The Empress File

shirt.”
    “We all look like we’re in a movie,” I said. “We’ve gotta be careful not to overdo it.”
    “You see the Beemer out in the parking lot?”
    “Yeah…”
    “Love that car. It turns the head of every goddamned good-looking woman in Memphis—”
    “A small exaggeration,” Marvel said.
    “I didn’t know the power of cars on women,” John said, a light in his eye. “I really didn’t.”
    “Just drive carefully,” LuEllen said. “That thing is costing us a fortune.”
    “Did you check Ballem’s office?” Marvel asked LuEllen.
    “Yeah. Going into the building could be tough. The door is right out in the open. People in small towns keep an eye on strangers. Especially at night.”
    “This help?” Marvel asked. She tossed a key ring with two keys on it to LuEllen. “The brass one’s for the building door, and the other one’s for the outer office door. Couldn’t get one for Ballem’s personal office without asking somebody we were afraid to ask.”
    “This is great,” LuEllen said. “Once I’m inside, I can handle his office.”
    “When are you going to do it?”
    I shrugged. LuEllen hated to give away anykind of security. “Sometime this week probably,” I said. I picked up my shoulder bag, opened it on the bed, and took out LuEllen’s Nikon F4, along with an instruction book.
    “The camera’s all set up,” she said to John as I handed it over with the book. “The film is loaded, and it’s on silent mode. You’ll have to focus it when you get there and lock in the exposure.” She dipped into my bag and took out another piece of gear. “This is the radio control.…”
    John peeled his coat off, and Marvel moved forward on the bed to peer at the camera. “Show me how to do this, exactly,” he said. “I don’t want to fuck up.”

S MALL - TOWN PEOPLE tell a story on themselves, an illustration of their closeness to their neighbors. Folks in small towns don’t use the turn signals on their cars, they say, because whoever is behind them
knows
where they’re going to turn.
    Longstreet wasn’t that small. It was a city, with better than twenty thousand good citizens and a few hundred rummies, bums, and lowlifes. It was not quite big enough to have a real slum, but it did have Oak Hill, which wasn’t so much a hill as the back end of the white cemetery. The city also had a lot of middling and a couple of good neighborhoods in both the black and white areas and one upper-middle-class subdivision spread around the Longstreet Golf and Country Club. During our stay a half dozen people mentioned that two black families lived out by the club: a doctor and a veterinarian.
    One thing Longstreet didn’t have was apartment buildings. Most of the town’s apartmentswere in the business district, above stores. That was a problem.
    When we left the Holiday Inn, we went straight back to the boat and changed. Gym shoes and jeans. LuEllen wore a deep red long-sleeved blouse, and I put on a long-sleeved navy blue polo shirt with a crushable white tennis hat. When we got close to the target, I’d pull off the hat and stick it in my pocket.
    We’d put the computers out of sight, but now I needed them and got down the portable IBM clone and a piece of gear called a Laplink. With the Laplink, I could dump the contents of one computer’s hard disk to the hard disk in the portable. The whole works fitted in a black nylon bag that looked like a briefcase.
    “Ready?” LuEllen asked. She was carrying the leather shoulder bag I’d had the camera in. It looked better on her than it did on me.
    “Let’s go.”
    “Don’t try to hide when we get to the door,” she said. “Don’t look around; don’t get up next to the wall; don’t touch me; don’t stand too close to me. Try to slump a little bit. Look tired.”
    “All right.”
    The night was hot, and the flying insects were fluttering up from the weeds around the marina into town. The streets were well lit; we walked from one pool of orange sodium-vapor light tothe next. We passed one man, a black man, who nodded and disappeared around a corner.
    We strolled. Ambled. There were lights above the stores, and I saw a woman’s shadow on a beige curtain and, below the window, walked through the strong, acrid smell of home permanent. Metallica pounded from a radio down an alley.
    “The problem with nights like these, where you’ve got apartments above the stores, is that people without air-conditioning sit in the windows, in