The Empress File

and it was, with a low-tech printer on a stand behind it and a small three-hundred-baud modem. I breathed a sigh of relief. If it had been a Macintosh or an Amiga, I’d have had to dump the high-capacity internal hard disk to smallerfloppy disks, and that might have taken a while. As it was, I should be able to do the job in a few minutes.
    I hooked up the Laplink, then handed the light to LuEllen, brought the machine up, stuck in a disk, and loaded a utility program of my own. A minute later I was looking through the hard disk, sending to my machine any text or financial files.
    While I did that, LuEllen looked around the office, checking drawers. The file cabinets were locked, but she opened each in a matter of seconds and began going through the files.
    “Not much here,” she said. “It’s all routine legal stuff. Real estate transfers, car accidents, workers’ compensation forms. There’s some city work, but it all looks like insurance and ordinances and printed budgets. Public stuff, nothing secret.”
    “Check the desk.”
    The desk was locked. She opened it, glanced through a few files, and shook her head.
    “Nothing financial,” she said. “No taxes, no books. Couple of
Playboys
. Toothpicks. Floss. Bottle of mouthwash.”
    “I’ll be done in a couple of more minutes,” I said. “I’m almost there.”
    She walked down the length of the bookshelves, pushing her hand over the tops of the books, feeling behind them. Then she got on herhands and knees and crawled around the perimeter of the room, pulling at the carpet. There was an expensive
National Geographic
globe in one corner, on its own rolling stand, and when she pushed it out of the way and pulled on the carpet, the corner came up.
    “Got something,” she said. She folded back the carpet and lifted the board underneath. I stepped over and squatted beside her. There was an old green metal cashbox set in the floor. She popped the lid. Inside were a stack of cash, a chrome-plated .38-caliber revolver, and what looked like legal papers.
    LuEllen lifted out the cash and the papers.
    “Two thousand,” she said, thumbing the cash. She put it back in the box, in exactly the position that it had been. I went back to the computer while she examined the papers. “There’re copies of a will and some kind of inventory and divorce papers. You want me to copy them? There’s a Xerox out in the hall.”
    “Do it.”
    I finished pulling the files from Ballem’s computer, shut it down, unplugged the Laplink cables, and started stuffing them back in the black satchel with the portable. I was zipping the satchel when LuEllen came into the room, moving fast, said, “Ssst,” and eased the door shut.
    “Somebody’s outside,” she whispered. She scrambled over to her satchel, took out two pairsof black panty hose, and threw one at me. I could hear the outer office door opening as I pulled it over my head. LuEllen, with the panty hose on her head but not yet pulled over her face, was digging in her satchel. She came up with a potato and a gym sock, put the potato in the sock, and stationed herself behind the door. I hid behind the desk.
    On other jobs we’d decided that the only answer to detection was flight or surrender. We wouldn’t hurt anyone for money. But in Longstreet surrender would not likely result in a trial. We wouldn’t be talking to lawyers. And we decided after the episode with the cop at Ballem’s, when I was prepared to hit him with a paint bucket, that we’d better come up with a new answer.
    The potato in the sock made an excellent sap, and neither the potato nor the sock was illegal. And the potato, LuEllen had heard, was soft enough to be non-lethal.
    We waited, LuEllen dangling the sock. The late visitor did not turn on the office lights but came straight down the hall, moving in the dark. From the light footsteps I decided that the visitor was female. The steps passed Ballem’s door, went on for a few feet, then stopped. There was a moment of silence, then a distracted humming. A woman’s voice, and a saccharine tune from the fifties called“Tammy”; I remembered it from my piano lessons.
    We waited, stressing out, huddled in the dark, and the Xerox machine started. And went on. And on. For more than half an hour, without stopping, the copy light flashing under the door like distant lightning. Then, just as suddenly as she’d shown up, she left, whoever it was. The Xerox machine stopped, the footsteps retreated down