The Empress File

pressure’ll get heavier and heavier, and he won’t be able to move. If he goes back tonight and you get elected to the council,he can always claim that it didn’t occur to him to boycott the meeting. If the meeting gets put off until tomorrow, there’s no way that’d work. By tomorrow everybody will have thought of it.”
    “You got nothing for me?” she asked. “Nothing?”
    “Man, I’m a technician. I can get you to a point, but after that… you’re the politician. What you need is a deal, to cut a deal.” I looked at my watch. “And I’ve got to take you back now. You’ve got about two minutes to get to Bell. Two minutes to figure out how you’re gonna get a bridge for him.”
    “Ah, Jesus,” she groaned. “We’re so close. So
close
. What am I going to do?”

I DROPPED M ARVEL in a pool of darkness a half block from the City Hall, hoping that nobody would see us or recognize us. She hurried away, not looking back. The outcome of our attack on the city was now in her hands. I had no ideas for her.
    And I had LuEllen to worry about. She should have been out of animal control, but I had to check. I was supposed to keep track of Hill and St. Thomas, and in the encounter with Marvel, I’d lost them.
    The road to animal control, after it got past the tank field, was dark as pitch. My headlights on the lonely gravel road would attract the attention of anyone at the place, but driving without them was impossible. I finally left them on, kept my speed up, and blew past the turnoff into the complex. There were lights on in the building, and Hill’s van squatted under the pole light in the yard.
    “Goddamn it,” I muttered. I smacked the steering wheel with the palm of my hand. LuEllen should have seen their headlights coming. But if she’d been inside, looking for a spot to hide Hill’s pistol, it was just barely possible that she’d been trapped. I went on down the road, parked, got a flashlight out of the glove compartment, and jogged back.
    The night had cooled, and the smell of mud, road gravel, weeds, and something else rode on a river breeze. Goose bumps popped up on my arms as I ran, and I finally identified the “something else” as the stink of decomposing flesh, probably from Hill’s killing pen.
    At the entrance to the animal control complex I slowed, cut a corner through the weeds, prayed that all copperheads were asleep, and stepped over a fence. The complex was in a flat, open area cut in the riverside brush. I skirted the open area, cut behind the pen where we’d seen Hill and St. Thomas killing the cats—the smell of rotting flesh grew stronger, and I started breathing through my mouth—and climbed the levee. Nothing; I was too far away to see whether or not the boat was tied to the wall. I started down the levee, picking my way along the nearly invisible game trail. The boat loomed up like a ghost in the night, just a light spot in the humidity, a trick of the eyes. In another fifty yards it had solidified. No lights, nothing moving around it.
    “LuEllen? LuEllen?”
    Nothing. Cursing under my breath, I turned back up the levee. I could hear somebody inside. A voice, a banging of drawers. There was a window on the far side of the building. If I could get to it, I should be able to see into the main work area.
    I started around the clearing, staying in the brush as long as I could, then darted into the cage area at the rear of the main building. Most of the animal pens were simple wooden or wire cages stacked six high inside a chain-link fence, but there was also an open pen for puppies. A couple of half-grown spotted mongrels stood up in the pen as I went by, watching curiously, and I prayed for silence. One continued to watch me, its nose pressed through the fence, while the other one turned in its tracks and settled down again. Neither barked.
    Standing in the darkness of the pens, I waited a second, listening, then poked my head out. A shaft of light came out of the window, onto the grass. Then a man spoke, but I couldn’t make out what was being said. I stepped out from the pen area, staying close to the building, moved up to the window, and carefully looked in, moving slowly.…
    Hill was there, his back to me, stuffing paper into a plastic garbage sack. The file cabinets around him were standing open. He was cleaningthe place out. That was OK, as long as they didn’t physically trash the computer. The voice I’d heard came from the radio, a local sports talk