The Empress File (13 page)

"Well..."

"There are times when you must look at the image. You know, the tarot speaks on a lot of different levels. Sometimes it's on a mystical level that seems far beyond anything I can interpret," I babbled. She was listening intently. "On other occasions it's as simple as the picture printed on the card."

"It did seem sort of special..."

Of course it did, with my implicit prompting.

"I don't know what it might mean, though," I said, putting new doubt into my voice. "A dark knight, a black knight, arriving on a white horse. That hardly seems to fit modern times - especially coupled with the wealth cards we see everywhere else. I don't know."

Jesus, I thought, am I overdoing it? Behind Dessusdelit, LuEllen was biting her lip.

I picked up the Death card and placed it in front of Dessusdelit. The room had grown tense, and Dessusdelit sat frozen for a moment, studying Death. Then, with a sudden release of breath, she pushed her chair back and stood up. Her eyes were wide and distant, as though she were stoned.

"Let's get some light in here," LuEllen said suddenly. She pulled a shade, and daylight cut through the gloom. "Boy, I've never seen anything like this." She looked down at her hand. "The crystal has stopped."

Dessusdelit leaned over and peered at it, nodded.

"I need a drink," I said. "Miz Dessusdelit?"

"No, no, thank you. I think I need to go home and lie down..."

She looked one last time at the dark knight on the white horse. When she was gone, LuEllen looked at me and grinned.

"That was strong," she said.

"Yeah. I hope I don't get in trouble with the tarot gods for fuckin' with the cards." She frowned, and I grinned at her. "No sweat. Let's get out on the river."

The animal control compound was three-quarters of a mile south of the marina, at the far end of the town's small industrial district. Going downriver, we passed the tall white cylinders of a grain elevator with a barge dock, a series of warehouses surrounded by chain-link fences, a lumberyard, and then a stretch of empty riverbank, overgrown with brush. The animal control complex was the last sign of life before the river turned and slid out of sight. From the water we could just see the tops of the buildings. A couple of dogs were yapping, but there was no other sound except the boat motor and the water cutting around the bow.

"Goddamn it," I said. "I thought we could see in there."

"Why don't we go on down, tie off, and climb that little hill?" LuEllen asked, pointing across the water. A short, steep hill poked up just beyond the corrugated metal roofs. "We could take the glasses up with us, and we'd be looking right down on it."

"All right. Let's see if we can find a place to tie off," I said. We drifted down until we were a quarter mile below the complex, where the river began to turn away from the town. The near bank had been reinforced with concrete mats and made a decent landing. We tossed some foam bumpers over the side to protect the boat's hull, climbed the revetment, and tied off on a handy tree. A faint, twisting game trail rambled along the top of the levee, winding back toward town. We followed it toward the base of the hill, LuEllen in the lead.

Twenty yards down the levee she did a half hop and jump, blurted, "Jesus H. Christ," and took three hasty steps back toward me. "Big fuckin' snake," she said.

"Probably a garter snake," I said. "Sunning itself."

"Bullshit. I know garter snakes."

We eased up the path, and LuEllen picked up a stick and swept the grass on either side of the trail. A few seconds later we saw the snake again, sliding through the grass. It had a wide reddish brown head and brown bands across a thick body. The snake turned, froze for the blink of an eye, then uncurled into a tussock of dead grass.

"Copperhead," I said.

"Ugly." She shuddered.

"Poisonous. First cousin to a rattlesnake. We better take this slow," I said. "If there are copperheads, there could be rattlers around, too."

With the snake sighting, it took another ten minutes to climb to the top of the hill. LuEllen, a city girl, was thoroughly spooked.

"If they know you're coming, they'll get out of the way," I said, trying to reassure her.

"They're going to know we're coming," she said, using the stick to whip the weeds in front of us.

The crest of the hill was free of heavy vegetation, and though it wasn't particularly high, it rose above everything but the grain elevators. The view of the river was terrific, and a fire ring with blackened stones suggested that the hilltop was a popular camping spot. A dozen old beer cans were strewn in a small depression just below the summit, along with plastic bags and a rotting half roll of toilet paper. We climbed past the garbage pit to the grassy patch at the top and stopped to catch our breath.

LuEllen had turned to say something, her mouth half open, when three shots banged out below us.

"Jesus," LuEllen said, dropping to her knees.

The shots continued, a series of three, then a couple more, a measured pause, then another three. By that time I was kneeling on the ground beside her.

"Target practice," I said. "Down by the dogcatcher's."

Crouched, we eased across the crest of the hill down next to a butternut tree on the far slope. Duane Hill and another man were standing forty yards away and seventy feet below us inside a rectangle made by a chicken-wire fence. Two lumpy burlap bags lay next to Hill's feet. The second man, a short, balding redhead who ran to fat, was loading the magazine into a heavy black automatic. A .45, I thought. I put the glasses on him. I wasn't positive, because I'd seen only bad newspaper photos of him, but I thought it was Arnie St. Thomas, the city councilman who ran the loan-sharking business.

"What are they doing?" LuEllen asked, puzzled. "And what's that noise?"

The noise was an ooka-ooka-ooka pumping sound coming from the animal control building. I had no idea what it was.

"I don't know and I don't know," I said. "Target practice, I guess. I hope they're not shooting up here."

The sound of laughter drifted up to us. The bald man suddenly dropped into a Weaver stance and fired four shots in sets of two: tap-tap, tap-tap. After the second set he straightened and called, "Whoa-oh."

LuEllen said, "There's something down there."

"What?"

"There's something in the cage. They're shooting at something," she said.

I scanned the wire enclosure but saw nothing. "I don't see anything..."

Hill picked up the bag next to his feet and carried it down toward the end of the enclosure closest to the bottom of the hill, unwrapped a string, and shook it. Three cats fell out. Two were small, little more than kittens. The third was a big old tiger-striped tomcat. The torn had a dazed, frightened look about it and slunk toward a corner of the pen.

"Goddamn them," LuEllen said in a fury. She moved a little away from the tree, but I pulled her back.

"Guns," I said.

Hill walked back toward the other man. When he was six feet away, he whirled, Wyatt Earp style. A gun came out from under the back of his shirt, a chrome-plated revolver, and he fired almost without hesitating. The first shot missed, but the second shot blew up one of the kittens. The second kitten froze, but the old tom streaked toward the opposite corner of the fencing and hit it about four feet off the ground.

"Come on, come on," I muttered. The cat crawled up the chicken wire, and Hill had swiveled to take it when the bald man let go with the .45. At the first shot Hill went down, yelling, but the bald man fired three more shots. The cat was climbing, almost over the top, but the third shot took it in the shoulder and knocked it over the wire into the grass just outside the fence.

"You cocksucker," Hill yelled back at the bald man, but the bald man was laughing.

"You like to shit your pants, Duane," he called.

"You fuckin' peckerwood," Hill shouted back, and he was laughing too. Then quick as a snake, he pivoted, stretching and going flat at the same time, landed on his stomach, his arms outstretched, and he blew up the second kitten with a single shot.

There was another bag by the bald man's feet. He bent over to pick it up.

"Let's get out of here," said LuEllen, ashen-faced with anger.

"Look at the locks," I said. I handed her the glasses, and she put them to her eyes. There was only one real building in the complex, though there had appeared to be more from the river. The other roofs we'd seen from the water turned out to be simple shelter tops, mounted on poles over a series of stacked holding cages.

The main building was constructed of concrete block, painted white, with a green steel door. Small dark windows with metal casements punctured the two sides we could see.

"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...

The sun was still hanging up in the hot, hazy sky when we drove out to the Wal-Mart on the edge of town, bought the green gum boots, and tossed them into the trunk. We ate at the Holiday Inn, stopped in the bar, and eventually ducked back to John's room. He was alone.

"I set you up," I said. "Told Dessusdelit that her future involves a black knight on a white horse, bringing welcome change."

"The Beemer's white, and I sure as shit am black," he said. He stepped over to the credenza, picked up a film cartridge, and flipped it to LuEllen. "Hope these are good."

"I'll look at them tonight." She glanced at her watch and turned to me. "We better get going. It'll be dark in half an hour."

"So tomorrow-"

"I'll talk to Brown about the land option," John said. "I hope Bobby's ready."

"I just talked to him. He's all ready. Is Marvel ready to move?"

"Harold's got the capitol crowd fixed. He told them that some heavy-duty crime is going down, that big money is being stolen, that something could happen this weekend. If he comes up with enough specifics, the attorney general will send in the state bureau of investigation."

"On a Saturday? For sure?"

"Any day of the week, any time of day, on six hours' notice."

"Can we trust them?"

"I think so. Crime is just crime, and most of the time they probably couldn't give a shit. But this is politics. This is a deal."

We pulled out of the dock just as the sun was disappearing over the highest of the old Victorian mansions up on the hill. The marina manager was leaving as we unhooked, and stopped by.

"Midnight cruise?"

"Little romance maybe," LuEllen told him, rolling her eyes at me.

"Well, good luck with that." The manager laughed, and he watched as we backed away, into the current.

We took our time going downriver, floating, easy. LuEllen stayed below, in the head, processing the film. I let the boat slip below the animal control complex, riding downriver for a dozen miles or more.

I could live out there on the Mississippi, I think, if I weren't eaten by the worm of Art. I could live there for the names alone. Longstreet was the only big town between Helena, Arkansas, and Greenville, Mississippi. Just in that stretch of 120 miles, from Helena to Greenville, you roll through Montezuma Bend, Horseshoe Cutoff, Kangaroo Point, Jug Harris Towhead, Scrubgrass Bend, Ashbrook Neck, and a few other places where you'd like to hop off the boat and look around.

The last of day's light was dying in the sky when I brought the boat around, took it back up-river, and eventually warped it against the revetment wall below the animal control complex. I killed the engine and the lights, dropped onto the main deck, and hopped ashore with the bow and stern lines. LuEllen came up, carrying the boots, as I finished tying off.

"Better take some repellent," she said, tossing me a spray can. "The mosquitoes'll be fierce."

"How'd the pictures come out?" I asked as I sprayed my hands and rubbed my face and the back of my neck.

"Not sure," she said, frowning a bit. "Three frames look good. On the fourth, her thumb might be in the way. I can't tell on the wet neg, I didn't want to take the chance of scratching it. But holding it up to the light... we could have a problem."

"Goddamn it," I said.

LuEllen shrugged. "If we've got three digits and she's only blocking the fourth, it just means it'll take a little longer to get in. We might have to try a dozen combinations, but we'll get it."

"When can you print?"

"Tonight, when we get back. I can't do it on the river because of the engine vibrations."

The night was still warm, but we wore dark long-sleeved shirts and jeans and the gum boots instead of shoes. I carried my portable in its black nylon case, and LuEllen had a daypack over her shoulder. We walked without talking, LuEllen using her miniature flashlight sparingly as we moved through the darkness. At the bottom of the hill she stopped, leaned her face close to my ear, and said, "Wait three minutes." I thought she was going up the hill, but instead, we simply stood in the dark.

When your eyes adjust from light to dark, the night vision seems to fade in, like a black-and-white slide coming into focus. What was pitch-dark when you first come out of bright lights is suddenly nothing more than twilight. It works the same for your hearing, although most people aren't aware of it. When you stand stock-still in a dark place, the noises that once resided in the background suddenly come to the fore. You notice the roar of far-off trucks climbing a grade, the motors and air conditioners, the insects in the trees, the sound of the wind. Human voices are an absolutely distinct sound; even from a long distance, when you can't make out the individual vowels and consonants, the rhythm or the rise and fall of the pitch tell you that you're hearing another human.

We heard all the background sounds, picked them up one at a time. No voices.

We waited the full three minutes, and then LuEllen was moving again. I trailed behind. The track along the levee broke out of the brush thirty or forty yards from the animal control buildings. The main building, the white one, was thirty yards away, across an open stretch of weedy lawn. A gravel driveway came in from the other side but stopped short of the building.

We waited for another five minutes in the weeds just out of the cleared area. There was one exterior light, up on a pole outside the main building. No lights were showing in the building.

"Glad the kennel's on the far side," LuEllen said. She took her picks and a power rake out of her pack. "Let's try not to wake up the mutts."

We were absolutely exposed as we crossed the yard. If anyone was up the hill or anybody came up in a car, we were in the open. There was no point in being furtive but we were furtive anyway. LuEllen went straight to the door, tried the knob, found it locked. There was a window around the side, and she tried it. It was locked. She came back to the door and looked at the lock.

"I'll try the picks," she whispered. "Maybe we can avoid the power rake. Hold the light."

She opened it, but it took twenty sweaty minutes. The power rake would have done it in two, but it sounds like a spoon dropped in a garbage disposal. When the door was open, we took a quick look around the side of the building, then crossed the yard and waited in the weeds again, listening and waiting. If there were any kind of unseen alarm, somebody should be coming up the road.

The sense of hearing isn't the only thing that sharpens in the dark. As far as we were from the building, there was a light but persistent stench of animal urine and fear. And something else...

"Raw meat," LuEllen muttered. "From the shooting pen..."

Nothing moved on the road. We went back and inside. The lock on Hill's office door was nothing. LuEllen slipped it, and we were in. The computer was another old IBM. I brought the machine up and began dumping the hard disk to my portable. LuEllen went through the desk and found a box of floppies. When the disk-to-disk transfer was complete, I loaded the floppies one at a time, found two sets of files, and saved them to my machine.

That done, I slipped in a utility program I'd written myself. A hard disk is like an electronic filing cabinet, with lots of storage space for files. Unless the operator is running complicated accounting programs with enormous amounts of data or huge applications programs, there's usually plenty of empty space.

I checked and found the Longstreet gang had used less than a tenth of the available disk space. Good. My program - a gem, if I do say so myself - simply made a second copy of everything on the disk and then hid it in the free space. The copy would never show up on directories or in any other routine transaction unless the right code phrase was entered at the prompt. I made the code phrase redneck. And fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

If these were the books, and the Longstreet gang got nervous and tried to erase them, there was an excellent chance that there'd still be a set left on the machine, hidden under the code. A set available to the state cops...

After LuEllen had unlocked the desk, she checked a filing cabinet, found nothing interesting, and then went through the rest of the building. As I finished, she came in and said, "Come look at this."

I packed my machine and followed her into the back. There was a small loading dock at the rear of the building, with a pulldown door, like a small garage door. Built into the wall opposite the door were two cubicles, four-by-four-by-four feet, with heavy Plexiglas doors. There was a grille in the wall of each, and the doors had thick rubber seals.

"Gas chambers?" she asked. "For the animals?"

I looked at the seals and then at a pump apparatus off to the side. "No. It's a vacuum system. They put the dogs in the chamber and suck the air out. That's the way they do it most places now."

"Christ, it sounds awful."

I shrugged. "I don't know. It's supposed to be humane."

We left it at that. LuEllen made a last check of the building, to make sure we hadn't left anything behind, relocked the door from the inside, and pulled it shut after us.

Ten minutes later we were on the river. We didn't talk much as we pushed back upstream. LuEllen lay in the sunbathing well, looking up at the stars, and the tension current drained away with the current.

By two o'clock I knew I had the books. I didn't know what they meant.

"They've used codes for all the categories," I told LuEllen. "The numbers are there, but I don't know what the categories are."

"Marvel may be able to figure it out," she said.

"I hope."

While I worked on the books, LuEllen set up the enlarger in the head. She made four prints, fixed them, washed them, and let them dry. By the time I was sure about the books, she was looking at the enlargements under a high-intensity light.

"We got three out of the four," she said.

She had enlarged the images of the safe dial to the size of an old-fashioned alarm-clock face. The numbers were clear enough in the first three. In the fourth, Wells's index finger covered the critical digit.

"So it's seventy-four, forty-four, twelve, and something between... say, fifty-five and seventy."

"Hang on." I got my drawing box, dug around, and came up with a compass and a set of dividers. Using the compass, I drew the missing portion of the dial over Wells's intruding finger. With the dividers, I measured the intervals between the visible numbers and marked them off around the rim of the dial.

"If this is the centerline," I said, indicating the line with a ruler and a sharp pencil, "then the digit is... sixty-six. Give or take a digit."

LuEllen looked at me and grinned. "You do have your uses. Other than sexual, I mean."