The Empress File

off. “He’s always going up and down the river collecting stuff for his sculpture.”
    “Oh, yeah? He does river stuff?”
    “Yeah, out of water-worn glass and old bottles and driftwood and shit,” I said.
    “I’d like to see some of that,” he said, and he sounded as if he did. When we were out of the marina, I turned upstream. LuEllen wanted to keep on going to St. Paul.
    “Hill’s fucked,” she argued. “We send some pictures to the cops and forget it. Toss the gun overboard.”
    “The photos might not be enough if the cops don’t know where they come from. A good defense attorney might be able to keep them out of evidence. And we can’t tell them where we got them, unless we want people looking at
our
backgrounds,… But if they find the gun out at animal control… that’d seal it up tight.”
    “I’m getting scared, Kidd. We’re walking the edge, with Hill and the cops and everybody.”
    “I know. One more night, and we’re out of here.”
    A mile or so above town we cut through a side channel behind a sandbar. The channel was too clogged to go all the way through, but it got us out of sight of the main river. LuEllen tossed her burglary tools over the side, one by one, along with the case. All could be replaced, and she had not an ounce of sentimentalism for them. She held the lockpicks out; we’d need them at animal control.
    Her camera equipment I could claim as my own, if the cops searched us and asked about it. I’d say I used it to shoot landscapes. We still had the extra prints of the murder photos, the gun, and the jewels. LuEllen hid the jewels by cutting tiny holes halfway through the carpet in the corner of the bedroom. She pressed the stones into the holes until they were out of sight, but before they came through the underside of the carpet. Even if somebody lifted the carpet, the jewels would be invisible and secure.
    That left two sets of photos and the negatives. Working with gloves, LuEllen packaged the prints and wrote short notes, in block letters, to the county sheriff and to the commander of the statepolice district headquarters. The negatives she put in another envelope. We’d mail that to a reliable friend in St. Paul, an old lady who lived in the apartment below mine and who took care of my cat while I was gone.
    Finally, the gun.
    “There’s nothing we can do with the gun except keep it hidden,” I said. “We need to hide it only until tonight.”
    “What if there’s a reception committee waiting back at the dock?”
    “Then we’re fucked anyway, because we’ve still got the photos.… Look, the main problems are the jewels and the lockpicks. The jewels they won’t find, and we can throw the picks overboard if we see somebody waiting. We can’t dump the gun or the photos, but we can explain them if we have to. We say we were taking landscape shots from the top of that hill, saw the killings, and were afraid to do anything because we believed Hill was psychotic. Because we didn’t know the town, and we were scared, and because Hill was friends with all the cops—”
    “Sounds like bullshit,” she said.
    “It’s all I got,” I said.
    T HERE WAS NOBODY waiting for us. Even the marina manager had gone off somewhere. We stuck plenty of stamps on our packages and put them in separate mailboxes.
    As we were walking back to the
Fanny
, LuEllen asked, “Is there anybody in this whole thing that we haven’t lied to at one time or another?”
    I had to think about it for a minute. “Bobby,” I said finally. “I don’t believe we’ve lied to Bobby.”
    A FTER SOME ARGUMENT we decided I should go to the city council meeting that night, while LuEllen went to the animal control complex with the gun.
    “What if somebody wonders what you’re doing there?” LuEllen asked.
    “I just tell them I’m hanging out, that Dessusdelit was a friend. Shit, at this point I don’t care. Hill and Ballem will be there, if only to quit. But I’ve got to see them. If something went wrong…”
    “OK.”
    “I’ll call you from City Hall. If Hill and Ballem are there, you can drift the boat down, tie off on that wall. If it’s clear, you go in, dump the gun—put it up in the ceiling maybe—and get out. Coming in from the river, at night, you should be OK, if you’re careful about scouting it out.…”
    “I’d rather go without you anyway,” she said. “Safer that way.”
    “Yeah. And as soon as I see what’s going on at City Hall, I’ll cruise animal