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 again. He took the bass boat to the left, paced us for a moment, then accelerated away, hotfooting it back toward the marina.

“Guess Hill wanted to keep his face,” LuEllen said laconically, as she climbed up on top. “Wouldn’t know why.”

Hill was waiting on the dock when we came in. St. Thomas was up toward the top of the levee, hurriedly walking away. There were a half dozen people around, messing with boats, talking, coming and going. We nosed in, coasted, bumped, and LuEllen tied us off.

Hill walked down the dock and yelled up at me: “What the fuck you think you were doing?”

“What the hell were you doing?” I called back. “I thought you were going to sink us.”

He was operating in the kind of blind rage that infects psychotics when they’re countered. His hand went to his hip, but he wasn’t actually far enough gone to pull the pistol with witnesses around. “I’ll get you, computer man,” he screamed. “I’ll be looking for you.”

LuEllen was watching him climb the levee when I dropped down to the lower deck. “Computer man?” she said.

“Somebody’s been doing research,” I said. “If they found out I do computers and suspect I’m with Marvel, then they may have put together the whole thing: the state having their books, John coming in, everything.”

“Time to leave,” she said.

“Soon,” I said. “We’re close.”

Late that night we got the City Hall money out of the engine compartment, agreed that seventeen thousand dollars was about right for expenses, and took the rest of it to Marvel’s friend’s house in the country.

“We took expenses out,” I told Marvel, handing her the package. “There’s eighty-three thousand left. You can’t give it back. That might jeopardize the case against Dessusdelit and St. Thomas, and there just wouldn’t be any explanations.”

“We’ve got some things we can do with it,” she said. “Thank you

I mentioned to John that I thought the money should be for all of us, but he said it was yours

“

John, who was lounging in an easy chair, shook his head. “It ain’t right,” he said. “You two are working an angle somewhere, but I can’t figure what it is.”