voices.

We waited the full three minutes, and then LuEllen was moving again. I trailed behind. The track along the levee broke out of the brush thirty or forty yards from the animal control buildings. The main building, the white one, was thirty yards away, across an open stretch of weedy lawn. A gravel driveway came in from the other side but stopped short of the building.

We waited for another five minutes in the weeds just out of the cleared area. There was one exterior light, up on a pole outside the main building. No lights were showing in the building.

"Glad the kennel's on the far side," LuEllen said. She took her picks and a power rake out of her pack. "Let's try not to wake up the mutts."

We were absolutely exposed as we crossed the yard. If anyone was up the hill or anybody came up in a car, we were in the open. There was no point in being furtive but we were furtive anyway. LuEllen went straight to the door, tried the knob, found it locked. There was a window around the side, and she tried it. It was locked. She came back to the door and looked at the lock.

"I'll try the picks," she whispered. "Maybe we can avoid the power rake. Hold the light."

She opened it, but it took twenty sweaty minutes. The power rake would have done it in two, but it sounds like a spoon dropped in a garbage disposal. When the door was open, we took a quick look around the side of the building, then crossed the yard and waited in the weeds again, listening and waiting. If there were any kind of unseen alarm, somebody should be coming up the road.

The sense of hearing isn't the only thing that sharpens in the dark. As far as we were from the building, there was a light but persistent stench of animal urine and fear. And something else.

"Raw meat," LuEllen muttered. "From the shooting pen."

Nothing moved on the road. We went back and inside. The lock on Hill's office door was nothing. LuEllen slipped it, and we were in. The computer was another old IBM. I brought the machine up and began dumping the hard disk to my portable. LuEllen went through the desk and found a box of floppies. When the disk-to-disk transfer was complete, I loaded the floppies one at a time, found two sets of files, and saved them to my machine.

That done, I slipped in a utility program I'd written myself. A hard disk is like an electronic filing cabinet, with lots of storage space for files. Unless the operator is running complicated accounting programs with enormous amounts of data or huge applications programs, there's usually plenty of empty space.

I checked and found the Longstreet gang had used less than a tenth of the available disk space. Good. My program – a gem, if I do say so myself – simply made a second copy of everything on the disk and then hid it in the free space. The copy would never show up on directories or in any other routine transaction unless the right code phrase was entered at the prompt. I made the code phrase redneck. And fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

If these were the books, and the Longstreet gang got nervous and tried to erase them, there was an excellent chance that there'd still be a set left on the machine, hidden under the code. A set available to the state cops.

After LuEllen had unlocked the desk, she checked a filing cabinet, found nothing interesting, and then went through the rest of the building. As I finished, she came in and said, "Come look at this."

I packed my machine and followed her into the back. There was a small loading dock at the rear of the building, with a pulldown door, like a small garage door. Built into the wall opposite the door were two cubicles, four-by-four-by-four feet, with heavy Plexiglas doors. There was a grille in the wall of each, and the doors had thick rubber seals.

"Gas chambers?" she asked. "For the animals?"

I looked at the seals and then at a pump apparatus off to the side. "No. It's a vacuum system. They put the dogs in the chamber and suck the air out. That's the way they do it most places now."

"Christ, it sounds awful."

I shrugged. "I don't know. It's supposed to be humane."

We left it at that. LuEllen made a last check of the building, to make sure we hadn't left anything behind, relocked the door from the inside, and pulled it shut after us.

Ten minutes later we were on the river. We didn't talk much as we pushed back upstream. LuEllen lay in the sunbathing well, looking up at the stars, and the tension current drained away with the current.

By two o'clock I knew I had the books. I didn't know what they meant.

"They've used codes for all the categories," I told LuEllen. "The numbers are there, but I don't know what the categories are."

"Marvel may be able to figure it out," she said.

"I hope."

While I worked on the books, LuEllen set up the enlarger in the head. She made four prints, fixed them, washed them, and let them dry. By the time I was sure about the books, she was looking at the enlargements under a high-intensity light.

"We got three out of the four," she said.

She had enlarged the images of the safe dial to the size of an old-fashioned alarm-clock face. The numbers were clear enough in the first three. In the fourth, Wells's index finger covered the critical digit.

"So it's seventy-four, forty-four, twelve, and something between. say, fifty-five and seventy."

"Hang on." I got my drawing box, dug around, and came up with a compass and a set of dividers. Using the compass, I drew the missing portion of the dial over Wells's intruding finger. With the dividers, I measured the intervals between the visible numbers and marked them off around the rim of the dial.

"If this is the centerline," I said, indicating the line with a ruler and a sharp pencil, "then the digit is. sixty-six. Give or take a digit."

LuEllen looked at me and grinned. "You do have your uses. Other than sexual, I mean."