Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  Dessusdelit blushed. “Well, I wouldn’t be… there isn’t anything—”

  “Could be something wicked this way comes,” LuEllen said. I jumped; LuEllen surprises me sometimes. She’d just quoted a piece of Macbeth, which later became a Ray Bradbury title. Dessusdelit obviously recognized at least the sound of it, and I wondered if it were the Shakespeare or the Bradbury.

  While Dessusdelit was mumbling over LuEllen’s suggestion, I thumbed through the deck and put the Queen of Cups on the table, faceup.

  “Significator,” I said. I glanced at LuEllen. “Would you pull the blinds just a little and kill the lights? I’d like it a little dimmer to help focus the concentration.…”

  LuEllen started pulling blinds, and I put the deck, less the single card, in front of the mayor. “I want you to shuffle. At least seven times, and after that, as long as you want,” I told her. She took the deck and began riffling the cards. When she was done, she placed it squarely in front of me.

  “Do you want to cut it?” I asked.

  “Should I?”

  “That’s purely up to you. Look inside yourself, and make a decision.”

  Dessusdelit closed her eyes, and after a moment her hand came out, groped for the deck, and cut it.

  “Good,” I said, picking up the deck.

  “What’d you do to this ball?” LuEllen blurted suddenly. She’d been juicing it with the laser. When Dessusdelit turned her head to look, the crystal was fluorescing like a piece of cold fire.

  “My God,” Dessusdelit said.

  “It just never stopped,” LuEllen said.

  As Dessusdelit turned, I switched the decks. The new deck was identical to the first but thoroughly stacked.

  “You know what it is?” Dessusdelit volunteered. She turned back to me, her voice dropping to a whisper. “It’s the tarot, focusing the energy in the room.”

  We all looked at the deck in my hand. “This is getting scary,” LuEllen said. I agreed. Dessusdelit’s voice had such a deadly intensity that the hair stood up on my arm.

  I shook it off and did a spread. The Empress came up immediately, overlying the significator, the card that represented Dessusdelit. She grunted, and I realized that she knew more about the tarot than she’d let on. I rolled out the rest of the spread, and she grunted several more times, little underbreath ummph noises. For the possible future, she got the Wheel of Fortune, upright, which generally means good luck; for the environment card, the Queen of Pentacles, which stands for success in business and the accumulation of property; and as the final outcome, the Ten of Pentacles, upright. The wealth card.

  “Something’s going on here,” I said. “I’ve never seen a reading so consistent across the board.”

  I began the interpretation, and she nodded and then reached out to the spread. “But this…” she said, tapping the future card. Death riding a white horse.

  “I told you about the Death card,” I said. “It doesn’t mean Death; it means change. Usually welcome change.”

  “Yes, but it’s a frightening image.”

  “Does the image strike you as particularly strong this morning? Did the image catch your eye, rather than the philosophical position behind the card?”

  “Well…”

  “There are times when you must look at the image. You know, the tarot speaks on a lot of different levels. Sometimes it’s on a mystical level that seems far beyond anything I can interpret,” I babbled. She was listening intently. “On other occasions it’s as simple as the picture printed on the card.”

  “It did seem sort of special.…”

  Of course it did, with my implicit prompting.

  “I don’t know what it might mean, though,” I said, putting new doubt into my voice. “A dark knight, a black knight, arriving on a white horse. That hardly seems to fit modern times—especially coupled with the wealth cards we see everywhere else. I don’t know.”

  Jesus, I thought, am I overdoing it? Behind Dessusdelit, LuEllen was biting her lip.

  I picked up the Death card and placed it in front of Dessusdelit. The room had grown tense, and Dessusdelit sat frozen for a moment, studying Death. Then, with a sudden release of breath, she pushed her chair back and stood up. Her eyes were wide and distant, as though she were stoned.

  “Let’s get some light in here,” LuEllen said suddenly. She pulled a shade, and daylight cut through the gloom. “Boy, I’ve never seen anything like this.” She looked down at her hand. “The crystal has stopped.”

  Dessusdelit leaned over and peered at it, nodded.

  “I need a drink,” I said. “Miz Dessusdelit?”

  “No, no, thank you. I think I need to go home and lie down.…”

  She looked one last time at the dark knight on the white horse. When she was gone, LuEllen looked at me and grinned.

  “That was strong,” she said.

  “Yeah. I hope I don’t get in trouble with the tarot gods for fuckin’ with the cards.” She frowned, and I grinned at her. “No sweat. Let’s get out on the river.”

  THE ANIMAL CONTROL compound was three-quarters of a mile south of the marina, at the far end of the town’s small industrial district. Going downriver, we passed the tall white cylinders of a grain elevator with a barge dock, a series of warehouses surrounded by chain-link fences, a lumberyard, and then a stretch of empty riverbank, overgrown with brush. The animal control complex was the last sign of life before the river turned and slid out of sight. From the water we could just see the tops of the buildings. A couple of dogs were yapping, but there was no other sound except the boat motor and the water cutting around the bow.

  “Goddamn it,” I said. “I thought we could see in there.”

  “Why don’t we go on down, tie off, and climb that little hill?” LuEllen asked, pointing across the water. A short, steep hill poked up just beyond the corrugated metal roofs. “We could take the glasses up with us, and we’d be looking right down on it.”

  “All right. Let’s see if we can find a place to tie off,” I said. We drifted down until we were a quarter mile below the complex, where the river began to turn away from the town. The near bank had been reinforced with concrete mats and made a decent landing. We tossed some foam bumpers over the side to protect the boat’s hull, climbed the revetment, and tied off on a handy tree. A faint, twisting game trail rambled along the top of the levee, winding back toward town. We followed it toward the base of the hill, LuEllen in the lead.

  Twenty yards down the levee she did a half hop and jump, blurted, “Jesus H. Christ,” and took three hasty steps back toward me. “Big fuckin’ snake,” she said.

  “Probably a garter snake,” I said. “Sunning itself.”

  “Bullshit. I know garter snakes.”

  We eased up the path, and LuEllen picked up a stick and swept the grass on either side of the trail. A few seconds later we saw the snake again, sliding through the grass. It had a wide reddish brown head and brown bands across a thick body. The snake turned, froze for the blink of an eye, then uncurled into a tussock of dead grass.

  “Copperhead,” I said.

  “Ugly.” She shuddered.

  “Poisonous. First cousin to a rattlesnake. We better take this slow,” I said. “If there are copperheads, there could be rattlers around, too.”

  With the snake sighting, it took another ten minutes to climb to the top of the hill. LuEllen, a city girl, was thoroughly spooked.

  “If they know you’re coming, they’ll get out of the way,” I said, trying to reassure her.

  “They’re going to know we’re coming,” she said, using the stick to whip the weeds in front of us.

  The crest of the hill was free of heavy vegetation, and though it wasn’t particularly high, it rose above everything but the grain elevators. The view of the river was terrific, and a fire ring with blackened stones suggested that the hilltop was a popular camping spot. A dozen old beer cans were strewn in a small depression just below the summit, along with plastic bags and a rotting half
roll of toilet paper. We climbed past the garbage pit to the grassy patch at the top and stopped to catch our breath.

  LuEllen had turned to say something, her mouth half open, when three shots banged out below us.

  “Jesus,” LuEllen said, dropping to her knees.

  The shots continued, a series of three, then a couple more, a measured pause, then another three. By that time I was kneeling on the ground beside her.

  “Target practice,” I said. “Down by the dogcatcher’s.”

  Crouched, we eased across the crest of the hill down next to a butternut tree on the far slope. Duane Hill and another man were standing forty yards away and seventy feet below us inside a rectangle made by a chicken-wire fence. Two lumpy burlap bags lay next to Hill’s feet. The second man, a short, balding redhead who ran to fat, was loading the magazine into a heavy black automatic. A .45, I thought. I put the glasses on him. I wasn’t positive, because I’d seen only bad newspaper photos of him, but I thought it was Arnie St. Thomas, the city councilman who ran the loan-sharking business.

  “What are they doing?” LuEllen asked, puzzled. “And what’s that noise?”

  The noise was an ooka-ooka-ooka pumping sound coming from the animal control building. I had no idea what it was.

  “I don’t know and I don’t know,” I said. “Target practice, I guess. I hope they’re not shooting up here.”

  The sound of laughter drifted up to us. The bald man suddenly dropped into a Weaver stance and fired four shots in sets of two: tap-tap, tap-tap. After the second set he straightened and called, “Whoa-oh.”

  LuEllen said, “There’s something down there.”

  “What?”

  “There’s something in the cage. They’re shooting at something,” she said.

  I scanned the wire enclosure but saw nothing. “I don’t see anything.…”

  Hill picked up the bag next to his feet and carried it down toward the end of the enclosure closest to the bottom of the hill, unwrapped a string, and shook it. Three cats fell out. Two were small, little more than kittens. The third was a big old tiger-striped tomcat. The tom had a dazed, frightened look about it and slunk toward a corner of the pen.

  “Goddamn them,” LuEllen said in a fury. She moved a little away from the tree, but I pulled her back.

  “Guns,” I said.

  Hill walked back toward the other man. When he was six feet away, he whirled, Wyatt Earp style. A gun came out from under the back of his shirt, a chrome-plated revolver, and he fired almost without hesitating. The first shot missed, but the second shot blew up one of the kittens. The second kitten froze, but the old tom streaked toward the opposite corner of the fencing and hit it about four feet off the ground.

  “Come on, come on,” I muttered. The cat crawled up the chicken wire, and Hill had swiveled to take it when the bald man let go with the .45. At the first shot Hill went down, yelling, but the bald man fired three more shots. The cat was climbing, almost over the top, but the third shot took it in the shoulder and knocked it over the wire into the grass just outside the fence.

  “You cocksucker,” Hill yelled back at the bald man, but the bald man was laughing.

  “You like to shit your pants, Duane,” he called.

  “You fuckin’ peckerwood,” Hill shouted back, and he was laughing too. Then quick as a snake, he pivoted, stretching and going flat at the same time, landed on his stomach, his arms outstretched, and he blew up the second kitten with a single shot.

  There was another bag by the bald man’s feet. He bent over to pick it up.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said LuEllen, ashen-faced with anger.

  “Look at the locks,” I said. I handed her the glasses, and she put them to her eyes. There was only one real building in the complex, though there had appeared to be more from the river. The other roofs we’d seen from the water turned out to be simple shelter tops, mounted on poles over a series of stacked holding cages.

  The main building was constructed of concrete block, painted white, with a green steel door. Small dark windows with metal casements punctured the two sides we could see.

  “Standard shit,” she said. “We can take it. We can probably use the power rake if we had to; there’s nobody to hear it.”

  “All right.”

  “We could do it from the boat. Wear some boots or something so we wouldn’t have to worry about snakes, walk back along the levee. Make sure there’s nobody up here.”

  She was still looking through the glasses when a young black woman stepped out of the building door into the hot sunshine. She called to Hill, telephone, and Hill started back toward the building.

  “Bring a couple more bags,” the bald man called after him. He shook the bag in his hand, and three more kittens tumbled out.

  On the way back to the boat LuEllen turned suddenly and said, “I’m glad I saw that.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause now I’m not going to feel bad about taking those motherfuckers out. Prison’s too good for those assholes.”

  BACK AT THE MARINA, we hooked up, and I called Bobby.

  Any traffic?

  Code word: Archball. May not help.

  Why?

  No auto-answer. Manual entry only.

  Shit. How about the exchange monitor?

  Set. Any call to engineer will ring here instead.

  Probably tomorrow or next day.

  We ready.

  To get into a computer from the outside, the computer has to be on-line with the phone system. The Longstreet crowd, though, had a primitive setup: Instead of simply calling and getting right into the computer, somebody at animal control had to answer the phone, then switch the caller over to the computer. They probably didn’t intend it as a security measure, but that’s what they got. There’s no better security for a computer than keeping it unplugged and plugging it in only for people you know.…

  “WE’VE GOT TO GO IN?” LuEllen asked, looking over my shoulder.

  “If we want the computer, we’ve got to go in.”

  “Let’s do it,” she said. “Let’s run down to that Wal-Mart, buy some boots, and go for a midnight cruise.”

  “That’s a lot of enthusiasm,” I said.

  She nodded, and I knew what she was thinking about. My cat is an old beat-up tom who roams the alleys and rooftops of Lowertown in St. Paul. One of these days he’ll be squashed by a car or killed by one of the river dogs. I’ll feel rotten about it, and so will LuEllen. She always worked solo and moves around too much to have a pet. But she and the cat get along famously, LuEllen lying on the couch, the cat on her stomach, both of them sound asleep in good fellowship. And I couldn’t get the picture out of my mind, that old tom making a run for it, Hill and his asshole friend shooting him down.…

  The sun was still hanging up in the hot, hazy sky when we drove out to the Wal-Mart on the edge of town, bought the green gum boots, and tossed them into the trunk. We ate at the Holiday Inn, stopped in the bar, and eventually ducked back to John’s room. He was alone.

  “I set you up,” I said. “Told Dessusdelit that her future involves a black knight on a white horse, bringing welcome change.”

  “The Beemer’s white, and I sure as shit am black,” he said. He stepped over to the credenza, picked up a film cartridge, and flipped it to LuEllen. “Hope these are good.”

  “I’ll look at them tonight.” She glanced at her watch and turned to me. “We better get going. It’ll be dark in half an hour.”

  “So tomorrow—”

  “I’ll talk to Brown about the land option,” John said. “I hope Bobby’s ready.”

  “I just talked to him. He’s all ready. Is Marvel ready to move?”

  “Harold’s got the capitol crowd fixed. He told them that some heavy-duty crime is going down, that big money is being stolen, that something could happen this weekend. If he comes up with enough specifics, the attorney general will send in the state bureau of investigation.”

  “On a Saturday? For sur
e?”

  “Any day of the week, any time of day, on six hours’ notice.”

  “Can we trust them?”

  “I think so. Crime is just crime, and most of the time they probably couldn’t give a shit. But this is politics. This is a deal.”

  WE PULLED OUT of the dock just as the sun was disappearing over the highest of the old Victorian mansions up on the hill. The marina manager was leaving as we unhooked, and stopped by.

  “Midnight cruise?”

  “Little ro-mance maybe,” LuEllen told him, rolling her eyes at me.

  “Well, good luck with that.” The manager laughed, and he watched as we backed away, into the current.

  We took our time going downriver, floating, easy. LuEllen stayed below, in the head, processing the film. I let the boat slip below the animal control complex, riding downriver for a dozen miles or more.

  I could live out there on the Mississippi, I think, if I weren’t eaten by the worm of Art. I could live there for the names alone. Longstreet was the only big town between Helena, Arkansas, and Greenville, Mississippi. Just in that stretch of 120 miles, from Helena to Greenville, you roll through Montezuma Bend, Horseshoe Cutoff, Kangaroo Point, Jug Harris Towhead, Scrubgrass Bend, Ashbrook Neck, and a few other places where you’d like to hop off the boat and look around.

  The last of day’s light was dying in the sky when I brought the boat around, took it back up-river, and eventually warped it against the revetment wall below the animal control complex. I killed the engine and the lights, dropped onto the main deck, and hopped ashore with the bow and stern lines. LuEllen came up, carrying the boots, as I finished tying off.

  “Better take some repellent,” she said, tossing me a spray can. “The mosquitoes’ll be fierce.”

  “How’d the pictures come out?” I asked as I sprayed my hands and rubbed my face and the back of my neck.

  “Not sure,” she said, frowning a bit. “Three frames look good. On the fourth, her thumb might be in the way. I can’t tell on the wet neg, I didn’t want to take the chance of scratching it. But holding it up to the light… we could have a problem.”