The Empress File

down.”
    We lapsed into silence again. He seemed to be waiting for a comment, but I had none to offer. The problem with dead people is simple enough. They’re dead. There’s no point in getting revenge for a dead man because the dead man won’t know and can’t care.
    John was waiting, though, so I eventually gave him a question. “What do you want me to do?”
    He was driving easily, one-handed. “We needed somebody who knows about politics, about information, and about security. Bobby says you’ve done a lot of computer work for politicians, that you’re good at planning, and you know about security.”
    “So you want me to figure out how to get these cops? Why don’t you find an NAACP lawyer, get the kid exhumed, and file a federal suit?”
    “Because we don’t want the cops,” John said. “Fuck the cops.”
    “What do you want?”
    “We want the machine. In fact, we want the town,” he said, his voice gone low and tight. “That’s what we want you to do, Kidd. We want you to take down the whole fuckin’ town.”

W E WERE DRIVING down the river in the long twilight of the summer solstice, a pale witches’ moon hung in front of us. Every few minutes we’d go through a raft of river air, cool, damp, smelling of mud and dead carp and decaying vegetation. I watched the moon ghosting through the evening clouds as John laid it out, simply and clearly. They wanted me to destroy the town’s political machine, any way I could do it, and leave it in the hands of their friends. Then I asked him another hard question, and he answered that one, too.
    When he stopped talking, I cranked back the car seat and closed my eyes, half in contemplation, half in dream.
    A long time ago I’d been an idealist of sorts. Somewhere along the line—Vietnam is the conventional answer, but I’m not even sure that’s right anymore—the idealism scraped off. After I’d asked him the first hard question, “What do youwant me to do?,” I’d asked the second: “Why should I do it?” Why should I take any risks for a dead kid I never knew?
    “Revenge,” John said. He hadn’t hesitated. He and Bobby had seen the questions coming and had rehearsed the answers. “Bobby said he was one of you—computer freaks.”
    “That’s not enough,” I said. “Good people die all the time.”
    “Friendship,” said John, checking the second item on a mental list. “Bobby’s your friend, and he needs your help. He’ll do something whether you’re there or not. He really doesn’t know how. He could fuck himself up.”
    I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I can’t put my ass on the line for something as thin as that. Bobby’s a friend, but only on the wires. If he wanted me to do some computer code, illegal code, that’d be one thing—”
    “Money,” John interrupted. “Lots of it. The town is papered with corruption cash. You could probably figure out a way to grab some of it. And since nobody can talk about where they got it… there’d be no comebacks.”
    “Money,” I said, looking out the window, maybe a little bitter. “Everybody’s reason.”
    “To tell you the truth, it bothers me to think you’d do it just for money,” he said. “Mercenaries tend to be… unreliable.” He sounded as if he knew.
    “I wouldn’t do it just to have
money
, but in this country, today, money is freedom. Anybody who tells you different is bullshitting you,” I said, looking over at him. “Freedom’s worth chasing.”
    He nodded. “So you’ll do it?”
    “Lots of money?”
    “Could be,” he said.
    “I’ll talk about it,” I said.
    T HE UNEASY HALF DREAM was shattered when we bounced across a set of railroad tracks. I opened my eyes on a dark town of unpainted shacks, huddled in a grove of dense, overbearing pin oaks. Here and there the ghostly moonlight broke through the canopy of leaves, etching web forms on the shacks, like the work of an enormous spider. We were through the place in less than a minute. If I hadn’t later gone through it in daylight— REZIN , POP . 240—I might have remembered the town as a hallucination, a dreamed remembrance of an Edgar Allan Poe story.
    “Nightmare place, probably red-eyed incestuous children with crosses carved on their foreheads, creeping through the cotton with choppin’ knives,” John said, echoing my thoughts. He’d seen me come awake.
    “Yeah.” I looked back at the town, a dark hole with a ribbon of moonlighted concrete runninginto it. Then we were around