The Empress File Read Online Free PDF

cop'd get off," Marvel said. "The local boys wouldn't cut on one of their own." When the final report came out, whitewashing the shooter, Dodge had acquiesced to it.
    "If we take down the town, is Dodge a potential front man for whatever's left?" I asked, taking it down on the portable.
    "Not for me," Marvel said. "He's as bad as any of them. He's in on the city council deals, and he clips the receipts at the recreation center. We figure he takes a hundred dollars out of the swimming pool receipts on a hot summer day. And we have a lot of hot summer days."
    "He has an eye for the girls," Harold said suddenly. It was something of a non sequitur, but he carefully didn't look at Marvel.
    "What Harold's saying is, Dodge has been trying to get into my pants since I was twelve," Marvel said.
    "So he's human, big deal," John said, not quite under his breath.
    Marvel suppressed a grin and started to say something, but I broke in: "We take him, too?"
    "Yeah. Take him."
    The other three city councilmen were white.
    Arnie St. Thomas, Marvel said, was a loan shark - and he used the city's money in his operation. Another, Carl Rebeck, was an insurance agent. He didn't do much, just voted the way he was told, and collected a piece of pie. "He's not smart. I doubt that he even knows that what he's doing is illegal. To him, it's just business. The councilman does favors for people, and they pay him for it."
    "Who's the fifth guy?" I asked, typing.
    "Lucius Bell. He's a cutie pie," Marvel said with a genuine smile. "He's a farmer. He's honest, I think, 'cept for one thing."
    "What's that?"
    "Our bridge fell down a few years back. Got hit by a runaway barge. To make a long story short, it never got replaced. Bell's a farmer, mostly on the other side of the river. He came over here and got himself elected to the council for no other reason than to get the bridge back. Everybody knows it; hell, everybody agrees with him."
    "But he's not a big mover with the machine?"
    "No. That's the mayor."
    The mayor, with the council's advice, oversaw nine city departments. Every one of them was corrupt. Even animal control.
    "The dogcatcher is a separate department?" John raised an eyebrow.
    "Gotta lot of mean dogs around here," Harold drawled. He said dawgs, like a country boy.
    "Duane Hill - he's animal control - is the machine's muscle," Marvel said simply.
    "Like when?"
    "Like we had some young lawyers go through here, from the rural legal services. They looked like they might set up shop. Duane got a bunch of his lowlife friends to hassle them. Every time those boys went out, somebody wanted to fight. The cops were always saying they couldn't do anything, it was just some boys gettin' drunk. That was bullshit. Duane himself beat up one of them. With a pool cue. Hurt him so bad the boy had to go to Memphis to get his teeth fixed. Eventually they all went away, and they never came back."
    "Nice guy."
    "Duane's the meanest man on the Mississippi River, I believe," Harold said, with what sounded almost like a note of rueful pride, "He gets a piece of the city council's take, of course, but he also sells dog blood on the side. You know, to veterinary hospitals. He has customers all over the mid-South. The way he gets the blood, he sticks a big needle into the dog's heart and lets it pump out. The more it hurts the dog, the better it is, because the heart beats harder. They say some nights, down at that end of town, you can hear dogs howling for hours."
    "Do you have a contact out there?" I asked Marvel.
    "I've got somebody I can work on," she said.
    "Do it... Now, you mentioned the city attorney a while ago. How does he fit in?"
    "He's the fixer... and maybe, with Chenille, the brains behind everything," Marvel said. "He drinks too much, and he's a bad man. He doesn't like black people, or anybody else, much. He's got two kids - they're both gone now, up North working - and the word is, he doesn't even like them. I'd say he's right at the heart of the