"What are they doing?" LuEllen asked, puzzled. "And what's that noise?"

The noise was an ooka-ooka-ooka pumping sound coming from the animal control building. I had no idea what it was.

"I don't know and I don't know," I said. "Target practice, I guess. I hope they're not shooting up here."

The sound of laughter drifted up to us. The bald man suddenly dropped into a Weaver stance and fired four shots in sets of two: tap-tap, tap-tap. After the second set he straightened and called, "Whoa-oh."

LuEllen said, "There's something down there."

"What?"

"There's something in the cage. They're shooting at something," she said.

I scanned the wire enclosure but saw nothing. "I don't see anything."

Hill picked up the bag next to his feet and carried it down toward the end of the enclosure closest to the bottom of the hill, unwrapped a string, and shook it. Three cats fell out. Two were small, little more than kittens. The third was a big old tiger-striped tomcat. The torn had a dazed, frightened look about it and slunk toward a corner of the pen.

"Goddamn them," LuEllen said in a fury. She moved a little away from the tree, but I pulled her back.

"Guns," I said.

Hill walked back toward the other man. When he was six feet away, he whirled, Wyatt Earp style. A gun came out from under the back of his shirt, a chrome-plated revolver, and he fired almost without hesitating. The first shot missed, but the second shot blew up one of the kittens. The second kitten froze, but the old tom streaked toward the opposite corner of the fencing and hit it about four feet off the ground.

"Come on, come on," I muttered. The cat crawled up the chicken wire, and Hill had swiveled to take it when the bald man let go with the.45. At the first shot Hill went down, yelling, but the bald man fired three more shots. The cat was climbing, almost over the top, but the third shot took it in the shoulder and knocked it over the wire into the grass just outside the fence.

"You cocksucker," Hill yelled back at the bald man, but the bald man was laughing.

"You like to shit your pants, Duane," he called.

"You fuckin' peckerwood," Hill shouted back, and he was laughing too. Then quick as a snake, he pivoted, stretching and going flat at the same time, landed on his stomach, his arms outstretched, and he blew up the second kitten with a single shot.

There was another bag by the bald man's feet. He bent over to pick it up.

"Let's get out of here," said LuEllen, ashen-faced with anger.

"Look at the locks," I said. I handed her the glasses, and she put them to her eyes. There was only one real building in the complex, though there had appeared to be more from the river. The other roofs we'd seen from the water turned out to be simple shelter tops, mounted on poles over a series of stacked holding cages.

The main building was constructed of concrete block, painted white, with a green steel door. Small dark windows with metal casements punctured the two sides we could see.

"Standard shit," she said. "We can take it. We can probably use the power rake if we had to; there's nobody to hear it."

"All right."

"We could do it from the boat. Wear some boots or something so we wouldn't have to worry about snakes, walk back along the levee. Make sure there's nobody up here."

She was still looking through the glasses when a young black woman stepped out of the building door into the hot sunshine. She called to Hill, telephone, and Hill started back toward the building.

"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.