Longstreet wasn’t that small. It was a city, with better than twenty thousand good citizens and a few hundred rummies, bums, and lowlifes. It was not quite big enough to have a real slum, but it did have Oak Hill, which wasn’t so much a hill as the back end of the white cemetery. The city also had a lot of middling and a couple of good neighborhoods in both the black and white areas and one upper-middle-class subdivision spread around the Longstreet Golf and Country Club. During our stay a half dozen people mentioned that two black families lived out by the club: a doctor and a veterinarian.

One thing Longstreet didn’t have was apartment buildings. Most of the town’s apartments were in the business district, above stores. That was a problem.

When we left the Holiday Inn, we went straight back to the boat and changed. Gym shoes and jeans. LuEllen wore a deep red long-sleeved blouse, and I put on a long-sleeved navy blue polo shirt with a crushable white tennis hat. When we got close to the target, I’d pull off the hat and stick it in my pocket.

We’d put the computers out of sight, but now I needed them and got down the portable IBM clone and a piece of gear called a Laplink. With the Laplink, I could dump the contents of one computer’s hard disk to the hard disk in the portable. The whole works fitted in a black nylon bag that looked like a briefcase.

“Ready?” LuEllen asked. She was carrying the leather shoulder bag I’d had the camera in. It looked better on her than it did on me.

“Let’s go.”

“Don’t try to hide when we get to the door,” she said. “Don’t look around; don’t get up next to the wall; don’t touch me; don’t stand too close to me. Try to slump a little bit. Look tired.”

“All right.”

The night was hot, and the flying insects were fluttering up from the weeds around the marina into town. The streets were well lit; we walked from one pool of orange sodium-vapor light to the next. We passed one man, a black man, who nodded and disappeared around a corner.

We strolled. Ambled. There were lights above the stores, and I saw a woman’s shadow on a beige curtain and, below the window, walked through the strong, acrid smell of home permanent. Metallica pounded from a radio down an alley.

“The problem with nights like these, where you’ve got apartments above the stores, is that people without air-conditioning sit in the windows, in the dark,” LuEllen said. “If somebody sees us go in, I hope they don’t notice that no lights come on inside

“

It was just after ten o’clock. The time and temperature sign on the Longstreet State Bank said eighty-three degrees.