"Yeah. I've got one, but I don't know how much money there'll be." I yawned, dropped my feet on the floor, and rubbed my hair around. "It's mostly a favor for Bobby. Maybe we can work something out on the money."

"Interesting?" She sat on the end of the bed.

"Could be. It's sort of like running a revolution. He wants us to help some people take over a town."

She crossed her legs and stroked a small white scar that dimpled her chin. "I'm so fucking bored I'll take anything."

"How's the coke?" I asked.

"I'm cutting down," she said defensively.

"Right." The skepticism showed in my voice.

"I am. I'm down to less than a gram." She yawned and took a long, deliberate stretch, just to show me that she was staying in shape. "So it's Chemise and who else?" she asked.

"Chaminade took a hike. I don't feel like being teased about it."

"Oops. Sorry," she said cheerfully. "But she was bound to go. You are an impossible motherfucker to live with."

CHAPTER 4

LuEllen spent the night on the sofa. When I wandered through the living room the next morning, she was still asleep. She was wearing one of my old T-shirts for a top and a pair of pink underpants. She had twisted her blanket into a coil and wrapped her arms and legs around it, like a kid climbing a rope. I stepped over to wake her, but at the last minute, with my hand already at her shoulder, I stopped, eased myself into an overstuffed chair, and just looked at her.

She was a burglar. A good one. She stole cash, mostly, because it couldn't be traced. I'd done some work in the same line, though I'd taken something even harder to trace than cash. Trade secrets – ideas, if you will. At first I thought there was a difference; later I wasn't so sure.

When she wasn't working, LuEllen wore hand-stitched ostrich-skin cowboy boots and too-tight jeans. Her shirts had piping on the back and little arrows at the corners of the breast pockets, unless she was wearing one of those little puffy white baby doll numbers that let the black bra show through.

She knew nothing about painting or computers, never made it out of high school. But she was intensely intelligent, a friend, and more than a friend. Sometimes we were in bed together; sometimes not. We tended to develop outside relationships, and we told each other that it was OK.

Maybe I believed it. But in the post-Chaminade tristesse, I was glad to have her back. Her legs looked great, not to mention her ass, and I eventually sneaked out of my chair, got a sketch pad, and started to draw. I laid out her body shape in a half dozen lines, blocked in her hair mass with charcoal, laid out the shadow beneath her waist, and stopped. I'd done this before, caught a sleeping woman unawares with a sketch pad. Sure. Maggie Kahn. Lying in the sunlight, on the bed in the Washington apartment, before the world started to come apart.

I was sitting there, staring at nothing, when LuEllen woke up. She woke like a cat, all at once, and spotted me.

"You've been drawing my ass, Kidd."

"I confess," I said. She rolled off the sofa and walked around my chair to look over my shoulder.

"Pretty good. But what I want to know is, Would you love me without the ass?"

It was a throwaway line. We dealt with each other with a careful sarcasm, with metaphorical pokes and winks. But with Chaminade taking a walk, and the hollow she left behind, with the flashback to Bloody Maggie, I was seized with an instant of what felt like honesty. I looked up and said, "Yeah. I would."

Our eyes hooked up for a moment. Her grin slowly faded, and a tear started down her cheek. "Fucking men," she said. She turned away, banged into the bathroom, and stayed there for half an hour.

When she came back out, we both were struggling to get back to normal.

"So what do you want me to do?" she asked brightly.

"I've got to pound on the computers. Bobby's shipping me more data than I can handle. While I do that, I want you to start looking for a boat. Something we can rent for a month or so."

"A boat?"

"Yeah. You know, one of those white plastic things with a pointed end? They hold out the water when you-"

"OK, OK," she said, waving me off. "What kind of boat? How big? What are we going to do with it?"

"A houseboat. Good-size. Air-conditioned. Something you'd tend to notice."

"You're going to live on it?" LuEllen has an oval face with dark hair, big, interesting eyes, and a few freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose.

"We're going to live on it."

"Down in Longstreet?"

"Yeah. Down in Longstreet."

I spent two weeks compiling Bobby's raw data into economic and psychological profiles of the individual city council members – the same kind of work I often do for politicians. Hill, the dogcatcher-enforcer, was a gambler and probably a loser. Dessusdelit and Ballem, though, were hoarders. I couldn't yet tell how much money they were taking out of Longstreet, but it was substantial. They couldn't invest it legally, because then they'd have to explain where they got it; none of it showed up on their IRS returns. Neither Dessusdelit nor Ballem had a passport, so they weren't personally taking it out of the country. They had to be stashing it.

Marvel talked to a man who worked for Ballem's lawn service and heard a story that Ballem collected stamps and maybe coins. Dessusdelit had been seen by another man in a Memphis jewelry store, and she'd been looking at unset stones.

"Stamps are great inflation hedges," LuEllen said. "Coins are not so good, but they're OK. Gold sucks, but it gives you some protection. Stones aren't so good either. But all of it stores value, and all of it is easy to move."

She knows what she's talking about.

Besides the research, I put in three hard hours at the Ramsey County Law Library. Every night I talked to John, Bobby, or Marvel.

"How much clout do you have with the black caucus of the state Democratic party down there?" I asked Marvel.

"Me? Not much. But Harold does."

"We may need their help. I'll get back to you. For now I just needed to know if you had any clout with them. Have you made any progress on finding the machine's books?"

"No, but we think you're right; there must be some. We have Xerox copies of letters on the sewer scam, and there's information in them that must be based on other letters, or files, or books. You know what I mean? You can infer the existence of the books from what these letters contain."

"Gotcha," I said. "When will I get the letters?"

"I gave them to John this morning. He was going back to Memphis, and he said Bobby would scan them in and ship them to you, whatever that means."

"I read an article in the Longstreet paper about the bridge. You mentioned it when I was down there. Tell me again."

She told me about the bridge. The bridge, she said, was the only reason the town hadn't blown away fifty years earlier. Now that it was gone, the city might go with it.

"Sounds serious."

"For people down here, it's desperate."

LuEllen caught me staring at the ceiling that night, chewing the eraser off a pencil.

"You have something?"

"What?"

"A plan?"

"Yeah. Maybe. An edge of one."

LuEllen found a thirty-six-foot Samson houseboat docked on the St. Croix River and took me down to see it.

"It's a fucking tub." I paced off its length along the dock. A huge tub, a shiny white, plastic behemoth, ugly, ungainly, and slow. Just what we'd need to catch the eye of a small river town. A diminutive American flag hung dispiritedly from a bent stainless steel rod on the peak of the cabin, to one side of a radar antenna. I looked under the stern and found the name Fanny inscribed in gold paint.

"Wait till you see the bedroom," LuEllen said.