The Empress File

the cabinet, craning my neck until I could see. She went straight to the safe, sat for a moment,listening and watching the glass doors to the outer building, then stood, flicked on the light, and started working the combination dial. She hit on the third try, and the heavy door swung open. She spent a moment pulling drawers, dropped a white canvas sack behind her, pushed the door shut, twirled the dial, and came back to the closet. It took as long to lock the closet door as it had to open it. It took only a minute to put the stairway door back on and another minute to lock the door at the top.
    “Got it,” she breathed at me. “Jesus, stealing is better than fucking, you know?”
    “Thanks,” I said dryly.
    “You know what I mean.…” Her voice sounded full, awash with adrenaline or some kind of special burglar hormone. We listened for another minute, heard nothing but LuEllen’s breathing. Then she retrieved the rope; we recrossed the ladder and took it back into the store, hooking the hatch behind us.
    “This is the worst,” she said when we were at the front of the store. “This is where we really could get caught again.”
    “I haven’t seen any cocaine,” I said. The thought had just popped into my head, from nowhere.
    “I thought I’d try it this way, doesn’t feel too bad.”
    “So…”
    “I still want it.”
    “That’s the way it is, I guess.” I slipped two fingers under her belt buckle and pulled her up against me. “You’re more interesting without the coke.”
    She stood up on her tiptoes and kissed me on the lips, and it went on for a bit.
    “This
is
goofy,” she said, pulling away. “This is how you get caught. You forget for a minute.…”
    We’d be going back out into the street blind. A car rolled by. We were ready to go when the lights from a second one showed. It passed, and we went. Outside, she used the pry bar to slip the lock in place, dropped the bar in her shoulder sack, and we were on the sidewalk.
    I put my arms around her, and she pressed her head against my shoulder. Lovers, again, walking in the moonlight. We stopped once on the street before we turned down toward the car, to kiss and, incidentally, to drop the latex gloves in a brand-new Longstreet storm sewer.
    J OHN WAS waiting for the call.
    “You going?” he asked.
    “Just got back,” I said. I looked at LuEllen, who was stacking packets of twenty-dollar bills on the kitchen table. “It was smooth as silk.”
    “Jesus Christ, I’m starting to think Bobby wasright about you guys,” John said. “I’ll call Marvel. I’ll send her in.”
    “I’ll call her,” I said. “There’ve been some changes. I think I’ve figured out how it’ll go, all the way to the end.”

W E HAD TAKEN out one hundred thousand dollars in cash. After counting it, we put it back in the bag and stuck the bag in the
Fanny
’s engine compartment, where it would be safe from accidental discovery. The boat was now a floating time bomb; on board we had LuEllen’s burglary tools, the books from the Longstreet machine, a hundred thousand dollars in stolen city cash, and the murder photos.
    D ESSUSDELIT ARRIVED PROMPTLY at ten o’clock, and we cold-decked her. I almost, but not quite, felt sorry for her. She was as nervous as a hen, settling into the querant’s chair with a series of twitches and unconscious starts. She’d been up all night, rolling the crystal ball in her hands. The ball had been dead, she said as she handed it back to LuEllen, except for a few moments around three in the morning. For a few seconds then she thought she saw her mother again.
    “She seemed to be welcoming me,” Dessusdelit said bleakly.
    “Maybe that means you’re going to visit her,” LuEllen suggested ingenuously.
    “She’s dead,” Dessusdelit snapped. “I thought I told you.”
    “Oh… I’m sorry,” LuEllen said, covering her mouth in embarrassment.
    We shuffled the cards, and Dessusdelit cut them. LuEllen reached out and touched her arm and said, “You can keep the ball for a while if that will help you reestablish a channel.…”
    When Dessusdelit turned her head to reply, I switched the decks and started laying down the Celtic Cross. Out came the Tower or, as some tarots have it, the Tower of Destruction, symbolic of the wrath of God. The card shows a medieval tower struck by a lightning bolt, with two people tumbling out of it.
    “Things seem to be stirred up,” I said as Dessusdelit turned back. I tried to put