The Empress File

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’vegot 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 behindthe 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 fromunder 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