"If they beat him up, and if he's in obviously bad shape, we want photos of him coming out with Hill. Maybe we could yell or scream or something, they wouldn't know who we are, but they'd have to let him go."

"Jesus, that worries me. Our security could be fucked."

"Yeah, but-" It suddenly dawned on me what the sound was. Ooka-ooka. I half stood and stared down the hill. "Motherfucker."

"What?"

"That's the pump for the fuckin' vacuum chamber. I bet that's what it is."

LuEllen didn't say anything but just stared, and the pump stopped. "You think?" she asked in the silence.

"Maybe they're trying to find out who else knows."

"Jesus, no. I don't believe it."

"We fucked up," I said. "We've gotta get to the car and call the cops. Or maybe we can call them, Hill and St. Thomas. I'll try to disguise my voice, tell them we know they've got Harold."

I was headed for the path down the hill when LuEllen whispered, "Wait. wait. Here we go." She waved me back.

The door to the animal control building opened, and St. Thomas stepped out into the sun and looked around. There was nothing to see but the van in the driveway. He was agitated, jerking around when a dog suddenly started barking from the cages. He walked around the building, checking, then went back inside. A moment later he and Hill came out, carrying what looked like a body wrapped in a sheet. Hill used only his left hand; his right was around the arm of a black woman, who seemed to be weeping.

"Ah shit," LuEllen said, shooting off a string of exposures.

They carried the body to the levee, walking fast, looking around, then along the land side of the levee, down from the crest where you couldn't see them from the river. They went along until they got to the revetment where we'd tied up the boat. Erosion had cut a little notch out of the levee just above the concrete slabs. They dropped the body, both of them breathing hard, and St. Thomas stepped up to the top of the bank and scanned the river. They were in weeds and brush up to their shoulders, and there was nothing on the water. When he was sure it was clear, they unwrapped the body, dragged it over the levee, and heaved it in the river. It sank almost immediately.

With every step they took, LuEllen snapped another photograph.

With the body gone, the two men climbed back down the levee to where the black woman waited. She was half crouched, talking fast. We couldn't hear what they were saying, but Hill laughed and shook his head. St. Thomas said something to her, then stood and offered his hand, and they climbed back up the levee to the path on top, and he gestured into the river.

"Telling her not to worry, the body's gone," LuEllen guessed, looking up at me.

"No, keep shooting," I snapped.

She looked back through the viewfinder and triggered off a shot and then, without looking up, asked, "Why?"

"Because they're going to kill her," I said. I started to stand, thinking to shout, but Hill, already moving, stepped up behind the woman with his hand extended. It was holding the black automatic that St. Thomas had used on the cats. The woman never saw it coming. Hill fired a single shot into the back of her head, and she tumbled down the embankment like a broken doll.

"Motherfucker," LuEllen groaned. She took shots of them going down the levee, pitching the woman's body into the water, then coming back up. Hill was animated, laughing, and slapped St. Thomas on the shoulder. St. Thomas said something, and Hill took the pistol out of his belt, looked at it, and turned and pitched it into the river.

"Shoot it," I blurted. LuEllen was still looking through the viewfinder and fired a last shot just as the pistol hit the water. I tried to mark the spot in my memory and then said, "Let's get the fuck out of here. If they even get a smell of us or decide to check this place out."

We ran back down the hill, down the road, and off onto the track.

"They'd know the car," LuEllen said, looking back toward the hill as we got in it.

"They were a hundred yards away, and they're both heavy guys, and they had no reason to run. Even if they're going up the hill, they wouldn't be more than halfway yet," I said. I turned the car around, rolled it back to the road, and went out the opposite way.

We argued about the killings.

"We can't tell anybody," LuEllen said urgently. "I don't want to quit, but I don't want to get involved in any kind of murder investigation. That'd blow me, that'd blow you."

"We can't just sit on it," I argued. "They fuckin' murdered them."

"So we handle it ourselves," she said. "We did once before."

I thought about the two bodies and what would be the now-rusty guns piled in the unmarked grave in West Virginia. Yeah, by God, we had handled it before, and it made me sick to think about. Not that we could have done anything different.

"I gotta think," I said. "We can't just let it go."

"OK, but please, please, we don't tell Marvel or John what happened. We don't tell anybody. This is for us, man." She was looking up at me and it occurred to me how small she was. "An investigation would drag us out in the open."

"For us." I threw an arm around her head and tightened up in a wrestler's headlock. She wrapped her inside arm around my waist. Not your basic Gone With the Wind clinch, but it felt right.

"Bobby will talk to them, tell them he called us."

"So we tell them that we went out to Dessusdelit's house, saw no sign of Harold's car, so we just kept going," LuEllen suggested. "We looked around for a while, checked animal control, but there just wasn't anything to see."

"Jesus." I ran my hand through my hair. There was an impulse to go out on the bow, take off the lines, and head south. That was impossible now.

LuEllen looked at me closely. "Kidd, sometimes you have these. impulses. to do the right thing. You've got to keep them under control. There's not a goddamned thing we can do for Harold or that woman. Nothing that would be worth going to prison for."

"I'd better call Marvel."

"What for?"

I shrugged. "To start working both ends against the middle."

Marvel was frantic.

"I don't know," I kept saying. I suggested that she and her friends start hunting for Harold's car.

"You don't think he's hurt?"

"You know these people better than I do," I said, a sour taste in my mouth.

"All right. We'll get people out looking. Maybe I ought to go over to Dessusdelit's house, confront her-"

"No, no. Don't do that. If they have done something with Harold, you could be in trouble. Especially the way they've got the cops fixed. The best thing is, find him. Find his car. Figure out what happened. But don't do anything to derail the plan. If worse comes to worst, and something happened to him, it's more important than ever that we take the town."

It occurred to me that none of us was using the words killed, murdered, and dead. It was if something happened. if he's hurt.

The day dragged by. Marvel launched her search, while LuEllen processed her film and began printing.

"You want something to weep about, look at these," she said when she came out of the bathroom/darkroom. She was printing on RC paper to cut the wash time, and the prints were still soft and damp. She laid them out on the table like grotesque place mats.

The killings were graphically portrayed, as real as anything I'd seen from Vietnam, Beirut, or Salvador. She laid them out in sequence, from the time Hill and St. Thomas came out the door carrying Harold's body to the instant when the murder gun hit the river. If LuEllen had been a newspaper photographer, she'd have had a Pulitzer locked up.

"Christ, it could be out of the thirties; even the people look the same. Hill's got that haircut, those short-sleeve shirts."

You couldn't quite see the pores in Hill's face when he pulled the trigger on Sherrie, but close enough. If the photos ever got into court, they'd send the two men to the electric chair.