The Empress File

anything.…”
    Hill picked up the bag next to his feet and carried it down toward the end of the enclosure closest to the bottom of the hill, unwrapped a string, and shook it. Three cats fell out. Two were small, little more than kittens. The third was a big old tiger-striped tomcat. The tom had a dazed, frightened look about it and slunk toward a corner of the pen.
    “Goddamn them,” LuEllen said in a fury. She moved a little away from the tree, but I pulled her back.
    “Guns,” I said.
    Hill walked back toward the other man. When he was six feet away, he whirled, Wyatt Earp style. A gun came out from under the back of his shirt, a chrome-plated revolver, and he fired almost without hesitating. The first shot missed,but the second shot blew up one of the kittens. The second kitten froze, but the old tom streaked toward the opposite corner of the fencing and hit it about four feet off the ground.
    “Come on, come on,” I muttered. The cat crawled up the chicken wire, and Hill had swiveled to take it when the bald man let go with the .45. At the first shot Hill went down, yelling, but the bald man fired three more shots. The cat was climbing, almost over the top, but the third shot took it in the shoulder and knocked it over the wire into the grass just outside the fence.
    “You cocksucker,” Hill yelled back at the bald man, but the bald man was laughing.
    “You like to shit your pants, Duane,” he called.
    “You fuckin’ peckerwood,” Hill shouted back, and he was laughing too. Then quick as a snake, he pivoted, stretching and going flat at the same time, landed on his stomach, his arms outstretched, and he blew up the second kitten with a single shot.
    There was another bag by the bald man’s feet. He bent over to pick it up.
    “Let’s get out of here,” said LuEllen, ashen-faced with anger.
    “Look at the locks,” I said. I handed her the glasses, and she put them to her eyes. There was only one real building in the complex, though there had appeared to be more from the river. Theother roofs we’d seen from the water turned out to be simple shelter tops, mounted on poles over a series of stacked holding cages.
    The main building was constructed of concrete block, painted white, with a green steel door. Small dark windows with metal casements punctured the two sides we could see.
    “Standard shit,” she said. “We can take it. We can probably use the power rake if we had to; there’s nobody to hear it.”
    “All right.”
    “We could do it from the boat. Wear some boots or something so we wouldn’t have to worry about snakes, walk back along the levee. Make sure there’s nobody up here.”
    She was still looking through the glasses when a young black woman stepped out of the building door into the hot sunshine. She called to Hill, telephone, and Hill started back toward the building.
    “Bring a couple more bags,” the bald man called after him. He shook the bag in his hand, and three more kittens tumbled out.
    On the way back to the boat LuEllen turned suddenly and said, “I’m glad I saw that.”
    “Why?”
    “’Cause now I’m not going to feel bad about taking those motherfuckers out. Prison’s too good for those assholes.”
    B ACK AT THE MARINA , we hooked up, and I called Bobby.
    Any traffic?
    Code word: Archball. May not help.
    Why?
    No auto-answer. Manual entry only.
    Shit. How about the exchange monitor?
    Set. Any call to engineer will ring here instead.
    Probably tomorrow or next day.
    We ready.
    To get into a computer from the outside, the computer has to be on-line with the phone system. The Longstreet crowd, though, had a primitive setup: Instead of simply calling and getting right into the computer, somebody at animal control had to answer the phone, then switch the caller over to the computer. They probably didn’t intend it as a security measure, but that’s what they got. There’s no better security for a computer than keeping it unplugged and plugging it in only for people you know.…
    “W E ’ VE GOT TO GO IN ?” LuEllen asked, looking over my shoulder.
    “If we want the computer, we’ve got to go in.”
    “Let’s do it,” she said. “Let’s run down to that Wal-Mart, buy some boots, and go for a midnight cruise.”
    “That’s a lot of enthusiasm,” I said.
    She nodded, and I knew what she was thinking about. My cat is an old beat-up tom who roams the alleys and rooftops of Lowertown in St. Paul. One of these days he’ll be squashed by a car