The Empress File

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.
    C LAYTON R AND 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.…”
    O FFICERS R OY R. (“T UD ”) D ICK 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 newweapon. 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