The Empress File

CHAPTER 5

We'd be in Memphis for a couple of days, getting some equipment and taking care of last-minute personal business, I said. Marvel suggested that we eat dinner together that night, but LuEllen vetoed the idea.

"We can't be seen with you," she said. "Even this meeting is risky. We're talking about felonies. If there's ever a trial, I don't want to be tied to you guys by a waitress or a bellhop or a maitre d' or anybody else."

"That's kind of pessimistic," Marvel said.

"I'm a pro," LuEllen answered. "I've never been arrested on the job because I try to think of everything in advance. If they ever do get me, I want them to have as little as possible."

The decision to attack the town had been a mood elevator. LuEllen's comments sobered them up, and by six o'clock they were gone. The minute they were out the door, LuEllen made a call.

Five minutes later we were standing on a curb along the riverfront.

"We're running late," I said. "If they don't show soon."

"They will. These guys are good."

"Better be," I said. I was getting cranked and turned away. Below us a string of barges was pushing upriver, driven by a tow called the Elvis Doherty. The pilot sat in his glass cage, smoking a pipe, reading what looked like one of those fat beach novels that come out every June. At the tow's stern an American flag, grimy with stains from the diesel smoke, hung limply off a mast between the boat's twin stacks. I was watching the tow, thinking that it would make a very bad Norman Rockwell painting. LuEllen was watching the street.

"Oh, ye of little faith," she muttered. I turned in time to see a blue Continental turning a corner a block away, followed by a coffee brown Chrysler. Neither was a year old. LuEllen held up a hand, as though she were flagging a taxi, and the two cars slid smoothly to the curb.

"Take the Ford," she said. She picked up a black nylon suitcase that she'd carried up from the Fanny and headed for the Chrysler. I stepped into the street as the driver got out of the Continental, the car still turning over with a deep, un-Continental-like rumble. The driver, a heavyset, red-faced guy with no neck, a Hawaiian shirt, and zebra-striped shorts, peeled off a pair of leather driving gloves.

"Go easy on the gas till you're used to it," he said laconically. "It's clean inside."

That said, he walked around the back of the car, joined the driver of the Chrysler, and they strolled away down the sidewalk. LuEllen waved and got into the Chrysler. I climbed into the Continental, pulled on my own driving gloves, and spent a minute figuring out where the car's controls were. Then I shifted into drive and touched the gas pedal. The Continental took off like a young Porsche. I never looked under the hood or figured out what LuEllen's friends had done to the suspension, but you could have taken the car to Talladega. On the way to Longstreet I found a stretch of flat, open highway and pushed it a bit, climbed through 120, had plenty of pedal left, and chickened out.

"That was stupid," LuEllen snapped. We were in the Wal-Mart shopping center on the edge of Longstreet, with a couple of hundred other cars. It was not quite dark. "A fuckin' speeding ticket would have killed us."

She was in her preentry flow, a weird state of mental focus that excluded everything but the job at hand. She would not be a pleasant woman to be with, not for a while, but she would be frighteningly efficient. "Sorry," I said, and I was.

"Stay with the program, goddamn it." She glanced at her watch. "It's time."

We took the Chrysler, as the less noticeable of the two cars. LuEllen drove downtown, taking the routes she'd scouted in her trip the week before. The city council was meeting, and two dozen cars were parked in the lot sideways across the street from City Hall.

"Chrysler," she said, nodding. The mayor's car was there, identical to the car we were driving. "I don't see Hill's pickup."

"And I don't see the Continental."

"May be on the street in front."

The Continental would be easy to recognize because it looked exactly like the one we'd left at the Wal-Mart. It belonged to Archie Ballem, the city attorney. We took a left, past the front of the City Hall. No pickup and no Continental.

"Ballem's got to be here for the bond hearing," I said. "Hill, we can't be sure."

"I thought he came to all these things."

"That's what Marvel said."

"I'd hate for her to be wrong this early," LuEllen said. We'd continued down the block past the City Hall. "Let's go around. Wait a minute. There he is. There. Ballem."

A man in a seersucker suit and a white straw hat was walking down the street toward us. He turned to look at our car as we rolled past. "Are you sure?" I asked.

"Ninety-nine percent. I saw him last week, on the street. His office is down this way."

We found the Continental outside Ballem's office, three blocks from the City Hall.

"If we could find Hill."

"If we don't, we'll call it off," she said. "But we've got the other two."

"We go?" I asked.

"Yes."

The phone company was a little redbrick cubicle on a side street, with a lighted blue and white phone booth hung on the side wall. We knew Chenille Dessusdelit, the mayor, was at the meeting. And we knew she was a widow and lived alone. But there might be a guest. We called her home, but there was no answer. With the twentieth ring LuEllen nipped the receiver off the phone with a pair of compact bolt cutters. The phone would still be ringing at Dessusdelit's, and with the receiver gone, it was unlikely that anyone would come along and hang up our public phone.

"Get the portable," LuEllen said. I knelt on the passenger seat, leaned into the back, unzipped her suitcase, took out the cellular phone, sat down again, and plugged it into the cigarette lighter. Dessusdelit's line was still busy.

"Maybe we could get Bobby to kill the call records, so we could just use the cellular and not have to mess with public phones," I suggested after I had hung up.

LuEllen shook her head. "Too complicated. Something could get fucked up and we'd be on paper." She feared paper more than anything: tax records, agreements, leases, checks. Phone bills. Paper left a trail and couldn't be denied.

We cruised Dessusdelit's house just once. A well-kept rambler, it was stuck at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a yard heavy with shrubbery. Trees overhung the streets from both sides, but there were no sidewalks and nobody out for a stroll. Too hot, probably. One light burned in a window at the center of the house, a virtual advertisement that the place was empty. The house on the south side of Dessusdelit's showed a few lights, but the house on the other side was dark. We came out of the cul-de-sac, took a left past the country club, did a U-turn, and headed back. I dialed Dessusdelit's house again, and the phone was still busy. I was looking out the window when I heard LuEllen take the first hit of coke. She carries it in small plastic capsules, one long snort apiece.

"Jesus," I said.

"Don't give me any shit."

The coke was on her in a second, but her driving was rock-steady.

"Zapper," she said.

"LuEllen."

"Get the fuckin' zapper."

The zapper was a specialized scanning transmitter that looked like a long-nosed hair dryer. It came with its own batteries. I got it out and started hyperventilating. LuEllen likes this part, with the adrenaline. I don't. LuEllen took us into the cul-de-sac and, without hesitating, into Dessusdelit's driveway. When we were still a hundred feet down the street, I pointed the zapper at the garage door and pulled the trigger. After a few seconds the door started up, and LuEllen barely had to slow down before we were inside. I dropped the door behind us, she killed the engine, and we sat in silence.

"Listen," LuEllen said. She was trembling with intensity. I listened and, after a second, picked out the faint ringing of the telephone.

The door to the interior was unlocked. Small towns. Lots of crime but not on the streets. LuEllen led the way in and then quickly through the house, stopping to answer and hang up the phone. There were three bedrooms. One had a queen-size bed, a couple of chests of drawers with jewelry boxes on top, and an antique oval mirror. Neat but lived in. Another was obviously a spare bedroom, with twin beds covered with decorative quilts. The third bedroom had been converted into a small home office with an IBM computer.

The living room was a double-jointed affair with two levels and a big brick fireplace, perfect for political soirees. The kitchen was ample, and there was a small first-floor utility room with a washer and dryer just off the kitchen. A quick tour of the unfinished basement turned up nothing of interest.

LuEllen started with the bedroom while I went back out to the car for my laptop and a stripper program. I was a little surprised that Dessusdelit had a computer at all; women of her age and status don't usually mess with them. Along with the computer were a slow modem, a desperately outmoded printer, and two double-drawer filing cabinets.

I loaded the stripper program into her machine, stripped her floppies and the hard disk, looking for data. I came up empty. There were two application programs, a word processor, and a spreadsheet, but no data.

I dumped the cabinets and again came up empty. Nothing but routine business letters. I carried the laptop back to the car and started working through the kitchen.

There was nothing subtle about what we were doing; we were tearing Dessusdelit's house apart. I dumped the cupboards onto the floor, shook each can and bottle before I tossed it aside, tore the drawers out of the refrigerator, checked the ice cube trays. Halfway through, there was a noisy crash from the bedroom, and I stopped to look. LuEllen had broken the bed apart.

"Loud," I said.

"Go work," she said coldly.

When I finished the kitchen, LuEllen was tearing through the living room. She had cut open the living room furniture and was tearing through a bookcase when I came out. "Where's the circuit probe?" she asked.

"Here." I patted my breast pocket. We'd been in for a while, and I was starting to sweat. LuEllen looked frozen, focused.

"Check the bedrooms, then the bathroom, then the kitchen. I'm going downstairs. I don't know, it should have been in the bedroom." She checked her watch again. "Seven minutes."

We didn't know what we were looking for. We did know that Dessusdelit had taken a lot of money out of the city over the years and that Bobby couldn't find it: couldn't find money, investments, long-distance trips that might point to a foreign money laundry. Nothing. She could have been buying land in some backwoods town under an assumed name, but that didn't feel right. She'd want it where she could see it. She did have a safe-deposit box at the Longstreet State Bank, but Bobby went into the bank records and found that she visited the box only once or twice a year.

Wherever she was putting the money, there should have been some sign of it in the house. There wasn't. The furnishings were good but not great; she hadn't stashed the money in antiques or art. I'd feared the possibility that she'd put it in antiques; we didn't have a moving van.

We hadn't yet found a safe. That's what the probe was for.

A circuit probe is simply a lamp the size of a pencil. There's a plug at one end, a light in the middle, and a screwdriver at the other end. The screwdriver fits the screw in the middle of common everyday home power outlets. Electricians use them to check the outlets to see if they're live.

I checked the outlet next to her bedroom door, one under a window on an outside wall, one next to a closet. I got a light every time. The last outlet, the one behind the bed's headboard, came up dead. I turned the probe over and used the screwdriver to loosen the outlet plate.

Lying on the floor, working, I could feel my heart pounding in my chest; we were getting long on time. I gave the screw a last turn and pried off the plate.

Ah. A wall cache. Inside was a metal box, and I used the screwdriver to pull it out.

"Find something?" LuEllen asked from the doorway.

"Yeah, a cache. shit."

"What?"

"Money. Goddamn it." The cash was packed tightly into the metal box, fifties and hundreds. I pulled it out, a folded-over wad some four or five inches thick, and tossed it to LuEllen. In the bottom of the box was a small white envelope. I fished it out with my fingertips, squeezed it, and found three hard bumps like cherry pits.

"Not more than a few thousand here," LuEllen said. "We've got to get going-what's that?"

I tore open the folded envelope and poured a little stream of ice into the palm of my hand.

"Diamonds," I said, holding my hand up to LuEllen.

"Damn, those are nice if they're investment grade," she said. She took the stones and tucked them in a shirt pocket with the cash. "We're running late."

"Find anything in the basement?" I asked as we headed back toward the car.

"No."

"Goddamn it, we're not doing that good."

"Get the paint."

We had two gallons of paint in the car, red oil-based enamel. We popped open one can and started spreading it around the house.

THIEF, I wrote on one wall, with a newspaper dipped in the paint, STEAL THE CITY BLIND. LuEllen splashed out, YOU DIE PIGGY on another two, and CROOK-CROOK-CROOK. We wrote some more garbage, hitting every wall in the house and most of the ceilings. The last of the paint we poured on the living room carpets.

"Dump the can, and let's go," LuEllen said. We checked the street from the house. Clear. We ran the garage door up and back down and were gone.

"I've never done anything like that," LuEllen said. "It didn't feel that good."

"I know."

We both were private people. Maybe even pathologically so. What we'd just done to Dessusdelit was close to rape. There'd been a point to it, though: We wanted to hurt her financially, beyond stealing her little stash. We wanted her angry, and a little frightened, and disposed to flex her machine muscle. We wanted her scraping for cash when a big opportunity came along.

LuEllen dropped the three stones into a Ziploc bag and put them under the passenger seat as we headed back to the Wal-Mart. "How much?" I asked.

"No way to tell," she said. "Everything depends on quality. If they're a good investment grade, anything between thirty and a hundred thousand."

"Not so good," I said. "There must be more somewhere."

We switched cars at the Wal-Mart, moving to the Continental, the twin to Ballem's car. Next we checked the City Hall. The parking lot was still full, and this time Duane Hill's personal Toyota pickup was in the lot.

"So we got him inside," LuEllen said. "Hope the meeting lasts."

"There's a public hearing. Marvel said it should be a couple of hours at least."

Ballem's car hadn't moved from the spot in front of his office. We stopped at a second public phone on the way to Ballem's house and made the call. When there was no answer, I nipped the phone receiver, and we started toward Ballem's.

"There's going to be hell to pay about those phones," LuEllen said, tongue in cheek. "We're fucking with Ma Bell."

Two blocks from the phone a cop car turned a corner in front of us, coming in our direction. As we passed, the driver lifted a hand in greeting. The Continental's windows were lightly tinted, so I doubt that he could see much, but I returned the wave.

"He thinks we're Ballem," I said.

"He's supposed to."

We went on another block when we saw the cop car's taillights come up.

"He's turning into a driveway," LuEllen said.

"Quite the trick. He should be on The Tonight Show," I said, the sudden tension forcing out a bad joke. LuEllen paid no attention.

"He's backing out; he may be coming back this way," LuEllen said.

"Do I turn or keep going?" I asked. The cop car was two blocks behind us, then two and a half, and I picked up his headlights.

"Go straight. Let's see what he does. We've got nothing in the car-"

"Except your bag with the wrecking bar and the zapper. And your coke."

"He's got no probable cause." But she dug into a shirt pocket and took out a half dozen red coke caps. If the cops got too close, they'd go out the window.

"This is the fuckin' Delta, LuEllen. That's probable enough." The lights were still back there but not closing. Then they swerved, off to the side of the road.

"He was looking at something else," she said, the relief warm in her voice. "Let's get out of sight."

Three minutes later, we were at Ballem's.

"Love those fuckin' automatic garage door openers," LuEllen said as the garage door rolled up. She broke another cap.

"Christ."

"Shut up."

I'm always tense when I work with LuEllen, and the cocaine made it worse. She loved it, the rush of the work and probably, I was afraid, the rush of the coke. She'd have done it all for free.

"Have you ever done a triple-header before?" I asked as we pulled into the garage and waited for the door to roll down.

"Not exactly. One time I went into a players' locker room during an NBA play-off game and hit every fuckin' locker in the place. That was about a twenty-header. if that counts." The door hit with a bump, and we sat, listening, and heard the phone. "Let's go."

Ballem was not like Dessusdelit. Dessusdelit kept her wealth hidden, and we didn't know where. Ballem put it on the walls – some of it anyway.

"Jesus," I said when we stepped into the living room. The floors were wood parquet, covered with rich maroon carpets. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase held knickknacks and books and framed a group of black-and-white prints. "Those are real."

LuEllen squinted at the signature on a lithograph of a young girl in a bonnet. "Cassatt?"

"Yeah." I took one off the wall and turned it over. A framer's tag was glued on the back panel, dated 1972. "Ballem would've gotten a great price on them way back then. Now they'd cost you an arm and a leg."

"Take them." She was in motion, headed for the basement. "Women hide stuff in the bedroom and kitchen; men hide it in the basement," she said simply.

I took the etchings. They all were American, by Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, John Sloan, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, and even Stuart Davis and Mauricio Lasansky, which suggested that Ballem had either a catholic taste or an art investment consultant, I don't much care for black-and-white prints, but they all were good, and any one of them would pay for a year at Harvard. I was stashing the last of them in the car when LuEllen came back up. "We got a box," she said. "Come look."

The basement was half finished, with tile floors and painted cement-block walls. The ceilings were open.

"Over here," she said, and led me into a nook behind the furnace.

"It's not exactly a safe," she said, nodding at a foot-square steel door set into the concrete wall. A serious-looking combination dial protruded from the front of the door. "It's more of a fireproof box."

"Can you open it?"

"I don't know." She glanced at her watch. "We're at two minutes, forty-five." She walked away from the lockbox, looking at the tools hung on Ballem's basement wall, then around the basement in general. A moment later she ran back up the stairs. I followed, but by the time I got to the top, she was already coming back. She was carrying a maul and a wood-splitting wedge. "From the garage. I saw that firewood around to the side."

I followed her back down and said, "What?"

"Stand back." LuEllen lined up with the maul and gave the box a full-swing whack with the sharp edge. The blade didn't cut through, but it put a dent in it. The impact sounded like the end of the world, like a blacksmith pounding on an anvil.

"Jesus Christ," I whispered. "Somebody'll hear."

"Not in this neighborhood," she grunted, pivoting for another swing. "Everybody's got air-conditioning, and all the windows are closed."

She took another whack, put another dent in the box. "You do it," she said. "You're a big strong man."

"Fuck, LuEllen." Now I really was sweating.

"Hit it," she said.

I hit it. A half dozen blows distorted the door enough to see into it. LuEllen fitted the wedge into the seam of the door just above the lock, handed me the maul, and said, "One more time."

I hit it, and the door popped open. Breathing hard, I looked at LuEllen. She was standing with her arms crossed, waiting, not bored but not nervous either.

Inside the safe we found a leather-bound book of stamps, a freezer bag full of currency, and a metal box filled with American gold coins in sealed packages. The stamp collection wasn't much to look at – a few dozen fading squares of red, blue, and green, each in its own archival envelope. We took it all.

"Upstairs," LuEllen said. She looked at her watch. "Seven minutes, thirty-five seconds."

Ballem had an aging computer setup almost identical to Dessusdelit's. While I checked that, LuEllen tore apart the rest of the house. In the bedroom she found a collection of bondage and discipline magazines, both hetero- and homosexual, a new gun, a Smith amp; Wesson.357 magnum, fully loaded, and a flat metal box, like a safe-deposit box. Inside were a dozen gold Rolex watches, old but in perfect condition.

"We're killing this guy," LuEllen said enthusiastically.

"Good."

I was bringing the paint in from the garage when headlights swept the windows.

"Car," LuEllen said. She said it loudly, so I'd be sure to hear. I crouched and scuttled back into the house. LuEllen was against the front wall, peering out of a crack.

"It's the cops," she said. "The driver's coming up to the porch."

I heard him outside the door and slid over next to it. If he came in. I lifted the paint can above my head. I waited, and the doorbell rang.

LuEllen's face was motionless, pale, watching me from her window spot.

The doorbell rang.

LuEllen's face, pale like the moon.

The doorbell rang.

My arms were aching.

And the cop walked away.

"He's going," LuEllen whispered. Then: "He's gone."

"Jesus Christ," I groaned, dropping the paint.

"Fucking cops," LuEllen said. She picked up the wrecking bar, dashed across the living room to the built-in shelves, and smashed them off the wall. She was in a frenzy, moving around the room, breaking everything breakable, knocking holes in the Sheetrock walls.

"The paint," she panted. "Dump the paint."

She went through the house like a dervish, while I threw the paint around. THIEF. CROOK. SUCK ON THIS. WHERE'S THE CITY MONEY?

"Let's go," she said when the paint was gone. "Let's get the fuck out of here." She threw the wrecking bar on the rug, and I followed her back to the garage. At seventeen minutes and a few seconds we were out of the house.

"That's about the longest I've ever been inside a place," she said. Her voice was half an octave lower than usual.

"You sound a little. turned on."

She let that sit in the air for a minute, then said, "Yeah. I guess I am."

The last part of our trip took us to the edge of town, to what had once been a farmhouse. It was set back from the blacktop, along a twisting dirt track that ran between overhanging trees. We'd made the phone call and got no answer.

A black form crossed the driveway like a shadow from hell, and the hair stood up on my arms.

"Look at that," LuEllen said. "Jesus, look at."

There were three dogs, black and tan, pointed ears and noses.

"Dobermans," LuEllen said. "All three."

She rolled her window down a couple of inches, and the dogs were there, snapping, nobody to call them down. LuEllen reached over the backseat, got the steaks out, rolled the window down another inch, and pushed them out. The dogs were on them in an instant.

"Eat, motherfuckers," LuEllen said. She broke another cap herself. She wouldn't look at me while she snorted it. "Eat."

Outside, the dogs were starting to wobble. Dobermans, when they're in good condition, look semiskeletal, hard muscle rippled over a frame of bones, the whole thing held together by craziness and tension. When the tension goes, as it will when the load of barbiturates is big enough, the dogs seem to come apart.

"Let's go," LuEllen said.

I stepped gingerly out of the car and around one of the dogs. The dog could apparently pick up the motion because he made a weak attempt to react but couldn't get himself coordinated.

We were parked in the yard, just down the steps from Hill's front door. There was a light in one window, but no movement. From the porch we could hear the phone ringing. LuEllen shoved a pry bar into the door, threw her weight against it, and ripped it open.

"Whoa," LuEllen said. The house stank of spoiled food and cigars, an unwashed human, bad plumbing, neglect. Old wallpaper sagged from the plaster-and-lath walls, and there were water stains on the ceiling.

Hill had no computer. LuEllen went straight into the basement, while I went upstairs and began ripping apart the bedroom. Neither of us found anything, and we met on the first floor.

"Where?" she said, one hand on her hip. She walked slowly through the house, taking it in. There was no question of art; there was nothing on the walls but calendars and a couple of stuffed deer heads. I knocked the deer heads off, but there was nothing inside. I looked in the stove and pulled the drawers out of the kitchen cabinets. Nothing.

"Kidd. C'mere."

"What?"

"Look at this."

When the house had been built a century ago, a bookcase had been built under the first flight of the staircase. Hill had piled the shelves with junk; spark plugs; cans of two-cycle oil; a few paperbacks. LuEllen had dumped one of the shelves and pulled it out.

"They're too shallow," she said. "So I pulled the shelf out, and it looks like it's been cut down."

I looked at it. The shelf had been cut lengthwise with a power saw. Once it had been a foot wide or wider. Now it would barely hold Hill's few paperbacks.

"You check the other side?"

"There's a storage space on the basement side, but it's full of cobwebs, and there's an old wall. No way to get in. I'm thinking the stairs."

The stairs were carpeted with a wool rug that must have been nearly as old as the house. I looked at the bottom of it. There was a loose place, and I grabbed it and pulled. The rug came up with a ripping sound.

"Damn. Velcro," LuEllen said. Velcro tabs had been glued to the rug and floor, to hold it in place. The rug covered the steps, and when we started working on them, three of them came cleanly away.

Tightly wedged into the space beneath the stairs and behind the bookcase's back wall was a pile of ordinary plastic garbage bags. LuEllen pulled one out and dumped it. Cash. She pulled another. More cash.

"Son of a bitch," she whispered. "The mother lode."

We had the bags in the car in five minutes, stepping carefully around the feebly thrashing dogs. They were coming back but not quickly.

"Paint?" LuEllen asked.

"Fuck it," I said. "Anything we did to that place would be an improvement."

"All right."

We saw no more cops. LuEllen dropped me next to the Continental in the Wal-Mart parking lot, and less than an hour after we had pulled into Chenille Dessusdelit's garage, we were gone, out of town, up the highway to Memphis. We dumped the take at the Fanny just after midnight. The cars we left in a hotel parking ramp, keys under the front seats. Neither of us had taken off our driving gloves, so they'd be clean.

Back at the boat we counted the cash from Hill's safe. Three hundred and seventy thousand dollars, with bills that went back more than ten years. Ballem's coins made the total take much higher. There were sixty-five of them, sealed individually and certified by a numismatic rating service. She called a friend in Las Vegas and got a price: another two hundred thousand, and that might be low.

She was most interested in the stamps.

"Stamps are money if they're not too rare. You don't want a one-of-a-kind, where everybody in the world would notice the sale. But if you get stamps that are worth a few thousand dollars each – investor kind of stamps, like those coins are investor kind of coins – they're just like money. They're money everywhere. Fuckin' Bolivia, Bangkok, Saudi Arabia – there's always somebody who'll buy. Especially these – British issues."

"What if these are one of a kind?" I asked, paging through the book. "What if they're worth too much?"

"Fuck, I don't know," she said. "We throw them away, I guess."

She didn't know any stamp freaks but was hot to peg the values. I called Bobby.

Need number of philatelic data base

Hold.

Three minutes later he came back. He knew only one that was on-line twenty-four hours. He gave me numbers, code names, and patched me into an anonymous telephone line out of Memphis. The first stamp was worth thirty-five hundred dollars if it was perfect. To me it looked perfect. The second stamp was worth forty-two hundred dollars if it was perfect. It looked perfect, too. They all looked perfect.

"A hundred and forty stamps. Say, thirty-five hundred to four thousand each."

"Another half million," I said.

"All right," she said, satisfied. "And I've got a friend who can handle it all."

"What about the diamonds?"

"Another friend. He can sell them, but it'll take a while. We'll get fifty percent of face."

"I wonder about Dessusdelit. I don't think we touched her."

"Maybe we'll get another chance."

"Maybe."

LuEllen was examining the Cassatt lithograph, a sweet child from another age. "I don't know about the art."

"That's the problem," I said. "There's a worldwide registry of stolen art, out in New York."

"Dump them?"

"I won't do that," I said, shaking my head. "Let me think about it. I'll stick them in a safe-deposit box for now."

She nodded, looked at the loot scattered around us.

"This was a good job. Really good. I mean, it was great." She stepped over next to me, like a cat approaching a sardine. "A little tense maybe."

I got up and took a turn around the cabin, walking away from her. "So we're rich again," I said.

"I don't give a fuck about the money," she said. "I like the way I feel."

I looked at her for a while, then got down a couple of tall glasses, two bottles of diet tonic water, a jug of Tanqueray, and a lime. "I was afraid it was getting like that," I said as I cut up the lime.

"Why afraid?"

I passed her a drink and tried mine. It was tart. Very tart. " 'Cause addicts always get caught."