Free The Empress File by John Sandford

she’d scouted in her trip the week before. The city council was meeting, and two dozen cars were parked in the lot sideways across the street from City Hall.
    “Chrysler,” she said, nodding. The mayor’s car was there, identical to the car we were driving. “I don’t see Hill’s pickup.”
    “And I don’t see the Continental.…”
    “May be on the street in front.”
    The Continental would be easy to recognize because it looked exactly like the one we’d left at the Wal-Mart. It belonged to Archie Ballem, the city attorney. We took a left, past the front of the City Hall. No pickup and no Continental.
    “Ballem’s got to be here for the bond hearing,” I said. “Hill, we can’t be sure.”
    “I thought he came to all these things.”
    “That’s what Marvel said.”
    “I’d hate for her to be wrong this early,” LuEllen said. We’d continued down the block past the City Hall. “Let’s go around.… Wait a minute. There he is. There. Ballem.”
    A man in a seersucker suit and a white straw hat was walking down the street toward us. He turned to look at our car as we rolled past. “Are you sure?” I asked.
    “Ninety-nine percent. I saw him last week, on the street. His office is down this way.”
    We found the Continental outside Ballem’s office, three blocks from the City Hall.
    “If we could find Hill…”
    “If we don’t, we’ll call it off,” she said. “But we’ve got the other two.”
    “We go?” I asked.
    “Yes.”
    The phone company was a little redbrick cubicle on a side street, with a lighted blue and white phone booth hung on the side wall. We knew Chenille Dessusdelit, the mayor, was at the meeting. And we knew she was a widow and lived alone. But there might be a guest.… We called her home, but there was no answer. With the twentieth ring LuEllen nipped the receiver off the phone with a pair of compact bolt cutters. The phone would still be ringing at Dessusdelit’s, and with the receiver gone, it was unlikely that anyone would come along and hang up our public phone.
    “Get the portable,” LuEllen said. I knelt on the passenger seat, leaned into the back, unzipped her suitcase, took out the cellular phone, sat down again, and plugged it into the cigarette lighter. Dessusdelit’s line was still busy.
    “Maybe we could get Bobby to kill the call records, so we could just use the cellular and not have to mess with public phones,” I suggested after I had hung up.
    LuEllen shook her head. “Too complicated. Something could get fucked up and we’d be on paper.” She feared paper more than anything: tax records, agreements, leases, checks. Phone bills. Paper left a trail and couldn’t be denied.
    We cruised Dessusdelit’s house just once. A well-kept rambler, it was stuck at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a yard heavy with shrubbery. Trees overhung the streets from both sides, but there were no sidewalks and nobody out for a stroll. Too hot, probably. One light burned in a window at the center of the house, a virtual advertisement that the place was empty. The house on the south side of Dessusdelit’s showed a few lights, but the house on the other side was dark. We came out of the cul-de-sac, took a left past the country club, did a U-turn, and headed back. I dialed Dessusdelit’s house again, and the phone was still busy. I was looking out the window when I heard LuEllen take the first hit of coke. She carries it in small plastic capsules, one long snort apiece.
    “Jesus,” I said.
    “Don’t give me any shit.”
    The coke was on her in a second, but her driving was rock-steady.
    “Zapper,” she said.
    “LuEllen…”
    “Get the fuckin’ zapper.…”
    The zapper was a specialized scanning transmitter that looked like a long-nosed hair dryer. Itcame with its own batteries. I got it out and started hyperventilating. LuEllen likes this part, with the adrenaline. I don’t. LuEllen took us into the cul-de-sac and, without hesitating, into Dessusdelit’s