“We’re getting ready to leave. We’re about done, but I’ll tell you what. You better get back here quick if Brooking Davis and Reverend Dodge are going to elect you to the council. Hill and Ballem will most likely quit this afternoon.”

“What’d you do to them?” she asked.

“Squeezed them,” I said.

“With Harold and Sherrie?” she asked.

“Look,” I said, “I didn’t want anybody to get hurt, but some people got hurt anyway. We’re using Harold as a little extra encouragement for Hill to leave, above and beyond the computer material. That’s all.”

She was no longer sure of me, and her face showed it.

“If you manipulated Harold

“

“You know what happened to Harold,” I said harshly, “because you sent him. We aren’t playing fuckin’ Ping-Pong here. We’re ruining some people’s lives, and they are hard people. They’ll fight back.”

“If I’d known

“

“Nobody can know,” I said. I looked at John. “You keep her close. Hill, Ballem, and the others, St. Thomas, are in a pressure cooker. Hill’s a psycho. I can’t predict what he’ll do.”

I stopped at a supermarket on the edge of town and stocked up with sandwich meat, bread, soup, pasta, cereal, and milk for the run upriver. When I got back to the boat, LuEllen was waiting. So was Dessusdelit.

“Mr. Kidd,” she said as I stepped aboard.

“Miz Dessusdelit. What can I do for you?”

“You know about our troubles?”

“Yes, after our talk

and I was at the meeting

“

“Our animal control officer, Duane Hill-“

“I know him.”

“He believes you have something to do with it, that I’ve been a fool with these tarot readings, with the crystal ball.”

She sounded like a magnolia, her voice slow and dreamy, something out of a Tennessee Williams play, like Blanche

And she was pleading.

“That’s bullshit, if you’ll pardon the expression. You know about my history with Hill?”

“I believe there was some kind of confrontation on the river.”

“It goes farther back than that. He attacked me, for no reason at all, outside the Holiday Inn. He was drunk. Actually he called LuEllen a rather unacceptable four-letter word, which I won’t repeat, and I was forced to respond. There was a fight, and he lost. Then Mr. Bell intervened and sent him on his way. Ever since then he has been watching me, and yesterday he tried to run us down with a speedboat and board our yacht. I believe he was carrying a gun. Personally, Miz Dessusdelit, I think he’s crazy.”

“He says you’re in league with a local Communist, a Negro woman-“