"Yeah. You know, I wanted to tell you." He looked as though he were going to dig his toe into the deck. "You know, thanks, motherfucker."
LuEllen and I were sitting on the hotel bed, and John was in a side chair, when Marvel and Harold arrived. John let them in.
"Whoa," LuEllen muttered. Marvel was wearing a V neck T-shirt and pleated black slacks. The whole outfit probably cost twenty dollars. On her it looked like a thousand-dollar Rodeo Drive production. She was carrying a white paper bag.
"Isn't she-" I started.
"She sure is," LuEllen said under her breath.
Harold was right behind Marvel, uncomfortable in a brown suit, white shirt, and brown-striped polyester tie. He looked like a magazine salesman assigned to the proletariat.
"Marvel, Harold," John said. "You know Kidd. That's LuEllen on the bed."
"LuEllen what?" Marvel asked, looking her over.
"Uh, just LuEllen," John said.
Marvel nodded. "All right," she said, and turned to me. "Did you figure something out?"
I'd told them bits and pieces on the telephone but saved the overall proposal for the Memphis meeting. If they turned me down, I'd take the Fanny to New Orleans with no regrets. Because whether or not they wanted the whole thing, they were going to get at least part of it.
"I think we can take them," I said.
Marvel walked over to the countertop that held the sink and dumped the bag. A two-quart carton of strawberry ice cream tumbled out with a box of plastic spoons. She picked up one of the half dozen hotel water glasses that were stacked on the counter, pulled off its cellophane wrapper, and opened the ice cream.
"How we gonna do it?" asked Marvel as she dished the strawberry into the first of the glasses.
"With superstition," I said. "Superstition, an old-time con game, and a little help from the governor."
We talked for two hours. When we were done, Marvel shook her head. "That's the most cynical thing I ever heard," she said. She got up and took a turn around the room. "Do something like that. how do you square it with any kind of ethical position?"
Harold was smiling in a nasty sort of way. "Fuck ethics," he said. "I like it."
Marvel looked at him in surprise, then took another turn around the room before she finally nodded.
"All right. I guess we're in. When do you start?"
I glanced at LuEllen and told them the first lie.
CHAPTER 5
We'd be in Memphis for a couple of days, getting some equipment and taking care of last-minute personal business, I said. Marvel suggested that we eat dinner together that night, but LuEllen vetoed the idea.
"We can't be seen with you," she said. "Even this meeting is risky. We're talking about felonies. If there's ever a trial, I don't want to be tied to you guys by a waitress or a bellhop or a maitre d' or anybody else."
"That's kind of pessimistic," Marvel said.
"I'm a pro," LuEllen answered. "I've never been arrested on the job because I try to think of everything in advance. If they ever do get me, I want them to have as little as possible."
The decision to attack the town had been a mood elevator. LuEllen's comments sobered them up, and by six o'clock they were gone. The minute they were out the door, LuEllen made a call.
Five minutes later we were standing on a curb along the riverfront.
"We're running late," I said. "If they don't show soon."
"They will. These guys are good."
"Better be," I said. I was getting cranked and turned away. Below us a string of barges was pushing upriver, driven by a tow called the Elvis Doherty. The pilot sat in his glass cage, smoking a pipe, reading what looked like one of those fat beach novels that come out every June. At the tow's stern an American flag, grimy with stains from the diesel smoke, hung limply off a mast between the boat's twin stacks. I was watching the tow, thinking that it would make a very bad Norman Rockwell painting. LuEllen was watching the street.
"Oh, ye of little faith," she muttered. I turned in time to see a blue Continental turning a corner a block away, followed by a coffee brown Chrysler. Neither was a year old. LuEllen held up a hand, as though she were flagging a taxi, and the two cars slid smoothly to the curb.
"Take the Ford," she said. She picked up a black nylon suitcase that she'd carried up from the Fanny and headed for the Chrysler. I stepped into the street as the driver got out of the Continental, the car still turning over with a deep, un-Continental-like rumble. The driver, a heavyset, red-faced guy with no neck, a Hawaiian shirt, and zebra-striped shorts, peeled off a pair of leather driving gloves.
"Go easy on the gas till you're used to it," he said laconically. "It's clean inside."
That said, he walked around the back of the car, joined the driver of the Chrysler, and they strolled away down the sidewalk. LuEllen waved and got into the Chrysler. I climbed into the Continental, pulled on my own driving gloves, and spent a minute figuring out where the car's controls were. Then I shifted into drive and touched the gas pedal. The Continental took off like a young Porsche. I never looked under the hood or figured out what LuEllen's friends had done to the suspension, but you could have taken the car to Talladega. On the way to Longstreet I found a stretch of flat, open highway and pushed it a bit, climbed through 120, had plenty of pedal left, and chickened out.
"That was stupid," LuEllen snapped. We were in the Wal-Mart shopping center on the edge of Longstreet, with a couple of hundred other cars. It was not quite dark. "A fuckin' speeding ticket would have killed us."
She was in her preentry flow, a weird state of mental focus that excluded everything but the job at hand. She would not be a pleasant woman to be with, not for a while, but she would be frighteningly efficient. "Sorry," I said, and I was.
"Stay with the program, goddamn it." She glanced at her watch. "It's time."
We took the Chrysler, as the less noticeable of the two cars. LuEllen drove downtown, taking the routes she'd scouted in her trip the week before. The city council was meeting, and two dozen cars were parked in the lot sideways across the street from City Hall.
"Chrysler," she said, nodding. The mayor's car was there, identical to the car we were driving. "I don't see Hill's pickup."
"And I don't see the Continental."
"May be on the street in front."
The Continental would be easy to recognize because it looked exactly like the one we'd left at the Wal-Mart. It belonged to Archie Ballem, the city attorney. We took a left, past the front of the City Hall. No pickup and no Continental.
"Ballem's got to be here for the bond hearing," I said. "Hill, we can't be sure."
"I thought he came to all these things."
"That's what Marvel said."
"I'd hate for her to be wrong this early," LuEllen said. We'd continued down the block past the City Hall. "Let's go around. Wait a minute. There he is. There. Ballem."
A man in a seersucker suit and a white straw hat was walking down the street toward us. He turned to look at our car as we rolled past. "Are you sure?" I asked.
"Ninety-nine percent. I saw him last week, on the street. His office is down this way."
We found the Continental outside Ballem's office, three blocks from the City Hall.
"If we could find Hill."
"If we don't, we'll call it off," she said. "But we've got the other two."
"We go?" I asked.
"Yes."
The phone company was a little redbrick cubicle on a side street, with a lighted blue and white phone booth hung on the side wall. We knew Chenille Dessusdelit, the mayor, was at the meeting. And we knew she was a widow and lived alone. But there might be a guest. We called her home, but there was no answer. With the twentieth ring LuEllen nipped the receiver off the phone with a pair of compact bolt cutters. The phone would still be ringing at Dessusdelit's, and with the receiver gone, it was unlikely that anyone would come along and hang up our public phone.
"Get the portable," LuEllen said. I knelt on the passenger seat, leaned into the back, unzipped her suitcase, took out the cellular phone, sat down again, and plugged it into the cigarette lighter. Dessusdelit's line was still busy.