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Back The Empress File
Chapters (20)
  1. Prologue
  2. CHAPTER 1
  3. CHAPTER 2
  4. CHAPTER 3
  5. CHAPTER 4
  6. CHAPTER 5
  7. CHAPTER 6
  8. CHAPTER 7
  9. CHAPTER 8
  10. CHAPTER 9
  11. CHAPTER 10
  12. CHAPTER 11
  13. CHAPTER 12
  14. CHAPTER 13
  15. CHAPTER 14
  16. CHAPTER 15
  17. CHAPTER 16
  18. CHAPTER 17
  19. CHAPTER 18
  20. CHAPTER 19

Tud called for a backup and an ambulance, and then they walked down toward the body, Billy Lee with the MP5 on his hip and Tud clutching his .38 police special. Lights were coming on in houses on both sides of the tracks, and a guy in a white sleeveless T-shirt was standing on his front lawn, watching them. They found the boy in the cinders and sandbabies next to the tracks, facedown. One bullet punched through his neck; a second took him in the spine between his shoulder blades; a third caught him a little lower and to the left, maybe nicking a lung. Good shooting. The boy must have lived for just a second after he went down, Tud thought, because his mouth was full of dirt and cinders, as if he’d bitten into the earth as he died.

The two officers looked down at him for a minute, and then Tud squatted and dumped the bag the kid had been carrying. Out fell a two-quart carton of chocolate rocky road, steaming in the muggy night air. They both looked at it for a long beat. Then Tud turned his sad hound dog eyes up to his partner.

“Goddamn it, Billy Lee,” he said, shaking his head. “You went and shot yourself the wrong nigger.”

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1

The computer alarm went off at four in the morning. When it started buzzing, I’d been asleep for half an hour. The alarm sounds like an off-the-hook telephone, and it took a minute to penetrate.

“Jap phone?” Chaminade Loan made a bump under the sheet across the bed. Her voice grated like old rust.

“Zwat?”

“Jap phone?”

“Yeah.” The cat was curled at the foot of the bed and looked up as I rolled out and padded down the hall toward the front room. When I passed the study door, a message was running down the blue screen of the Amiga 3000, and I realized I was hearing the computer alarm, not the phone. A dozen small computers and dumb terminals are scattered around the study, three or four of them plugged in at any one time. Several people knew how to call and dump data to the Amiga’s memory. Only one knew how to tap the alarm.

Bobby Duchamps.

Bobby wouldn’t be calling to chat. The alarm sounded as soon as the data came in and repeated one minute out of every five until I turned it off. The message on the screen was straightforward. After the sign-on stuff, it said:

Call Now.

When Bobby said now, he meant now. As far as I know, he sits in front of a computer around the clock; Bobby doesn’t have a workday and always answered personally when I called his private board.