The Empress File

be a sure thing.”
    “All right. And you’ve got the focus figured out and all that.…”
    “I’ve been working with it, and I’ll check it again before I go in to make sure it’s turned on, that it’s on silent mode, that the radio’s attached.… It’ll be peeking out of the briefcase.”
    “The briefcase handles…”
    “Yeah, we thought of that. They’ll be out of the way. We’ve got them taped. And I’ll go out to talk to this Brown dude as soon as we’re out of the place.”
    “OK. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Let me talk to Marvel.”
    She must have been standing next to him because she was on the line a second later.
    “Everything OK?” she asked.
    “Bobby says there’s a computer out at the animal control building. Ballem calls it with his computer and apparently does some work with it. You got anybody out there?”
    “There’s a girl I could talk to… but I don’t know. She’s not the most trustworthy.”
    “I’ll try to raid it from here, but if I can’t, we might have to go into the place. We could use another key.”
    “Oh, man, I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “My friend’s pretty shaky.”
    “Is she a secretary? What?”
    “She’s fuckin’ Duane, is what she’s doing.”
    “Ah, shit…”
    “It’s no big love affair; she thinks she needs the money.”
    “Well, talk to her. But don’t give her any hint of what’s happening.”
    “I’ll think of something,” she said. “A story.”
    “Be careful, for Christ’s sakes. Hill’s goofy. If there’s any question, back off. We’ll try to go in without her help.”
    LuEllen didn’t like it. The worst thing, she said, was that too many people knew that we’d be hitting a particular place.
    “Our security,” she said, “is fucked. You know what the state women’s prison is like here? I don’t need some two-hundred-pound baby-killer sitting on my face for three to five.”
    “If it looks bad, we won’t do it,” I said. “Let’s check it out tomorrow. Right after our session with Dessusdelit.”
    “It’s kind of remote. We’ll be noticed if we hang around.”
    “Nah. I looked at the map, and the place is right on the river. We’ll chug down the river, look it over with the glasses, chug back, and look it over some more.”
    We were off the boat early the next morning, walking through town to the Coffee Klatch Café. The morning was warm and humid: pleasant but with the thick, hazy feel that foretold an insufferably hot day. It’d be good to be on the river. We got the window seat we needed at the Coffee Klatch and lingered over coffee and cheese Danishes.
    “John,” LuEllen said, and I turned my head to the street. John was climbing the City Hall steps, carrying the briefcase. He was wearing the dark pin-striped suit we’d seen in the motel. He looked hot.
    Ten minutes later LuEllen said, “There she is. Let’s go.”
    We slid out of the booth, left a dollar tip, paid the rest of the bill at the counter, and hurried outside. We’d been in the café only fifteen minutes, but you could feel that the day had gotten hotter and closer. Across the street Mary Wells was climbing out of her car. We walked down to the corner, waited for a car to pass, and strolled across the street toward the City Hall.
    “Radio on?”
    “Just looked,” LuEllen said. The hand-size transmitter was in her shoulder bag. We were tenfeet behind Wells as she climbed the steps into the City Hall. We paused for a moment at the directory inside, then followed her up the second flight to the clerk’s office.
    “It’s going to be a scorcher today…” Wells was saying as we walked in. She was talking to a woman behind the service counter. John was standing at a table to one side, poring over a book of plat maps. Wells’s eyebrow went up as she looked from John to the assistant; the assistant caught it and shrugged. John’s briefcase, its mouth opened toward the safe on the back wall, was sitting on a flat-file cabinet.
    “Could I help you folks?” the assistant asked, looking past Wells.
    “Yes, I was told you sell Corps of Engineers navigation maps for the Mississippi.”
    “The map book? Sure…”
    Wells walked through a wooden gate on the public counter to a glass-enclosed private office at the back. The clerk dug in a drawer, found a map book, and said, “That’ll be twelve dollars. There’s no sales tax on government publications.…”
    I dug out my billfold and handed her a fifty. “I’m