"Whoa," she said.

"What?"

She turned back and shone the light on her own face. She was grinning.

"We're inside the clerk's office," she whispered.

"You want me to come?"

"No point."

She climbed down off the cabinet into the clerk's office. I pushed myself up on top of the cabinet, craning my neck until I could see. She went straight to the safe, sat for a moment, listening and watching the glass doors to the outer building, then stood, flicked on the light, and started working the combination dial. She hit on the third try, and the heavy door swung open. She spent a moment pulling drawers, dropped a white canvas sack behind her, pushed the door shut, twirled the dial, and came back to the closet. It took as long to lock the closet door as it had to open it. It took only a minute to put the stairway door back on and another minute to lock the door at the top.

"Got it," she breathed at me. "Jesus, stealing is better than fucking, you know?"

"Thanks," I said dryly.

"You know what I mean." Her voice sounded full, awash with adrenaline or some kind of special burglar hormone. We listened for another minute, heard nothing but LuEllen's breathing. Then she retrieved the rope; we recrossed the ladder and took it back into the store, hooking the hatch behind us.

"This is the worst," she said when we were at the front of the store. "This is where we really could get caught again."

"I haven't seen any cocaine," I said. The thought had just popped into my head, from nowhere.

"I thought I'd try it this way, doesn't feel too bad."

"So."

"I still want it."

"That's the way it is, I guess." I slipped two fingers under her belt buckle and pulled her up against me. "You're more interesting without the coke."

She stood up on her tiptoes and kissed me on the lips, and it went on for a bit.

"This is goofy," she said, pulling away. "This is how you get caught. You forget for a minute."

We'd be going back out into the street blind. A car rolled by. We were ready to go when the lights from a second one showed. It passed, and we went. Outside, she used the pry bar to slip the lock in place, dropped the bar in her shoulder sack, and we were on the sidewalk.

I put my arms around her, and she pressed her head against my shoulder. Lovers, again, walking in the moonlight. We stopped once on the street before we turned down toward the car, to kiss and, incidentally, to drop the latex gloves in a brand-new Longstreet storm sewer.

John was waiting for the call.

"You going?" he asked.

"Just got back," I said. I looked at LuEllen, who was stacking packets of twenty-dollar bills on the kitchen table. "It was smooth as silk."

"Jesus Christ, I'm starting to think Bobby was right about you guys," John said. "I'll call Marvel. I'll send her in."

"I'll call her," I said. "There've been some changes. I think I've figured out how it'll go, all the way to the end."

CHAPTER 14

We had taken out one hundred thousand dollars in cash. After counting it, we put it back in the bag and stuck the bag in the Fanny's engine compartment, where it would be safe from accidental discovery. The boat was now a floating time bomb; on board we had LuEllen's burglary tools, the books from the Longstreet machine, a hundred thousand dollars in stolen city cash, and the murder photos.

Dessusdelit arrived promptly at ten o'clock, and we cold-decked her. I almost, but not quite, felt sorry for her. She was as nervous as a hen, settling into the querant's chair with a series of twitches and unconscious starts. She'd been up all night, rolling the crystal ball in her hands. The ball had been dead, she said as she handed it back to LuEllen, except for a few moments around three in the morning. For a few seconds then she thought she saw her mother again.

"She seemed to be welcoming me," Dessusdelit said bleakly.

"Maybe that means you're going to visit her," LuEllen suggested ingenuously.

"She's dead," Dessusdelit snapped. "I thought I told you."

"Oh. I'm sorry," LuEllen said, covering her mouth in embarrassment.

We shuffled the cards, and Dessusdelit cut them. LuEllen reached out and touched her arm and said, "You can keep the ball for a while if that will help you reestablish a channel."

When Dessusdelit turned her head to reply, I switched the decks and started laying down the Celtic Cross. Out came the Tower or, as some tarots have it, the Tower of Destruction, symbolic of the wrath of God. The card shows a medieval tower struck by a lightning bolt, with two people tumbling out of it.

"Things seem to be stirred up," I said as Dessusdelit turned back. I tried to put the best face on it but let enough sickly kindness ooze into my voice that she had to know what I was doing.

Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times, and finally she blurted, "I've had some personal difficulties."

"That's what we're seeing then. But remember, the Tower doesn't always mean disaster," I continued with a patently false heartiness. "Remember when I told you that sometimes it's as simple as looking at the picture? One time I had an opening scheduled for a Chicago gallery. For me it was a big deal. I don't usually do the magical kind of tarot spreads, but I was worried about this opening; my career was in the balance. So I said, what the heck and did a spread-"

"And the Tower came up?" she asked eagerly. She was looking for reassurance, and since I had obviously survived the Tower.

"Exactly. Well, you can imagine how I felt. I even considered canceling the opening. But that was ridiculous. I couldn't do it. Food had been ordered, and wine. There were dozens of invitations out, including to the newspaper critics. Besides, I kept telling myself, it was just superstition-"

"What happened at the opening?" she asked, cutting me short.

"At the opening? Nothing. It went wonderfully." She allowed herself a small smile. "But before the opening. well, the question I had asked the cards was, 'How will my day go tomorrow?' Thinking, of course, about the opening. And I got the Tower. The next day I was eating breakfast, English muffins with orange marmalade. I was using a toaster to toast the muffins, and one got stuck and started to burn. When I thought about it later, I knew I'd been blindly stupid, but I wasn't thinking at the time. What I did was, I used a table knife to try to pry the muffin out. I got a terrific shock. Threw me across the room. My arm and hand spasmed for days."

Dessusdelit's smile slowly died.

"Everything was fine with the opening. The Tower was simply a picture that portrayed something that would happen to me. The card shows a lightning bolt, like the electricity in the toaster. I damn near electrocuted myself."

As I said that, the blood drained from her face. The state had the electric chair, and after Harold and Sherrie, it must have been on her mind.

"Could I look at your ball again?" she stuttered at LuEllen.

"Sure." LuEllen got it from its bag, and Dessusdelit rolled it through her hands. Nothing.

"No color," Dessusdelit said.

"Maybe things just aren't right," LuEllen said. "You've got to be able to focus. If you can't focus your mind, the ball won't have anything to react to."

"Goddamn," Dessusdelit muttered. I nearly dropped the cards, and LuEllen sat back, surprised. Dessusdelit's bony hands clenched on the table in front of her. Her mouth was running as though she were speaking in tongues. "We've got these goddamn niggers in town, goddamn nigger bitch, ruining it for ever'one, ruinin' ever'thing. Started happening when that shitheel dickhead cop shot that nigger kid trash fuckin' coon down on the tracks."

She rambled on insanely for a moment, then seemed to run down. She sat for another few seconds, staring blindly at her hands, then suddenly stood and walked out.