LuEllen started pulling blinds, and I put the deck, less the single card, in front of the mayor. "I want you to shuffle. At least seven times, and after that, as long as you want," I told her. She took the deck and began riffling the cards. When she was done, she placed it squarely in front of me.

"Do you want to cut it?" I asked.

"Should I?"

"That's purely up to you. Look inside yourself, and make a decision."

Dessusdelit closed her eyes, and after a moment her hand came out, groped for the deck, and cut it.

"Good," I said, picking up the deck.

"What'd you do to this ball?" LuEllen blurted suddenly. She'd been juicing it with the laser. When Dessusdelit turned her head to look, the crystal was fluorescing like a piece of cold fire.

"My God," Dessusdelit said.

"It just never stopped," LuEllen said.

As Dessusdelit turned, I switched the decks. The new deck was identical to the first but thoroughly stacked.

"You know what it is?" Dessusdelit volunteered. She turned back to me, her voice dropping to a whisper. "It's the tarot, focusing the energy in the room."

We all looked at the deck in my hand. "This is getting scary," LuEllen said. I agreed. Dessusdelit's voice had such a deadly intensity that the hair stood up on my arm.

I shook it off and did a spread. The Empress came up immediately, overlying the significator, the card that represented Dessusdelit. She grunted, and I realized that she knew more about the tarot than she'd let on. I rolled out the rest of the spread, and she grunted several more times, little under breath ummph noises. For the possible future, she got the Wheel of Fortune, upright, which generally means good luck; for the environment card, the Queen of Pentacles, which stands for success in business and the accumulation of property; and as the final outcome, the Ten of Pentacles, upright. The wealth card.

"Something's going on here," I said. "I've never seen a reading so consistent across the board."

I began the interpretation, and she nodded and then reached out to the spread. "But this." she said, tapping the future card. Death riding a white horse.

"I told you about the Death card," I said. "It doesn't mean Death; it means change. Usually welcome change."

"Yes, but it's a frightening image."

"Does the image strike you as particularly strong this morning? Did the image catch your eye, rather than the philosophical position behind the card?"

"Well."

"There are times when you must look at the image. You know, the tarot speaks on a lot of different levels. Sometimes it's on a mystical level that seems far beyond anything I can interpret," I babbled. She was listening intently. "On other occasions it's as simple as the picture printed on the card."

"It did seem sort of special."

Of course it did, with my implicit prompting.

"I don't know what it might mean, though," I said, putting new doubt into my voice. "A dark knight, a black knight, arriving on a white horse. That hardly seems to fit modern times – especially coupled with the wealth cards we see everywhere else. I don't know."

Jesus, I thought, am I overdoing it? Behind Dessusdelit, LuEllen was biting her lip.

I picked up the Death card and placed it in front of Dessusdelit. The room had grown tense, and Dessusdelit sat frozen for a moment, studying Death. Then, with a sudden release of breath, she pushed her chair back and stood up. Her eyes were wide and distant, as though she were stoned.

"Let's get some light in here," LuEllen said suddenly. She pulled a shade, and daylight cut through the gloom. "Boy, I've never seen anything like this." She looked down at her hand. "The crystal has stopped."

Dessusdelit leaned over and peered at it, nodded.

"I need a drink," I said. "Miz Dessusdelit?"

"No, no, thank you. I think I need to go home and lie down."

She looked one last time at the dark knight on the white horse. When she was gone, LuEllen looked at me and grinned.

"That was strong," she said.

"Yeah. I hope I don't get in trouble with the tarot gods for fuckin' with the cards." She frowned, and I grinned at her. "No sweat. Let's get out on the river."

The animal control compound was three-quarters of a mile south of the marina, at the far end of the town's small industrial district. Going downriver, we passed the tall white cylinders of a grain elevator with a barge dock, a series of warehouses surrounded by chain-link fences, a lumberyard, and then a stretch of empty riverbank, overgrown with brush. The animal control complex was the last sign of life before the river turned and slid out of sight. From the water we could just see the tops of the buildings. A couple of dogs were yapping, but there was no other sound except the boat motor and the water cutting around the bow.

"Goddamn it," I said. "I thought we could see in there."

"Why don't we go on down, tie off, and climb that little hill?" LuEllen asked, pointing across the water. A short, steep hill poked up just beyond the corrugated metal roofs. "We could take the glasses up with us, and we'd be looking right down on it."

"All right. Let's see if we can find a place to tie off," I said. We drifted down until we were a quarter mile below the complex, where the river began to turn away from the town. The near bank had been reinforced with concrete mats and made a decent landing. We tossed some foam bumpers over the side to protect the boat's hull, climbed the revetment, and tied off on a handy tree. A faint, twisting game trail rambled along the top of the levee, winding back toward town. We followed it toward the base of the hill, LuEllen in the lead.

Twenty yards down the levee she did a half hop and jump, blurted, "Jesus H. Christ," and took three hasty steps back toward me. "Big fuckin' snake," she said.

"Probably a garter snake," I said. "Sunning itself."

"Bullshit. I know garter snakes."

We eased up the path, and LuEllen picked up a stick and swept the grass on either side of the trail. A few seconds later we saw the snake again, sliding through the grass. It had a wide reddish brown head and brown bands across a thick body. The snake turned, froze for the blink of an eye, then uncurled into a tussock of dead grass.

"Copperhead," I said.

"Ugly." She shuddered.

"Poisonous. First cousin to a rattlesnake. We better take this slow," I said. "If there are copperheads, there could be rattlers around, too."

With the snake sighting, it took another ten minutes to climb to the top of the hill. LuEllen, a city girl, was thoroughly spooked.

"If they know you're coming, they'll get out of the way," I said, trying to reassure her.

"They're going to know we're coming," she said, using the stick to whip the weeds in front of us.

The crest of the hill was free of heavy vegetation, and though it wasn't particularly high, it rose above everything but the grain elevators. The view of the river was terrific, and a fire ring with blackened stones suggested that the hilltop was a popular camping spot. A dozen old beer cans were strewn in a small depression just below the summit, along with plastic bags and a rotting half roll of toilet paper. We climbed past the garbage pit to the grassy patch at the top and stopped to catch our breath.

LuEllen had turned to say something, her mouth half open, when three shots banged out below us.

"Jesus," LuEllen said, dropping to her knees.

The shots continued, a series of three, then a couple more, a measured pause, then another three. By that time I was kneeling on the ground beside her.

"Target practice," I said. "Down by the dogcatcher's."

Crouched, we eased across the crest of the hill down next to a butternut tree on the far slope. Duane Hill and another man were standing forty yards away and seventy feet below us inside a rectangle made by a chicken-wire fence. Two lumpy burlap bags lay next to Hill's feet. The second man, a short, balding redhead who ran to fat, was loading the magazine into a heavy black automatic. A.45, I thought. I put the glasses on him. I wasn't positive, because I'd seen only bad newspaper photos of him, but I thought it was Arnie St. Thomas, the city councilman who ran the loan-sharking business.