"Bring a couple more bags," the bald man called after him. He shook the bag in his hand, and three more kittens tumbled out.
On the way back to the boat LuEllen turned suddenly and said, "I'm glad I saw that."
"Why?"
" 'Cause now I'm not going to feel bad about taking those motherfuckers out. Prison's too good for those assholes."
Back at the marina, we hooked up, and I called Bobby.
Any traffic?
Code word: Archball. May not help.
Why?
No auto-answer. Manual entry only.
Shit. How about the exchange monitor?
Set. Any call to engineer will ring here instead.
Probably tomorrow or next day.
We ready.
To get into a computer from the outside, the computer has to be on-line with the phone system. The Longstreet crowd, though, had a primitive setup: Instead of simply calling and getting right into the computer, somebody at animal control had to answer the phone, then switch the caller over to the computer. They probably didn't intend it as a security measure, but that's what they got. There's no better security for a computer than keeping it unplugged and plugging it in only for people you know.
"We've got to go in?" LuEllen asked, looking over my shoulder.
"If we want the computer, we've got to go in."
"Let's do it," she said. "Let's run down to that Wal-Mart, buy some boots, and go for a midnight cruise."
"That's a lot of enthusiasm," I said.
She nodded, and I knew what she was thinking about. My cat is an old beat-up tom who roams the alleys and rooftops of Lowertown in St. Paul. One of these days he'll be squashed by a car or killed by one of the river dogs. I'll feel rotten about it, and so will LuEllen. She always worked solo and moves around too much to have a pet. But she and the cat get along famously, LuEllen lying on the couch, the cat on her stomach, both of them sound asleep in good fellowship. And I couldn't get the picture out of my mind, that old tom making a run for it, Hill and his asshole friend shooting him down.
The sun was still hanging up in the hot, hazy sky when we drove out to the Wal-Mart on the edge of town, bought the green gum boots, and tossed them into the trunk. We ate at the Holiday Inn, stopped in the bar, and eventually ducked back to John's room. He was alone.
"I set you up," I said. "Told Dessusdelit that her future involves a black knight on a white horse, bringing welcome change."
"The Beemer's white, and I sure as shit am black," he said. He stepped over to the credenza, picked up a film cartridge, and flipped it to LuEllen. "Hope these are good."
"I'll look at them tonight." She glanced at her watch and turned to me. "We better get going. It'll be dark in half an hour."
"So tomorrow-"
"I'll talk to Brown about the land option," John said. "I hope Bobby's ready."
"I just talked to him. He's all ready. Is Marvel ready to move?"
"Harold's got the capitol crowd fixed. He told them that some heavy-duty crime is going down, that big money is being stolen, that something could happen this weekend. If he comes up with enough specifics, the attorney general will send in the state bureau of investigation."
"On a Saturday? For sure?"
"Any day of the week, any time of day, on six hours' notice."
"Can we trust them?"
"I think so. Crime is just crime, and most of the time they probably couldn't give a shit. But this is politics. This is a deal."
We pulled out of the dock just as the sun was disappearing over the highest of the old Victorian mansions up on the hill. The marina manager was leaving as we unhooked, and stopped by.
"Midnight cruise?"
"Little romance maybe," LuEllen told him, rolling her eyes at me.
"Well, good luck with that." The manager laughed, and he watched as we backed away, into the current.
We took our time going downriver, floating, easy. LuEllen stayed below, in the head, processing the film. I let the boat slip below the animal control complex, riding downriver for a dozen miles or more.
I could live out there on the Mississippi, I think, if I weren't eaten by the worm of Art. I could live there for the names alone. Longstreet was the only big town between Helena, Arkansas, and Greenville, Mississippi. Just in that stretch of 120 miles, from Helena to Greenville, you roll through Montezuma Bend, Horseshoe Cutoff, Kangaroo Point, Jug Harris Towhead, Scrubgrass Bend, Ashbrook Neck, and a few other places where you'd like to hop off the boat and look around.
The last of day's light was dying in the sky when I brought the boat around, took it back up-river, and eventually warped it against the revetment wall below the animal control complex. I killed the engine and the lights, dropped onto the main deck, and hopped ashore with the bow and stern lines. LuEllen came up, carrying the boots, as I finished tying off.
"Better take some repellent," she said, tossing me a spray can. "The mosquitoes'll be fierce."
"How'd the pictures come out?" I asked as I sprayed my hands and rubbed my face and the back of my neck.
"Not sure," she said, frowning a bit. "Three frames look good. On the fourth, her thumb might be in the way. I can't tell on the wet neg, I didn't want to take the chance of scratching it. But holding it up to the light. we could have a problem."
"Goddamn it," I said.
LuEllen shrugged. "If we've got three digits and she's only blocking the fourth, it just means it'll take a little longer to get in. We might have to try a dozen combinations, but we'll get it."
"When can you print?"
"Tonight, when we get back. I can't do it on the river because of the engine vibrations."
The night was still warm, but we wore dark long-sleeved shirts and jeans and the gum boots instead of shoes. I carried my portable in its black nylon case, and LuEllen had a daypack over her shoulder. We walked without talking, LuEllen using her miniature flashlight sparingly as we moved through the darkness. At the bottom of the hill she stopped, leaned her face close to my ear, and said, "Wait three minutes." I thought she was going up the hill, but instead, we simply stood in the dark.
When your eyes adjust from light to dark, the night vision seems to fade in, like a black-and-white slide coming into focus. What was pitch-dark when you first come out of bright lights is suddenly nothing more than twilight. It works the same for your hearing, although most people aren't aware of it. When you stand stock-still in a dark place, the noises that once resided in the background suddenly come to the fore. You notice the roar of far-off trucks climbing a grade, the motors and air conditioners, the insects in the trees, the sound of the wind. Human voices are an absolutely distinct sound; even from a long distance, when you can't make out the individual vowels and consonants, the rhythm or the rise and fall of the pitch tell you that you're hearing another human.
We heard all the background sounds, picked them up one at a time. No voices.
We waited the full three minutes, and then LuEllen was moving again. I trailed behind. The track along the levee broke out of the brush thirty or forty yards from the animal control buildings. The main building, the white one, was thirty yards away, across an open stretch of weedy lawn. A gravel driveway came in from the other side but stopped short of the building.
We waited for another five minutes in the weeds just out of the cleared area. There was one exterior light, up on a pole outside the main building. No lights were showing in the building.
"Glad the kennel's on the far side," LuEllen said. She took her picks and a power rake out of her pack. "Let's try not to wake up the mutts."
We were absolutely exposed as we crossed the yard. If anyone was up the hill or anybody came up in a car, we were in the open. There was no point in being furtive but we were furtive anyway. LuEllen went straight to the door, tried the knob, found it locked. There was a window around the side, and she tried it. It was locked. She came back to the door and looked at the lock.