"I gotta talk to Carl," I said urgently.

"Can I ask what this concerns?" The voice of a politician's wife.

"Well, uh, I just been talking to one of them state boys," I bumbled. "You better tell Carl to get his ass on this telephone, this is important."

Rebeck picked up an extension a minute later. "Yes?"

"Carl, I don't want to say who this is 'cause I could get in trouble myself. But you know me, and I know you, and I'm here to tell you, those state boys have got more than some money shuffled around. Somebody's got themself hurt. I don't know who, but they got homicide investigators comin' in. If I was you, I'd go have a talk with them state folks. Maybe you can get out while the gettin' is good."

"What-" he started, but I hung up.

"There," I said drunkenly, "that'll fix things."

"You need another gin and tonic," LuEllen said, and we fell around the inside of the cabin, laughing about Rebeck.

At four o'clock Bobby dumped to the computer and tapped the alarm. By that time we were sobering up, and the call to Rebeck no longer seemed like such a good idea.

"What the fuck were we doing?" LuEllen moaned.

"Shit, it'll be OK," I said, grimacing. I hadn't gotten loaded in two years.

When I brought up Bobby's file, I found a series of calculations based on current, channel shape, and flow that suggested that the bodies would be anywhere from three to twenty-five miles downstream. He listed a series of probabilities for each location but warned that "the bodies could have gotten hung up on something two minutes after they went in the water and maybe went nowhere."

On the other thing, he said, "I did Dessusdelit."

"Fuck it," I said to LuEllen as I crawled back up the ladder. "Let's go out on the water."

The marina operator was reseating planks at the end of the dock, working with a power drill, a couple of crescent wrenches, and a stack of two-by-sixes. LuEllen waved to him, glass in hand, as we went out, and he waved back with his own beer bottle.

We headed south past the warehouses, elevators, and the tank field, past animal control. There was nobody in sight at the complex, and at the revetment, where Hill and St. Thomas had dumped the bodies in the water, I put LuEllen ashore. She jogged up the levee path, watching the weeds for snakes, and peeked at animal control. Nobody home.

She came back, and we examined the last of the murder photos, the shot of Hill throwing the pistol into the river. I had no idea how much the lazy current would deflect something as heavy as a pistol, so we anchored ten feet above where it had gone in the water and began working with the magnet. LuEllen didn't have a great deal of faith in the possibility of finding it. I thought it was mostly a matter of patience.

I was using a muskie rod to cast with, with the magnet tied on instead of a lure. The magnet was heavy, but if I got my shoulders into it, I could toss it twenty-five or thirty feet downstream and then crank it back upstream to the boat.

And I found the pistol, just about the time my arms started to tighten up. There was a clank transmitted through the rod, and I said, "Whoops," and gave the rod to LuEllen and went back and eased up on the anchor. When we had the line running pretty much straight up and down, I slowly retrieved it. It was a.45. A good old government model from Colt. I detached the gun from the magnet, cut the magnet from the line, and threw it overboard.

"Why'd you do that?" LuEllen asked.

"I hate magnets. Damn dangerous things, around computers and software."

We spent another hour poking along to the south, scanning the banks for any sign of a shirt. Bobby's note said the shirt was what we'd see, since the decomposition gases gathered in the abdominal and chest cavities.

Nothing. I cleaned the gun as we went along, lubricated it with some WD-40, and put it back together. Good as ever. Some people like guns, some people don't, but you can't deny their quality as machines.

We hid the pistol with the money bag, down in the engine compartment; as the sun went down, we turned the Fanny's nose upstream and headed back. Five minutes after we arrived at the marina, Marvel called.

"They're going to quit," she exulted. "It's all over town. They had a meeting at Dessusdelit's house, and St. Thomas went home and told his wife. They're out of here."

On Monday Dessusdelit called at nine-fifteen. I was still asleep, and LuEllen crawled over me to answer the phone, then handed it over.

"I'm. I really need. some help. Would it be. could you come to the City Hall, my office? And bring your tarot?" She sounded ragged, desperate.

"Now?"

"Yes. Right away. You'll have to hurry. I've got a meeting at ten."

We took quick showers, then grabbed my tarot and LuEllen's crystal ball and drove up to the City Hall. Dessusdelit's office was in the city council suite. There was a secretary's desk in an outer office, a conference room, then a series of four closet-size offices for the councilmen, and a double-size closet for the mayor. A dozen people milled around the ground floor, outside the council meeting chambers, and a couple more slouched against the walls in the council's outer office.

The harried secretary said, "Mr. Kidd?" as soon as we walked in, and ushered us through to Dessusdelit's office. Dessusdelit was with one of those young-old people you find in corners around city halls, a guy maybe twenty-five, who'd seen fifty years' worth of corruption and showed it in the weary, overly wise crinkles around his eyes.

As tired as he looked, Dessusdelit looked worse. She'd aged ten years in two days. She'd tried to cover her distress with makeup, but now she looked like a painted puppet.

"Could you excuse us for a minute, Robert?" she asked the young-old guy. "I have to talk to these folks privately for a few minutes."

"What's happening?" I asked. "I saw the papers."

"There's been a serious problem," she answered. She glanced at her watch. "I have a question about your tarot. Must I ask you a question? Explicitly? Or can I just hold the deck and think a question?"

"You can do it either way," I said. "A lot of tarot readers don't believe the question should ever be spoken. I think it clarifies a reading, but no, you don't have to speak it."

"I'd like to try it that way if we could."

We couldn't cold-deck her, so I simply took the deck out of its box, unwrapped it, shuffled a few times, passed it to her, and had her go through the routine. She might be asking any of a number of questions: Should I quit the council? Where did the hundred thousand go? Will the murders be found out?

"You know, stress can twist a reading," I said conversationally as she shuffled the cards. "Maybe we should wait until you're a little more relaxed."

She stopped shuffling long enough to glance at her watch and shook her head. "No. It has to be before the meeting."

So. It had to do with the meeting. That most likely meant that she was asking whether she should quit, although I couldn't be sure how she would formulate the question.

"Don't try to formulate a precise question. Just let your mind settle on a situation, and let's see what the cards have to say about it. They're really not best for yes or no answers."

I rolled the cards out. We got a spread that could have meant a lot of things. Her eyes darted around like a bird's looking for a worm, past the Three of Swords, a deadly card, to the Nine of Pentacles, a card suggesting attainment, and finally settled on the Hanged Man. I tapped the card with my index finger.

"This is the key," I said in my most portentous voice. "It stands for sacrifice, giving up something held dear, to clear the way for greater gains in life. This is what I call a forked reading because you can see that the possible futures" – I tapped the Three of Swords and the Nine of Pentacles – "are wildly split. You're at the crux of a situation. If you make the sacrifice, the road leads to the Nine. If you don't, it leads to the Three."