The Empress File

stared, and the pump stopped. “You think?” she asked in the silence.
    “Maybe they’re trying to find out who else knows.”
    “Jesus, no. I don’t believe it.…”
    “We fucked up,” I said. “We’ve gotta get to the car and call the cops.… Or maybe we can call them, Hill and St. Thomas. I’ll try to disguise my voice, tell them we know they’ve got Harold.”
    I was headed for the path down the hill when LuEllen whispered, “Wait… wait. Here we go.” She waved me back.
    The door to the animal control building opened, and St. Thomas stepped out into the sun and looked around. There was nothing to see but the van in the driveway. He was agitated,jerking around when a dog suddenly started barking from the cages. He walked around the building, checking, then went back inside. A moment later he and Hill came out, carrying what looked like a body wrapped in a sheet. Hill used only his left hand; his right was around the arm of a black woman, who seemed to be weeping.
    “Ah shit,” LuEllen said, shooting off a string of exposures.
    They carried the body to the levee, walking fast, looking around, then along the land side of the levee, down from the crest where you couldn’t see them from the river. They went along until they got to the revetment where we’d tied up the boat. Erosion had cut a little notch out of the levee just above the concrete slabs. They dropped the body, both of them breathing hard, and St. Thomas stepped up to the top of the bank and scanned the river. They were in weeds and brush up to their shoulders, and there was nothing on the water. When he was sure it was clear, they unwrapped the body, dragged it over the levee, and heaved it in the river. It sank almost immediately.
    With every step they took, LuEllen snapped another photograph.
    With the body gone, the two men climbed back down the levee to where the black woman waited. She was half crouched, talking fast. Wecouldn’t hear what they were saying, but Hill laughed and shook his head. St. Thomas said something to her, then stood and offered his hand, and they climbed back up the levee to the path on top, and he gestured into the river.
    “Telling her not to worry, the body’s gone,” LuEllen guessed, looking up at me.
    “No, keep shooting,” I snapped.
    She looked back through the viewfinder and triggered off a shot and then, without looking up, asked, “Why?”
    “Because they’re going to kill her,” I said. I started to stand, thinking to shout, but Hill, already moving, stepped up behind the woman with his hand extended. It was holding the black automatic that St. Thomas had used on the cats. The woman never saw it coming. Hill fired a single shot into the back of her head, and she tumbled down the embankment like a broken doll.
    “Motherfucker,” LuEllen groaned. She took shots of them going down the levee, pitching the woman’s body into the water, then coming back up. Hill was animated, laughing, and slapped St. Thomas on the shoulder. St. Thomas said something, and Hill took the pistol out of his belt, looked at it, and turned and pitched it into the river.
    “Shoot it,” I blurted. LuEllen was still looking through the viewfinder and fired a last shot justas the pistol hit the water. I tried to mark the spot in my memory and then said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here. If they even get a smell of us or decide to check this place out…”
    We ran back down the hill, down the road, and off onto the track.
    “They’d know the car,” LuEllen said, looking back toward the hill as we got in it.
    “They were a hundred yards away, and they’re both heavy guys, and they had no reason to run. Even if they’re going up the hill, they wouldn’t be more than halfway yet,” I said. I turned the car around, rolled it back to the road, and went out the opposite way.
    W E ARGUED about the killings.
    “We can’t tell anybody,” LuEllen said urgently. “I don’t want to quit, but I don’t want to get involved in any kind of murder investigation. That’d blow me, that’d blow you.”
    “We can’t just sit on it,” I argued. “They fuckin’ murdered them.”
    “So we handle it ourselves,” she said. “We did once before.”
    I thought about the two bodies and what would be the now-rusty guns piled in the unmarked grave in West Virginia. Yeah, by God, we had handled it before, and it made me sick to think about. Not that we could have done anything different.
    “I gotta think,” I said.