The Empress File

The Empress File

John Sandford

PROLOGUE:

The heat was ferocious.

The odor of melting blacktop was thick in the air, like the stink of an oil slick, and the rare night walkers glistened with sweat. A time-and-temperature sign outside the state bank poked scarlet digits down the dark streets: 91, it said, and 11:04. Three doors north of the bank, a janitor at the Paramount Theater vacuumed the lobby in slow motion. The theater was air-conditioned. His home was not.

Across the street from the Paramount, a window dresser at Trent's fussed with an abattoir of dismembered mannequins. He worked only nights, after curfew for children twelve and under. He was setting up the annual bathing suit display, and modern mannequins, the city council observed, had nipples.

In the window lights even the dummies looked hot.

With nightfall an army of insects marched out of the Mississippi river bottoms. Coffee brown beetles, some as long as a man's thumb, scuttled through the gutters. Hard-shelled June bugs ricocheted like stones off the storefront windows. Fuzzy-winged moths fluttered in the headlights of passing cars. They made yellow smears when they hit the windshields; the biggest ones had guts like baby birds, and blood.

The moths and the delicate green lacewings were the tragic stars of the night. By the hundreds of thousands they burned in the eerie violet halos of electronic insect traps. The lucky ones made it past the traps and found heaven in the parking lot lights at the E-Z Way. Under the brilliant floods they danced and died in midnight ecstasy. Their bodies littered the pavement like confetti.

Elvis Coultier loved the bugs. They made intricate patterns in the boring nightscape, like a living kaleidoscope. In some dumb way they brought him a breath of drama. Once a night, or sometimes twice, a luna moth would appear, huge, green, fragile. He would watch as it circled and climbed, danced, courting the light, and finally burned, fluttering like an autumn maple leaf to the parking lot.

He loved the bugs, but the heat was killing him. He couldn't breathe. His lungs felt as if they were packed with sponges. He had the doors and the big side window open as far as they would go, but never a breeze came in.

Elvis was the night manager at the E-Z Way, a fat young man given to tent-size sweatpants and novelty T-shirts. Tonight's had a tiger-striped cartoon cat, with the caption "I Love a Little Pussy." He'd dripped ketchup on the shirt while eating a hot dog, and five red splotches crossed the Pussy like bloody fingerprints. Elvis mopped his face with a rag he kept in the soda cooler. Reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore Show flickered on the portable TV bolted into one corner of the ceiling, but it was so hot that he'd lost the story line. Beige moths the size of penny-candy wrappers battered themselves against Mary's face.

The E-Z Way, the only all-night store in town, squatted beside the A&M Railroad tracks. Both whites from the east side and blacks from the west - anyone looking for milk or beer or cigarettes - patronized the place. "We get 'em all, sooner or later," Elvis liked to say.

At 11:04 Darrell Clark was Elvis's only customer. He stood in the back of the store, peering through the glass of an upright cooler. A dozen varieties of ice cream and sherbet were racked inside: vanilla, Dutch chocolate, strawberry, butter brickie, raspberry surprise, chocolate rocky road. Each name and each color photo evoked a memory of taste. Butter brickie and jamocha were out. Vanilla was good, but too... vanilla.

Darrell was dressed in Wal-Mart shorts and a brown short-sleeved polo shirt. The shirt was too small and fit his growing body like a second skin. His hair was close-cropped over his high forehead.

Darrell licked his lower lip every few seconds as he considered the beckoning flavors. After some thought he opened the cooler door, paused to let the cold air wash over him, shivered, selected a two-quart carton of the chocolate rocky road, and carried it to the counter. Elvis counted Darrell's handful of crumpled dollar bills, quarters, and dimes, rang up the sale, and slipped the ice cream into a brown paper bag.

"Now you haul ass, boy," Elvis told him. "That rocky road'll melt faster'n snot on a hot doorknob."

Darrell headed out the door on the run. The brown paper bag dangled from one hand, and his rubber flip-flops slapped on the blacktop as his long fourteen-year-old legs ate up the ground. He crossed the parking lot under the moth-shrouded pole lights and ran down the dirt-and-cinders path that paralleled the A&M tracks.

Two things were going through his head.

The first was the thought of the rocky road, cool and buttery in a blue plastic bowl. A good choice.

Behind that was an algorithm he had been toying with: a way to generate real-time fractal terrain at reasonable speeds on his Macintosh II personal computer...

Clarisse Barnwright, whom everybody, including herself, called Old Lady Barnwright, hobbled along Bluebell, a rubber-tipped cane held in one hand, her purse clutched in the other. She lived one block over from the tracks, on the white side of town. She'd spent her entire life in the neighborhood, born in a house not a hundred yards from the house where she expected to die. For thirty-nine years she'd beaten Latin and English into the thick heads of Longstreet's children. White children for the first twenty-seven years, a mix of black and white for the last twelve. Then she gave it up and sank gratefully into retirement.

Her husband's death preceded her retirement by a year. Some people thought that was why she quit. She couldn't face life and work without Albert, they said wisely.

They were wrong.

The fact was, Clarisse wasn't unhappy to see him go. Had, late on hot summer nights in the forties and fifties, lying in the same bed with him, sweaty and suffocating, listening to his burbling snorts and occasional farts, considered helping him along the Path to Glory. Might have done it, if she could have thought of a surefire way of not getting caught. The state had the electric chair, and no particular prejudice against using it on women.

Clarisse sighed as she thought about it. If Albert had lived, he'd have just sat around the house and complained. Complained about paint flaking off the siding, complained about the furnace, complained about the cracking sidewalks, complained about the cotton crop. Never complained about anything interesting.

Never complained about their sex life, for example. She might have been interested if one night he'd looked up and said, "Clare, just what do you know about this here cunny-lingus business?" Old Lady Barnwright cackled to herself. That probably would have finished her off.

Clarisse Barnwright lived inside her head. She was so preoccupied with her thoughts that she never heard the soft steps coming up behind.

Clayton Rand sat on his dark porch and watched Old Lady Barnwright coming down the sidewalk. A little late for the old lady, but she still got around good, considering her age. Hell, Clayton was sixty-four, and he'd had her as a teacher in eleventh and twelfth grades. Clayton fanned himself with the sports section of the Gazette, watching her hobble down the sidewalk. Wonder what she thinks about? Probably conjugating Latin verbs or something.

When he saw the shadow behind her, Clayton wanted to holler a warning, but his tongue got stuck, and nothing would come out of his mouth. He stood up with his mouth half open as the shadow grabbed the old lady's purse. She went ass over teakettle into the Carters' honeysuckle hedge, yelling her head off, while the shadow went sideways across the street, headed for the tracks. Clarisse Barnwright might have been an old lady, Clayton thought as he pulled open the screen door and reached for the phone, but there was nothing wrong with her lungs.

"Police emergency," Lucy answered in her best bubble gum voice. Lucy had wonderful cone-shaped tits and tended toward pink glitter lipstick and thin cotton sweaters. Clayton felt as if he'd sinned just calling her on the 911 line. "Is this an emergency?"

"Goddamn right it is, honey," Clayton hollered. "This here is Clayton Rand out on Bluebell. Some colored kid just snatched Old Lady Barnwright's purse. Not more than five, ten seconds ago. He's took off lickety-split toward the tracks..."

Officers Roy R. ("Tud") Dick and William L. Teeter had the tac squad that night. That was why the laser-sighted Heckler & Koch MP5, instead of the standard police shotgun, was propped between them. The MP5 was a new weapon. Billy Lee had qualified on it, but Tud had not. He wasn't interested. Tud had little time for guns, and with good reason: The last time a Longstreet cop had fired a weapon in the line of duty, he'd missed six out of six times and got his own ass shot by his brother-in-law. That was back in '71...

The two cops were sitting on a side street, talking about the heat and waiting to see if Annie Carlson would get drunk and take one of her patented summer showers. She never pulled the shade on the back bathroom window, and when she came out of the shower, with the white towel wrapped around her hair, and was framed in the lighted square, Tud thought she looked just like some kind of famous painting. He couldn't tell you which. Billy Lee thought she looked like a potential Playmate of the Month. Which is to say, large.

Tud was sucking on a peach soda when they got the squawk from Lucy down at Dispatch. One second later the black kid ran past the end of the street, lickety-split, just like Lucy said.

"Let's get him," Tud said. He dropped the empty pop can on the floor, hit the lights and the siren at the same time, and they took off, leaving Annie Carlson high and dry. The black kid was running parallel to the tracks and was fast coming to the point where the street went left around a bend and the tracks went straight.

"Shit, Billy Lee, he's gonna get off behind the water tower," Tud said.

"Stop the car. Stop the fuckin' car."

Tud stopped the car, and Billy Lee jumped out with the MP5 and punched up the laser.

"Hold it right there. You hold it right there..." He was screaming as loud as he could.

He put the laser's red dot in the middle of the black kid's back. "You hold it, boy..." A sort of greasy, short-breathed excitement got him by the balls when he realized the black kid wasn't going to stop and Tud said, "Hey, now, Billy Lee..." Billy Lee pulled the trigger, and a burst of nine-millimeter slugs went downrange, and the black kid tumbled ass over teakettle into the weeds.

"Ass over teakettle," Billy Lee said aloud in the sudden stunning silence.

Tud called for a backup and an ambulance, and then they walked down toward the body, Billy Lee with the MP5 on his hip and Tud clutching his .38 police special. Lights were coming on in houses on both sides of the tracks, and a guy in a white sleeveless T-shirt was standing on his front lawn, watching them. They found the boy in the cinders and sandbabies next to the tracks, facedown. One bullet punched through his neck; a second took him in the spine between his shoulder blades; a third caught him a little lower and to the left, maybe nicking a lung. Good shooting. The boy must have lived for just a second after he went down, Tud thought, because his mouth was full of dirt and cinders, as if he'd bitten into the earth as he died.

The two officers looked down at him for a minute, and then Tud squatted and dumped the bag the kid had been carrying. Out fell a two-quart carton of chocolate rocky road, steaming in the muggy night air. They both looked at it for a long beat. Then Tud turned his sad hound dog eyes up to his partner.

"Goddamn it, Billy Lee," he said, shaking his head. "You went and shot yourself the wrong nigger."

Chapter
1

The computer alarm went off at four in the morning. When it started buzzing, I'd been asleep for half an hour. The alarm sounds like an off-the-hook telephone, and it took a minute to penetrate.

"Jap phone?" Chaminade Loan made a bump under the sheet across the bed. Her voice grated like old rust.

"Zwat?"

"Jap phone?"

"Yeah." The cat was curled at the foot of the bed and looked up as I rolled out and padded down the hall toward the front room. When I passed the study door, a message was running down the blue screen of the Amiga 3000, and I realized I was hearing the computer alarm, not the phone. A dozen small computers and dumb terminals are scattered around the study, three or four of them plugged in at any one time. Several people knew how to call and dump data to the Amiga's memory. Only one knew how to tap the alarm.

Bobby Duchamps.

Bobby wouldn't be calling to chat. The alarm sounded as soon as the data came in and repeated one minute out of every five until I turned it off. The message on the screen was straightforward. After the sign-on stuff, it said:

Call Now.

When Bobby said now, he meant now. As far as I know, he sits in front of a computer around the clock; Bobby doesn't have a workday and always answered personally when I called his private board.

I yawned, sat down naked at the machine, tapped a key to kill the alarm, switched the modem to send and punched in a number for East St. Louis. The number rang eight times, and I pressed the "a" key. It rang twice more and was answered with a twenty-four-hundred-baud carrier tone. A few seconds later a "?" flashed on the upper left corner of my screen. I typed Hivaoa, my code name on Bobby's system. It's taken from Gauguin's 1902 painting The Magician of Hivaoa, which hangs in the Musee d'Art Moderne in Liege. As a password Hivaoa may seem pretentious, but it fills the two main requirements of any computer code word: It's easy to remember, and you don't have to worry that somebody will stumble on it by accident. Bobby came back instantly:

Friend bad-needs face-to-face ASAP.

When/Where?

Today/Memphis.

Short notice.

Asking favor.

I'll check airlines.

Already booked 4:47 Northwest Airlines Minn-St. Paul-Memphis arrive 7:20.

Booking the plane was presumptuous, but Bobby's a computer freak. Computer freaks are like that. Besides, he was virtually a full-time resident of the Northwest reservation system, so it probably didn't cost him anything.

Bobby and I had met inside a GM design computer back in the old days and had enlarged our friendship on the early pirate boards, the good ones that the teenyboppers never saw. Over the years we'd dealt a lot of data and code to each other. I'd never met him face-to-face, but I'd talked to him on voice lines. A black kid, I thought, still young, early to mid-twenties. A southerner. He had a hint of a speech impediment, and something he said suggested a physical problem. Cerebral palsy, like that. A while back he helped me out of a jam involving the mob, several murders, and a computer attack that wrecked a defense contractor. I still flash on it from time to time, like visitations from an old acid trip. In return for his help, I sent a bundle of cash Bobby's way. So we were friends, but only on the wires. I went back to him:

Where go Memphis?

He meets plane.