A mile or so above town we cut through a side channel behind a sandbar. The channel was too clogged to go all the way through, but it got us out of sight of the main river. LuEllen tossed her burglary tools over the side, one by one, along with the case. All could be replaced, and she had not an ounce of sentimentalism for them. She held the lockpicks out; we’d need them at animal control.

Her camera equipment I could claim as my own, if the cops searched us and asked about it. I’d say I used it to shoot landscapes. We still had the extra prints of the murder photos, the gun, and the jewels. LuEllen hid the jewels by cutting tiny holes halfway through the carpet in the corner of the bedroom. She pressed the stones into the holes until they were out of sight, but before they came through the underside of the carpet. Even if somebody lifted the carpet, the jewels would be invisible and secure.

That left two sets of photos and the negatives. Working with gloves, LuEllen packaged the prints and wrote short notes, in block letters, to the county sheriff and to the commander of the state police district headquarters. The negatives she put in another envelope. We’d mail that to a reliable friend in St. Paul, an old lady who lived in the apartment below mine and who took care of my cat while I was gone.

Finally, the gun.

“There’s nothing we can do with the gun except keep it hidden,” I said. “We need to hide it only until tonight.”

“What if there’s a reception committee waiting back at the dock?”

“Then we’re fucked anyway, because we’ve still got the photos

Look, the main problems are the jewels and the lockpicks. The jewels they won’t find, and we can throw the picks overboard if we see somebody waiting. We can’t dump the gun or the photos, but we can explain them if we have to. We say we were taking landscape shots from the top of that hill, saw the killings, and were afraid to do anything because we believed Hill was psychotic. Because we didn’t know the town, and we were scared, and because Hill was friends with all the cops-“

“Sounds like bullshit,” she said.

“It’s all I got,” I said.

There was nobody waiting for us. Even the marina manager had gone off somewhere. We stuck plenty of stamps on our packages and put them in separate mailboxes.

As we were walking back to the Fanny, LuEllen asked, “Is there anybody in this whole thing that we haven’t lied to at one time or another?”

I had to think about it for a minute. “Bobby,” I said finally. “I don’t believe we’ve lied to Bobby.”