John Sandford - The Empress File

"We'll call it in as soon as we get back," I said.

The run back upstream was depressing.

"How come we keep getting people killed, Kidd?" LuEllen asked.

"You keep asking, and I keep telling you: We don't," I said. "They get themselves killed. We're just unlucky enough to be around when it happens. Harold knew what he was doing."

"How about Sherrie?"

"I won't take the blame," I said. "Hill's a fuckin' psycho. Period. It's not us. It's them."

"I'll try to remember that," she said. And after a minute: "The money we took from City Hall – I think we're going to have to give it back."

"What?"

"When we were over at Marvel's house, she mentioned a couple of times what they could do with the money. Give some of it to the family of the kid that got shot – they've got a couple of more kids – or give some of it to Harold's family. She was talking like the money belonged to all of us."

"Huh." I'd planned to keep it.

"The point is, everybody knows our faces. And they know what we've done. Some of it, anyway. And so far you'd have a hell of a hard time proving that anybody else has done anything wrong. If we take expenses out – she'd expect that – and give them the rest and they spend it, then we've got something on them. I like Marvel, all right, but she's a politician."

"I see," I said. And I did, sour as the taste was.

A couple of miles below the Longstreet landing a sleek glass bass boat was goofing along the shoreline. One man was on the back deck; the other, on the bow. When I first saw them, I assumed they were casting. I didn't immediately look closer because a tow had rounded the bend above us, pushing a string of barges. The first priority on the river is to avoid the tows; they can't stop in time to miss anything that they're close enough to see.

We took the tow down the right side. When we cleared it, the bass boat was arrowing out from the shore on the other side, to intercept us.

"That's fuckin' Hill," LuEllen said. She put the glasses on the bass boat. "And that's St. Thomas up front. Bet they were looking for the bodies."

There was no chance of running – the Fanny was a pig, and the bass boat was carrying a big 115-horse Mariner outboard – but I pushed the throttle full forward. If we could fend them off long enough to get to the marina, they'd be limited in what they could do.

Ten seconds later they were on top of us, throwing off a fat, curling wake, the outboard's normally deep roar climbing toward a scream. Hill stood at the bow while St. Thomas sat behind the wheel, maneuvering to come beside us. Hill was shouting something, but with the two motors and the sound of the water breaking under the hulls, I couldn't make it out. I waved him off and kept drifting right, away from the bass boat.

When Hill saw that I wouldn't voluntarily let him come aboard, he shouted something back to St. Thomas, then stepped up to the edge of the bow casting-deck and crouched, one hand on the low gunwale to steady himself, ready to leap aboard the Fanny. He had a lump on his hip under his white short-sleeved shirt and when his shirt flapped in the bow wind, I could see flashes of gun-metal blue.

The Fanny had a rail all the way around and her deck was a foot higher than the low-riding bass boat's. Coming aboard could be tricky.

St. Thomas, his brow wrinkled in concentration, brought the bass boat six feet from the Fanny, then edged closer. I stepped away. He bored in again. This time, I flipped the wheel toward him, and the distance between the two hulls went from six feet to nothing. The bass boat was faster and more maneuverable, but the Fanny was bigger. If the two hulls hit, the bass boat would fold like a beer can. Anything caught between the two hulls would be crushed. St. Thomas flinched.

Hill had been tensing to jump. When I cut in, St. Thomas almost jerked the boat out from under Hill's feet. He staggered, swayed, caught himself, and screamed something either at Hill or at me, his face red with rage.

They came back in. This time they came an inch at a time. St. Thomas was watching me now, instead of the boat. If I moved the wheel, he was right with me.

Hill put his hands up to grab the rail and LuEllen was there, facing him across the rail. She'd cracked the boat's emergency kit and was pointing an emergency flare gun at Hill's chest from no more than three feet away. Hill reached back and I thought for a second that he was reaching for his pistol. LuEllen must have thought so too, because the barrel of the flare pistol drifted up until it was leveled at Hill's eyes. They stared at each other for a beat, then two, LuEllen's face as hard as a chip of flint, before St. Thomas flinched again. He took the bass boat to the left, paced us for a moment, then accelerated away, hotfooting it back toward the marina.

"Guess Hill wanted to keep his face," LuEllen said laconically, as she climbed up on top. "Wouldn't know why."

Hill was waiting on the dock when we came in. St. Thomas was up toward the top of the levee, hurriedly walking away. There were a half dozen people around, messing with boats, talking, coming and going. We nosed in, coasted, bumped, and LuEllen tied us off.

Hill walked down the dock and yelled up at me: "What the fuck you think you were doing?"

"What the hell were you doing?" I called back. "I thought you were going to sink us."

He was operating in the kind of blind rage that infects psychotics when they're countered. His hand went to his hip, but he wasn't actually far enough gone to pull the pistol with witnesses around. "I'll get you, computer man," he screamed. "I'll be looking for you."

LuEllen was watching him climb the levee when I dropped down to the lower deck. "Computer man?" she said.

"Somebody's been doing research," I said. "If they found out I do computers and suspect I'm with Marvel, then they may have put together the whole thing: the state having their books, John coming in, everything."

"Time to leave," she said.

"Soon," I said. "We're close."

Late that night we got the City Hall money out of the engine compartment, agreed that seventeen thousand dollars was about right for expenses, and took the rest of it to Marvel's friend's house in the country.

"We took expenses out," I told Marvel, handing her the package. "There's eighty-three thousand left. You can't give it back. That might jeopardize the case against Dessusdelit and St. Thomas, and there just wouldn't be any explanations."

"We've got some things we can do with it," she said. "Thank you. I mentioned to John that I thought the money should be for all of us, but he said it was yours."

John, who was lounging in an easy chair, shook his head. "It ain't right," he said. "You two are working an angle somewhere, but I can't figure what it is."

I shrugged. "You could just give us credit for a selfless act."

He looked at us for a moment, then said, "Nah."

Back on the boat I called Bobby:

Will tell John/Marvel about Harold body. Will call cops anonymously and give them IDs. Will tell John/Marvel you found body reports in data searches. Please back up if John inquires.

He came back:

OK. But need long talk soon.

He was getting nervous, thinking about friends and loyalties. I answered:

Yes. Tomorrow, day after. Soon.

The next morning I phoned the Bolivar County Sheriff's Department. Posing as a reporter for a Memphis television station, I asked a couple of airweight questions about bodies pulled from the river. A woman had been found, a deputy said, but hadn't been identified. There'd be no further comment pending an autopsy.

I called another meeting at the country place.

"It's about your friends, the ones you've been looking for," I said cautiously, talking to Marvel on the telephone.