At ten minutes and ten seconds I rolled through the cul-de-sac a last time. I paused again at the end of Dessusdelit's driveway. LuEllen popped into the backseat, staying low, and held the door shut with her hand.

"Get it?" I asked.

"Yeah, but I don't know what I've got," she said. "It's the briefcase, but I didn't find it until about a minute before your pickup. She had it hidden behind some built-in drawers under the linen closet."

When we were well away from Dessusdelit's, she screwed the dome light back in and climbed into the front seat. We were sitting at a downtown stoplight when she dug into the briefcase and came up with a handful of small white envelopes, the same kind I'd taken out of the wall cache.

"More stones?" I asked.

"A fuckin' river," she said, dumping a glittering tracery of light into the palm of her hand. "Diamonds. Emeralds. Some rubies. Jesus Christ, Kidd, there's so many you could make a snowball out of them."

"So she's paid."

"Oh, yeah. She's paid."

CHAPTER 17

John walked down to the boat the next morning, just as we were getting up.

LuEllen had gone out to the main cabin, wearing only a pair of underpants and a T-shirt. I was sitting on the bed with my feet flat on the floor, suddenly bone-tired, when she called, apprehensively, "John's coming."

"What?" I stood up, pulled on my artist's shorts and a T-shirt, and padded barefoot into the cabin. John was at the bottom of the levee wall, just stepping out on the pier. I went out to meet him, shading my eyes in the bright morning sunlight. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with Beethoven's face on the front. He waved cheerily to the marina manager, then came right up to the boat.

"Hey, Kidd, how's the work going?" he called in a voice loud enough for the manager to hear. He scrambled aboard, and we shook hands.

"I'm John Smith, Memphis artist," he said quietly. He was sweating harder than seemed necessary, even with the heat. "We need to talk. I didn't think you could risk coming to Marvel's, and we don't have time to go out in the country."

"Come on inside," I said.

"Bizarre shit," John said as soon as the door was shut. "Did you hear about Dessusdelit?"

"What about her?"

"She's dead. The cops think it was suicide. Last night."

LuEllen stared at me, deadpan.

"Jesus Christ," I said. "Do you know anything else?"

"They found her in bed, wearing a pink nightgown. She took a bunch of pills and whiskey, I guess. There was a note, but I don't know what it said. The cops are talking to Ballem, I know that."

"What about the meeting tonight?"

"That's still on, as far as I know, but I thought you needed to hear about Dessusdelit, and I was afraid to call on the phone. Quite a few people know she was seeing you, getting her cards read."

"You think the cops are coming here?"

"I don't know. I don't know what the note said."

"Jesus."

"Time to go," LuEllen said when John left.

"We can't now," I said. "If the cops want to talk to us, we've got to be here. If we take off and they come looking for us."

"What a fuckin' mess. We did another one," LuEllen said.

"How're you gonna know?" I said. "Assholes aren't supposed to kill themselves."

"We've got to clean the boat out," she said. "If they go through it, they'll find my tools."

We decided to go out on the river.

"That was an artist guy from Memphis, haven't seen him in years," I told the manager as we cast off. "He's always going up and down the river collecting stuff for his sculpture."

"Oh, yeah? He does river stuff?"

"Yeah, out of water-worn glass and old bottles and driftwood and shit," I said.

"I'd like to see some of that," he said, and he sounded as if he did. When we were out of the marina, I turned upstream. LuEllen wanted to keep on going to St. Paul.

"Hill's fucked," she argued. "We send some pictures to the cops and forget it. Toss the gun overboard."

"The photos might not be enough if the cops don't know where they come from. A good defense attorney might be able to keep them out of evidence. And we can't tell them where we got them, unless we want people looking at our backgrounds. But if they find the gun out at animal control. that'd seal it up tight."

"I'm getting scared, Kidd. We're walking the edge, with Hill and the cops and everybody."

"I know. One more night, and we're out of here."

A mile or so above town we cut through a side channel behind a sandbar. The channel was too clogged to go all the way through, but it got us out of sight of the main river. LuEllen tossed her burglary tools over the side, one by one, along with the case. All could be replaced, and she had not an ounce of sentimentalism for them. She held the lockpicks out; we'd need them at animal control.

Her camera equipment I could claim as my own, if the cops searched us and asked about it. I'd say I used it to shoot landscapes. We still had the extra prints of the murder photos, the gun, and the jewels. LuEllen hid the jewels by cutting tiny holes halfway through the carpet in the corner of the bedroom. She pressed the stones into the holes until they were out of sight, but before they came through the underside of the carpet. Even if somebody lifted the carpet, the jewels would be invisible and secure.

That left two sets of photos and the negatives. Working with gloves, LuEllen packaged the prints and wrote short notes, in block letters, to the county sheriff and to the commander of the state police district headquarters. The negatives she put in another envelope. We'd mail that to a reliable friend in St. Paul, an old lady who lived in the apartment below mine and who took care of my cat while I was gone.

Finally, the gun.

"There's nothing we can do with the gun except keep it hidden," I said. "We need to hide it only until tonight."

"What if there's a reception committee waiting back at the dock?"

"Then we're fucked anyway, because we've still got the photos. Look, the main problems are the jewels and the lockpicks. The jewels they won't find, and we can throw the picks overboard if we see somebody waiting. We can't dump the gun or the photos, but we can explain them if we have to. We say we were taking landscape shots from the top of that hill, saw the killings, and were afraid to do anything because we believed Hill was psychotic. Because we didn't know the town, and we were scared, and because Hill was friends with all the cops-"

"Sounds like bullshit," she said.

"It's all I got," I said.

There was nobody waiting for us. Even the marina manager had gone off somewhere. We stuck plenty of stamps on our packages and put them in separate mailboxes.

As we were walking back to the Fanny, LuEllen asked, "Is there anybody in this whole thing that we haven't lied to at one time or another?"

I had to think about it for a minute. "Bobby," I said finally. "I don't believe we've lied to Bobby."

After some argument we decided I should go to the city council meeting that night, while LuEllen went to the animal control complex with the gun.

"What if somebody wonders what you're doing there?" LuEllen asked.

"I just tell them I'm hanging out, that Dessusdelit was a friend. Shit, at this point I don't care. Hill and Ballem will be there, if only to quit. But I've got to see them. If something went wrong."

"OK."

"I'll call you from City Hall. If Hill and Ballem are there, you can drift the boat down, tie off on that wall. If it's clear, you go in, dump the gun – put it up in the ceiling maybe – and get out. Coming in from the river, at night, you should be OK, if you're careful about scouting it out."

"I'd rather go without you anyway," she said. "Safer that way."