“Oh, ye of little faith,” she muttered. I turned in time to see a blue Continental turning a corner a block away, followed by a coffee brown Chrysler. Neither was a year old. LuEllen held up a hand, as though she were flagging a taxi, and the two cars slid smoothly to the curb.

“Take the Ford,” she said. She picked up a black nylon suitcase that she’d carried up from the Fanny and headed for the Chrysler. I stepped into the street as the driver got out of the Continental, the car still turning over with a deep, un-Continental-like rumble. The driver, a heavyset, red-faced guy with no neck, a Hawaiian shirt, and zebra-striped shorts, peeled off a pair of leather driving gloves.

“Go easy on the gas till you’re used to it,” he said laconically. “It’s clean inside.”

That said, he walked around the back of the car, joined the driver of the Chrysler, and they strolled away down the sidewalk. LuEllen waved and got into the Chrysler. I climbed into the Continental, pulled on my own driving gloves, and spent a minute figuring out where the car’s controls were. Then I shifted into drive and touched the gas pedal. The Continental took off like a young Porsche. I never looked under the hood or figured out what LuEllen’s friends had done to the suspension, but you could have taken the car to Talladega. On the way to Longstreet I found a stretch of flat, open highway and pushed it a bit, climbed through 120, had plenty of pedal left, and chickened out.

“That was stupid,” LuEllen snapped. We were in the Wal-Mart shopping center on the edge of Longstreet, with a couple of hundred other cars. It was not quite dark. “A fuckin’ speeding ticket would have killed us.”

She was in her preentry flow, a weird state of mental focus that excluded everything but the job at hand. She would not be a pleasant woman to be with, not for a while, but she would be frighteningly efficient. “Sorry,” I said, and I was.

“Stay with the program, goddamn it.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s time.”

We took the Chrysler, as the less noticeable of the two cars. LuEllen drove downtown, taking the routes she’d scouted in her trip the week before. The city council was meeting, and two dozen cars were parked in the lot sideways across the street from City Hall.

“Chrysler,” she said, nodding. The mayor’s car was there, identical to the car we were driving. “I don’t see Hill’s pickup.”

“And I don’t see the Continental

“

“May be on the street in front.”

The Continental would be easy to recognize because it looked exactly like the one we’d left at the Wal-Mart. It belonged to Archie Ballem, the city attorney. We took a left, past the front of the City Hall. No pickup and no Continental.