“Doesn’t look like a float. Looks like it’s stuck on a tree.”

Sherrie’s body was hung up on a dead cotton-wood sweeper near the Concordia Bar Light.

“Jesus,” LuEllen said as we drifted up. The smell of decaying flesh was overwhelming. I had intended to tangle the body in a wad of heavy monofilament fishing line and tangle the line in some brush, to anchor it, but in the end, neither of us had the stomach for the job. Instead, we calculated the distance the body lay above the light and turned back upriver.

“We’ll call it in as soon as we get back,” I said.

The run back upstream was depressing.

“How come we keep getting people killed, Kidd?” LuEllen asked.

“You keep asking, and I keep telling you: We don’t,” I said. “They get themselves killed. We’re just unlucky enough to be around when it happens. 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’ve got 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.