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The Empress File

The Empress File

Titel: The Empress File Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: John Sandford
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a curve, and it was gone, just another piece of the Delta. I turned to the front and ran my tongue over my teeth. Moss had sprouted during the nap. When I couldn’t dislodge it with my tongue, I leaned over the seat for a beer. I’d kill it with alcohol.
    “You want one?” I asked.
    “Yeah. Another Coke.”
    I popped the top off a Coke and a beer, handed him the Coke, and said, “So tell me about Longstreet.”
    Twenty thousand people lived in the town, he said. Nine thousand were white; eleven thousand were black. The city council districts had been drawn to put three whites and one black on the council.
    “They fixed the districts so there’d be five thousand people in each one—one man, one vote, just like it’s laid down by the law,” John said. “One district covers the heart of the black side of town, five thousand people. Hardly a white among them. That district will always elect a black councilman. But when you take out those five thousand black votes, in one bloc, the whites are a majority in all the rest of the districts. There’s about two thousand whites in each, and about fifteen hundred blacks.”
    “That’s common enough,” I said.
    “It’s still a son of a bitch,” John said.
    “These friends in Longstreet… are they reliable?”
    “I don’t know,” John said carefully. “I’ve got solid recommendations, but I’ve never met them myself. Our main contact is a woman, name of Marvel. She’s a Marxist, I hear. That means she’s probably got her own agenda.”
    “I thought Marxism was out of style,” I said.
    John threw back his head and roared. “In the fuckin’ Delta? Listen, even when Marxism was
in style
, you could get lynched for laughing at Groucho and Zeppo, much less believing in Karl.”
    W E ROLLED into Longstreet after midnight, past a Holiday Inn, a Taco Bell, and a Dairy Queen, a row of white grain elevators, a few dark stores, and a lot of empty streets.
    The Mississippi had been a presence all through the trip. We could sense it and sometimes smell it, but with the levee between the highway and the water, we couldn’t see it. Longstreet, though, was built on higher ground. As we came to the center of town, to the first traffic light, we climbed above the levee, and the river opened out below. A ramshackle marina, with a few bare white bulbs flickering on an overhead grid, sat at the bottom of the river-bank. A couple of runabouts, a dozen olive drabjon boats, and an aging houseboat swung off the T-shaped pier.
    “You know where we’re going?” I asked.
    “I’ve got directions,” he said, turning at the light. We crossed the business district, passed a well-lit town square with an equestrian statue at its center, and bumped across another set of railroad tracks. On the other side was a convenience store that looked like a collision between a chicken coop and a billboard. A hand-painted sign on the side of the store, red block letters on white, said E - Z WAY . Three tall light poles, the kind used to illuminate tennis courts and Little League baseball fields, lit up the parking lot. Every bug between Helena and Greenville swarmed around them.
    “That’s where the kid bought the ice cream before he got shot,” John said. Through the open doors we could see a fat white man sitting on a dinette chair. He was mopping his face with a rag. John took a left around the E-Z Way and drove another six blocks on a potholed road past a clapboard Baptist church. Then he slowed and peered out the windshield toward the passenger side.
    “It’s a green house with a porch and some potted flowers hanging from the eaves,” he said, half to himself. We rolled another hundred feet down the street. “There it is.”
    The house was a concrete-block rambler withan overhanging roof, a small porch, and a picture window. Our headlights picked out a couple of pink metal lawn chairs crouched on the porch. John eased the car into a graveled parking strip. “You wait here. I’ll go up and ask,” he said.
    He climbed out of the car, stretched, walked up to the porch, and knocked. The door opened immediately. John said a few words, nodded, and walked back to the car. I’d cracked the window. “This is it,” he said. I climbed out into air that felt as if you could grab a piece, wring it out, and get water. As we walked to the door, John said quietly, “Wait’ll you see her.”
    M ARVEL A TKINS WAS Hollywood-beautiful, beautiful like you don’t see walking about in the

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