“Standard shit,” she said. “We can take it. We can probably use the power rake if we had to; there’s nobody to hear it.”

“All right.”

“We could do it from the boat. Wear some boots or something so we wouldn’t have to worry about snakes, walk back along the levee. Make sure there’s nobody up here.”

She was still looking through the glasses when a young black woman stepped out of the building door into the hot sunshine. She called to Hill, telephone, and Hill started back toward the building.

“Bring a couple more bags,” the bald man called after him. He shook the bag in his hand, and three more kittens tumbled out.

On the way back to the boat LuEllen turned suddenly and said, “I’m glad I saw that.”

“Why?”

” ‘Cause now I’m not going to feel bad about taking those motherfuckers out. Prison’s too good for those assholes.”

Back at the marina, we hooked up, and I called Bobby.

Any traffic?

Code word: Archball. May not help.

Why?

No auto-answer. Manual entry only.

Shit. How about the exchange monitor?

Set. Any call to engineer will ring here instead.

Probably tomorrow or next day.

We ready.

To get into a computer from the outside, the computer has to be on-line with the phone system. The Longstreet crowd, though, had a primitive setup: Instead of simply calling and getting right into the computer, somebody at animal control had to answer the phone, then switch the caller over to the computer. They probably didn’t intend it as a security measure, but that’s what they got. There’s no better security for a computer than keeping it unplugged and plugging it in only for people you know

“We’ve got to go in?” LuEllen asked, looking over my shoulder.

“If we want the computer, we’ve got to go in.”

“Let’s do it,” she said. “Let’s run down to that Wal-Mart, buy some boots, and go for a midnight cruise.”

“That’s a lot of enthusiasm,” I said.

She nodded, and I knew what she was thinking about. My cat is an old beat-up tom who roams the alleys and rooftops of Lowertown in St. Paul. One of these days he’ll be squashed by a car or killed by one of the river dogs. I’ll feel rotten about it, and so will LuEllen. She always worked solo and moves around too much to have a pet. But she and the cat get along famously, LuEllen lying on the couch, the cat on her stomach, both of them sound asleep in good fellowship. And I couldn’t get the picture out of my mind, that old tom making a run for it, Hill and his asshole friend shooting him down