The Hanged Man’s Song

Chapter Ten

WE SPENT THE AFTERNOON at the Baton Noir. A small but pleasant swimming pool hung off a second-floor deck, and LuEllen put on a modest black bikini and went out to sun herself before the gathering insurance salesmen and lawyerly deal-makers. John began reading through the paper we’d taken out of Carp’s, and I did the laptop.

Among the paper John found dozens of bills, mostly unpaid, indicating that Carp owed upward of $30,000 to various credit card companies. Most of the bills had been sent to an address in Washington, D.C.

He also found Carp’s online service account numbers and e-mail addresses, and increasingly unpleasant letters both to and from a lawyer concerning his mother’s estate. In the latest of those letters, Carp accused the attorney of looting his mother’s bank accounts. John’s impression was that when the lawyer was finished, Carp got the aging mobile home and a few thousand dollars-but he also got the impression that there wasn’t much more than that anyway.

“But he’s really pissed,” John said. “If I were that attorney, I’d be watching for guys in clock towers.”

“He’s desperate for money,” I said. “His mother’s estate must have seemed like a dream come true, and it turns out to be a mirage.”

I GOT started on Carp’s laptop by working my way around the password security. I plugged my laptop into his via a USB cable, ran a program that took control of his hard drive from my laptop, deleted his password file, and I was in. It ain’t rocket science.

One thing I found immediately was that Carp had dozens of documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee: CIA briefings on Cuba, Venezuela, Korea, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and a half-dozen Middle Eastern countries, including some negative assessments of the leaders of Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. None of it was encrypted.

In another file, I found letters to Senator Frank Krause of Nebraska, the head of the committee. There was no indication of whether any had actually been sent, and several showed signs of incomplete editing. All of them were written to object to Carp’s firing, which had happened three months earlier. The other side of the correspondence wasn’t on the computer, and John couldn’t find it among the papers, so it was hard to know exactly why he’d been fired. Judging from Carp’s side of the issue, it may have involved his political views, which were unstated. There was a draft of a note to someone else, another staffer, complaining about the unfairness of his firing, which referred to “crazy feminist politics.”

The letters suggested that his employment involved office computer support-he kept the committee’s computers running, helped with basic software issues and security problems. In an e-mail file, I found a couple hundred complaints and questions typical of an office system: questions about ethernet connections, lost e-mail, distribution lists, password changes, equipment upgrades.

LuEllen came back, carrying a Coke, looking for her suntan cream. The pool was getting crowded, and she was moving from display to exhibition mode.

As she was about to leave again, I hit the mother lode: a file of photographs and short films, two of which we’d already seen on television-the military execution and the blackface film. Nothing about the Norwalk virus.

“This is the Bobby file,” LuEllen said. “This is it.”

We paged through the photos, looking at the captions. John, who’d spent most of his life in politics of a kind, was fascinated. “You could do an unbelievable amount of damage with these things,” he said. He wasn’t enthusiastic, he was awed. “Some of the biggest assholes in the Congress would go down… if this stuff is real.”

“What are they doing in Carp’s computer?” LuEllen asked.

“Must’ve transferred it from Bobby’s,” I said. “A backup, or something, before he started messing with the other files.”

“Okay,” John said, still looking over my shoulder. “Oh my God, look at this. This guy’s a cabinet guy, he’s what? HUD? HEW? Something like that.”

We talked about the effect of the photos for a while. LuEllen thought they’d be revolutionary, but John shook his head. “You read those books about people finding the body of Christ and it ends Christianity, or somebody finds out that the President likes to screw little boys, and that leads to an atomic war. It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “Nothing is simple. Stuff like this ruins careers, it might change the way things work for a while, but the world goes on.”

“You’re an optimist, John,” LuEllen said. “I’m going back to the pool. There are a whole bunch of guys from Texas up there.”

“That’s a blessing,” John said. “Wouldn’t want to miss that.”

I went back to the computer and John finished with the paper. A half hour later, sitting in a dwindling pile of scraps, he said, “Ah, man.” He was holding a slip of paper, shook his head and passed it to me. It was a phone bill for cable repair service, made to Robert Fields. Bobby’s address was right there. “Took it out of Baird’s file,” I said.

“Gotta be,” John said.

LuELLEN had come back, glowing with the sun, took her bikini-ed self into the bathroom to clean up and dress, and when she came back out, turned on the TV. A little while later, changing from Oprah to CNN, she said, “Look at this.”

The Norwalk virus story was exploding: the President, in person, was promising a full investigation. If the so-called test had actually taken place, he said, the persons responsible would be prosecuted. He added that the government had no evidence of such a test and suggested that this “supposed revelation” might be a new kind of terrorist attack intended to discredit the American military and shake up financial markets.

“Getting ugly,” John said.

I went back to the laptop. In a file called Carly, I found thirteen letters to a woman. The earliest ones were friendly technical advice on printing photographs from a new digital camera. They gradually became more personal, and he began trying to cajole her into a date. That apparently didn’t work. In a file called Linda, there were six letters to another woman, with the same tone. There were other files named Shannon and Barb that were a bit more businesslike, but still had that feeling of attention that would make most women nervous.

Another file contained unremarkable glamour shots of super-models, along with a major selection of hard-core porn. Half of it seemed to be young Japanese schoolgirls in plaid skirts; or out of plaid skirts. Given the resolution of the photos, it appeared that most of it had been downloaded from the ’net.

In a file called Contacts, I found addresses and phone numbers for Thomas Baird and Rachel Willowby. In his Microsoft address book, there were several hundred e-mail addresses, and in a PalmPilot sync file, there were thirty or forty home addresses and phone numbers for people I’d never heard of.

Then I stumbled over a file called DDC Working Group-Bobby, and inside, a list of names, e-mail addresses, and a half-dozen phone numbers and a few memos. One of the memos referred to a Deep Data Correlation working group, which explained the “DDC.” I showed it to John and LuEllen.

“What the heck would that be?”

“I don’t know, but we better find out, if we can,” I said. To John: “Anything else?”

“Most of it can be tossed,” he said, patting the pile of paper on the bed. “It’s just bullshit.”

“So toss it,” I said. “I’m gonna call one of these numbers, and then get online, see if there’s anything new from the guys on the ring.”

BACK to the truck stop. From a phone inside, I called the first of the phone numbers for the Deep Data Correlation working group. After the usual long-distance clicking, I got a computer tone, and hung up. Called another number, got another tone. All right: computer access, but no way to get in, not yet.

Then I checked my blind addresses and got an alarm from the address I’d given to Rachel Willowby. It said, “Jimmy James Carp is parked outside-4:17 P.M.”

I looked at my watch: a few minutes past 4:30, so the note had just come in. I fired the car up, took it back to the motel in a hurry. John and LuEllen were flipping cards at a waste basket when I came in.

“We gotta go get her,” John said, when I told them about the note.

“If there’s trouble…” I remembered what Marvel had said about his fingerprint status. “And he’s got a gun.”

“Gotta go anyway,” he said. He was already headed toward the door.

“Made a mistake not bringing a gun with us,” LuEllen said, a step behind him. “Every asshole in Louisiana has a gun in his car except us. And when you need one, like the NRA says, you need one.”

“I’m not sure the NRA would want me to have one,” John said.

“Let’s figure this out on the way over,” I said. “There’s gotta be something we can do. Besides trying to tackle him in the street.”

WE WORKED through a series of harebrained plans as we drove into New Orleans, but there wasn’t time, and there just isn’t much you can do when the other guy has a gun and you don’t.

“One big thing is that none of us can get hung up with the cops,” LuEllen said. “We can’t just jump him in the street and then haul him away. That’s kidnapping and it looks like kidnapping and somebody’s gonna get the license plate number and then we’re toast.”

“Track him, get him inside, wherever he’s staying…”

“But what about the kid?” John asked. “There’s only one reason he’s after the kid, and that’s to find out who tracked him to the trailer.”

“Two reasons,” I said. “The other one is, to shut her up. She can connect him to Bobby.”

“Ah, Jesus. And since he already killed Bobby…”

“You better drive faster, Kidd,” LuEllen said.

“We still gotta figure out the gun.”

“Catch him in the open, and he might be afraid to use it,” I said.

“Gotta get to the girl, though,” John said. “That’s the number-one thing.”

WE WENT straight into Rachel Willowby’s. Didn’t see a Corolla, nothing but the usual beat-up full-sized Chevys and Oldsmobiles; one guy far down the street was washing off the floor mats of his car, but he was the only person we could see moving around outside.

At the Willowby place, John was out on the street before the car stopped rolling, heading for her door. I was out and called, “Take it easy, take it easy.” LuEllen was trailing, hurrying to catch me, and I was hurrying to catch up with John, but he was a dozen steps ahead of me and I didn’t want to run, because running attracts the eye.

Then he was at the door, and instead of knocking, pushed it, and then was inside and the shouting started, “Hey, hey, hey…” and then I was in, blinking in the sudden darkness of the interior. John was halfway across the small front room, Rachel Willowby was sitting at the kitchen table in front of her laptop, and Carp stood beside the table.

He had the gun.

“… are you motherfuckers?” Carp was shouting.

“Friends of Rachel’s,” John was saying over the top of Carp’s question. “We’re friends of Rachel’s and she says she’s in trouble.”

“Is this a friend of Rachel’s?” Carp asked, waving the gun barrel at me. “Where in the hell did he come from? And who’s that?” He looked past me, and I half turned. LuEllen peeked around the door frame and said, “We called 911, they’re on the way.”

Carp glanced toward the back door on the other side of the kitchen, and his tongue flicked out. “You guys are from the working group. Tell Krause to stay the fuck away from me or I will bomb them. I will fuckin’ blow them up.”

“Who? What group? What are you talking about?” John asked. He stepped toward Carp, but he looked at me. He needed a couple more steps.

“Krause,” Carp said.

“What?” John asked. Another short shuffle step.

CARP shot him.

The gun was a.22, but even a.22 sounds like a cannon when it’s fired in a small concrete cubicle, and the muzzle flash lit us up and John staggered and went down and Carp was already across the kitchen and banging out the door. I went as far as the door and saw him running toward the back of the lot, aiming for a space between two duplexes. He’d parked one street over, I thought. He was running awkwardly and I knew I could catch him and took two quick steps and was snagged by LuEllen’s voice: “Kidd!”

I stopped, then went back.

“John’s hit. We’ve gotta move.”

Rachel was frozen next to her laptop. John was on his feet, his left hand clapped over his right triceps, and looked at her and said, “I’m a pretty nice guy who lives up north of here on the Mississippi and I’ve got two kids and a nice wife. If you want to come with me, you can stay with us until we find your mom. But you gotta decide right now.”

She looked at him for a long three seconds, then turned and pulled the power cord on her laptop. “I’m coming. I gotta get my bag.”

JOHN was hit in the middle of his triceps, and though he didn’t think the bone was broken, he thought the bullet might have grooved it. The slug was still inside his arm, and he was shaky as he was walking out to the car: trembling now from post-fight adrenaline and shock. We were operating in full daylight yet, but I could hear traffic passing and a plane overhead and music from somewhere, and we didn’t seem to be attracting much attention. I’ve heard a theory that you can shoot a gun once anywhere and get away with it; it’s twice or three times that causes a problem. Maybe that’s right: in any case, we got John into the backseat of the car without any trouble.

LuEllen slid in beside him, on the wound side, and Rachel, carrying a plastic Wal-Mart shopping bag full of clothes, got in the front passenger seat.

I had no idea where Carp had gone. Never saw a Corolla. And at that point, didn’t much care.

LuELLEN looked at the bullet hole and said, “There’s no pulsing blood, but he’s bleeding. What do you want to do?”

“Get back to Longstreet,” John said. “I can handle it if I can get back home.”

“That’s six hours, man.”

“Doesn’t hurt that much yet. Put a pressure bandage on it back at the motel.”

“I’ve got some Vicodin at the motel,” LuEllen said, looking at me. “We could get back to Longstreet, if he doesn’t bleed to death.”

“Is he gonna bleed to death?” I asked. Rachel was now kneeling on the front seat, looking wide-eyed at John over the seat back.

“I don’t think so,” LuEllen said. “Not if we keep some pressure on it. He may be down a pint when we get there.”

SO THAT’S what we did: checked out of the Baton Noir, a pressure bandage, made out of a fresh towel, tight against the wound. Couldn’t speed: had to stay right on the limit. On the way north, when we were clear of New Orleans, John placed a long-distance call to Memphis and asked to talk with Andy. He had to wait for a moment, and then said, “Hey, man, this is John. I been bit. Uh-huh. Went in right in the triceps, not too bad, there’s no artery bleeding, but it didn’t come through.” He explained the bandages, and where we were. “We’re about five hours out from Longstreet, coming up from New Orleans. I’d appreciate it if you could have George come down and take a look. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. That’d be good. Some shit this chick gave me, um, Vicodin, and it doesn’t hurt much. Uh-huh. I’ll see you then.”

We didn’t talk much. I was focused on driving, and John was trying to sleep. We caught snatches of news from various talk-radio stations and it was all about the Norwalk attack; that and the upcoming high school football season. At one point, John said, “Jesus, this is boring,” and then, “Carp said we should tell Krause to stay away from him. That’d have to be the senator. Head of the committee.”

“Carp said that?” LuEllen asked. “I didn’t hear that.”

Rachel said, “He asked me if a Mr. Krause had called, or somebody from the government, and I thought he meant you because he said it was a white man and a black man together.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I told him that a white man and a black man came and said they was Bobby’s friends, and they were looking for Bobby.”

John exhaled and said, “Not good.”

“He was gonna kill me, man,” Rachel said. “He said he’d shoot me right in the eyeball, and he would have. He’s a crazy man. And he does want to fuck me.”

ONCE in Longstreet, we paused at the local Super 8 just long enough for LuEllen to check in. LuEllen didn’t want to see any new faces-she’d already seen too many that day, and there wasn’t any point to her coming along. After she had a room, John and I and Rachel continued to John’s place. A new Chevrolet was parked in the driveway, and Marvel was pacing around in the yard. When she saw me coming, she ran up to the car window and looked in the back and saw John and jerked open the door and cried, “How bad? George is here, how bad?”

MARVEL was angry and unhappy and scared, and also worried about Rachel, never quite understanding from me what was going on with the girl. George, as it turned out, was a doctor, a big squared-headed, square-chested guy who might have been a tight end in another life, and he was prepared to operate right in the house. He frowned when he first saw me, a white guy, but never asked a question.

John was the calmest of us all, and took some time to explain to Marvel the exact situation with Rachel. As he did that, George was checking his blood pressure: checked it once, checked it again, then nodded. “Good blood pressure,” he said to Marvel.

When that was done, John told Marvel to go away-“Go anywhere, I just don’t want you fussin’ around”-and we went into the kitchen, where George had spread a sterile sheet on the kitchen table.

After washing John’s arm with an antiseptic, George gave him a blocking shot, pulled on some sterile plastic gloves and a mask, and went to work on the arm. He didn’t have any X rays, but he seemed familiar with gunshot wounds, and located the.22 slug with a probe. He had to work it awhile, with a variety of small tools that would have looked at home on a dentist’s tray. In twenty minutes he’d winkled the slug out into his glove.

“Gonna hurt like heck in the morning,” he told John. “I’ll give you some stuff to take, some painkillers and antiseptics, but it’s still gonna be sore.”

There was more to it than that-especially on Marvel’s side, because she was royally pissed-and sometime after two o’clock, I went down to the Super 8 and fell into bed next to LuEllen.

THE next morning, first thing, without bothering with security, I went out on the Super 8 phone line and checked my mail-boxes.

There was nothing from the ring, but there was a letter from Bobby.

Kidd:

I’ve been gone for a while now. I assume that I’m dead, though maybe I’m just too sick to stop this from going out. Here is the important thing: a good friend of mine, who calls himself Lemon, has a selected set of my working documents, and will continue my operation now that I am gone. He does not know you or of you (unless you have a connection that I don’t know about) but will take you as a client. To sign on with him you need to identify yourself as 118normalgorgeousredhead at lemon@ebonetree.net and provide him with a dump address. I leave that to you, if you want a new hookup. He’s not a bad guy and has substantial resources. Anyway, good luck and good-bye; it’s been interesting working with you.

– Bobby

That gave me a chill: a voice from beyond, more or less.

LuEllen got the same chill. “Dead people should stay dead. You shouldn’t be talking to people after you’re dead.”

“He might not be completely dead.”

“What?”

“He’s like Janis Joplin or Frank Sinatra. I heard ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ on the radio the night I drove up to Jackson. Janis is dead, but I never knew her personally, and I keep hearing her song, so to me, it’s the same as if she was still alive. Her song keeps going.”

“Yeah, but this… I mean, the guy’s talking to you, personally.”

GEORGE, the doctor, had gone home. No longer worried about another person seeing her face, LuEllen came with me to John’s. Marvel ushered the kids out into the yard, where they wouldn’t hear it, and said-shouted-something like this at us:

“I don’t know what the three of you could have been thinking of. What the fuck could you have been thinking of? You already got shot at once. You already got your asses shot at in the trailer. Why did you think he wouldn’t shoot you again? You knew the crazy motherfucker had a gun, because he already shot at you. Why didn’t you call the cops? Fuck this laptop. What was going on in your stupid heads? Is there anything in there at all? Look at this silly motherfucker sitting at the kitchen table with a big bandage on him and that shit-eating grin on his face like some watermelon-eatin’ coon in a goddamned travelin’ show. Oh, Lord, why does Thy servant have to put up with this shit? Why is that…”

You get the idea.

JOHN was okay. He was going to be okay, though George was right: he hurt like hell. And Rachel was okay. She and Marvel had come to an understanding, and she sat at the kitchen table with John, pounding down the Cream of Wheat, enjoying the Marvel show. After we got Marvel calmed down-calmed down wasn’t exactly the idea, but quieted down, anyway-I went back to the motel and continued mining Carp’s laptop, going online to look for names, places, dates. LuEllen went visiting, out to see a farmer friend who lived across the river. She came back in the early afternoon and told me that the Norwalk attack was getting more and more play, and that there was virtually nothing else on television.

“It’s like the days after nine-eleven,” she said. “It’s really brutal.”

I KEPT working, since I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

Two-thirds of the names in the PalmPilot sync list were identifiable through Google: I’d stick the name in and the information would pop up. Most of the names were associated with the Intelligence Committee and belonged to minor political onions in the Washington stew. Others belonged to computer people, and only a few seemed to be personal.

The personal names were the hardest to get information on. Of the dozen names in the file, I struck out on four of them, and while I found the other eight, I couldn’t determine any particular connection between Carp and the person named, except in the case of his dentist.

The DDC Working Group-Bobby remained a mystery.

“WE’RE coming to a blank wall,” I said. We were back at John’s, the three of us together. Marvel was down at city hall, perpetrating some commie plot. Rachel had gone with her, and the two kids were taking a nap.

“Could we hack into CNN and when he attacks, figure out where it’s coming from?” John asked.

I shook my head. “Not unless we had the phone line, right when he was on it. We’d have to monitor thousands of calls.”

“You can’t tell just from his address.”

“Naw. He can just grab a wi-fi system like we did and ship it from some one-time e-mail address. I’m sure that’s what he’s doing, or the feds would have grabbed him by now. He’s like Bobby-he’s coming out of nowhere.”

LuEllen asked the key question: “What do you think about him?”

I said, “He might be nuts. He probably killed Bobby, he lost his job and he has no money and he’s way deep in debt, he doesn’t seem to have any friends, women don’t like him, his mother just died, he feels like he’s been ripped off by this lawyer.”

“Anything in there about his dog?” John asked.

AFTER more talk, I decided to get in touch with Lemon, Bobby’s successor. Among other things, I needed to tell him that Bobby was dead, in case he didn’t know for sure, and to set up a routine we could use to communicate with each other. I also wanted to check again on the FBI investigation.

That evening LuEllen and I drove down to Greenville and located another warehouse with a friendly wi-fi. I called into the FBI first, went straight to the guy’s folder, and found some snappy memos back and forth from Jackson, the essence of which was that they were getting nowhere. I signed off and went looking for Lemon.

Lemon from 118normalgorgeousredhead:

I am a friend of Bobby’s and a member of the ring. Went to Bobby’s house with another member of ring, found Bobby murdered and his laptop gone. His true name was Robert Fields of Jackson, Mississippi; see news stories on cross-burning in Jackson. We have informed National Security Agency of his identity in effort to close attacks on hack community. We have Bobby’s backup DVDs but they are encrypted. The current holder of the laptop is launching attacks signed Bobby. Apparently not all files are encrypted; we are trying to recover it. We are searching for a man named James Carp, a former employee of U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee who we believe now holds the laptop and is launching the attacks. Any help appreciated. We believe it necessary to find Carp before government agents. Believe agents already searching for him.

– Estragon

I dumped it with a return address, and then went looking in another direction. We had all of his credit card numbers from the bills we’d found at his place. Credit card databases are basic stuff, and I checked the ones I had for card activity: as far as I could tell, he hadn’t used a credit card for a month.

LuEllen had the inspiration: “Check his mom’s cards.”

I did, and immediately found a Shell card that was getting activity. It had been used the afternoon of the shooting-once, an hour later, near Slidell. Had he gone back to his mother’s place, or was he just heading east on I-10? No way to know from just that. But the next use of the card was at a pump in Meridian, Mississippi, way north on I-59. Then, the next morning-just about the time Marvel had been screaming at us about John-he’d used it to charge gas and food in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

“Going north,” I said. “Going fast.”

“Headed for Washington.”

“Maybe.”

A HALF-HOUR had passed by the time we finished with the credit cards, and I went back to my dump site. We found a note from Lemon:

Estragon:

YOU MUST RECOVER THE LAPTOP. When I was online with Bobby, he rapidly accessed multiple encrypted laptop files, I believe with encryption codes kept on the laptop itself. I don’t know how codes were kept, but maybe disguised as another encrypted file. While Carp may not be able to use them, any encryption center would break them out almost immediately, if that is how they are disguised. GET THE LAPTOP. I will search for Carp and advise at this address. Much Carp information online. He maintains current address at 1448 Clay Street, Apt. 523, Washington, D.C.

I went back with the three e-mail addresses we had for Carp, suggested that Lemon monitor them, but not give away his presence:

We maybe try to find Carp for face-to-face using e-mail, if nothing else works.

He was back in a second:

Will do that, will begin research now. You go to Washington?

I went back:

Think so. Will advise. Will check here every six hours.

He said,

Who did burning cross?

I said,

We did-wanted FBI investigation, so we could monitor. Monitoring now, they find nothing, but should start working on Bobby angle.

He said,

Okay. Will get back in six hours.

“ARE we going to Washington?” LuEllen asked.

“Tell you in a minute. I’m gonna run a little check on this Lemon stuff.”

I went back out, looked in a couple of databases, and came up with a phone bill-a big phone bill-for Carp at the Clay Street address in Washington. “There it is,” I said.

“So…”

“Everything goes there,. Carp’s headed that way, Lemon says he has a current apartment there, and so does AT &T, and there’s this working-group thing. I think that’s where it’ll happen.” I turned and put my arm around her shoulder. “But it’s getting a little strange for a simple burglary wench,” I said.

“I’ll hang on for a while longer. Guy’s starting to piss me off.”

BACK in Longstreet, we lost John, which we’d expected. Marvel, arms crossed, said, “I’m putting my foot down. If John gets killed, I’ll have to find work to support the kids. To do that, I’ll have to go out of town and the whole Longstreet project goes down the drain. So I’m telling him, No.”

John looked abashed, the guy who didn’t want to appear to be under his wife’s thumb, but who knew she was right. I couldn’t see any reason for him to come with us. “It’s all gonna be computer stuff at this point. If we need help carrying a body, we’ll give you a ring.”

“Do that,” he said. But I think he wanted to come.

WE LEFT for Washington the next morning, driving. We were driving because that’s about the only anonymous way to travel around the U.S. Everything else will wind up in a database.

Even by car, anonymity is tough: if you pay for motels or gas with credit cards, if you speed and get a ticket, if you use your cell phone, you’re gonna be on a computer, fixed at an exact spot at an exact time. I’d noticed, once-you can see for yourself-that when you pull up to the parking-garage exit booth at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, to pay your money, they’ll give you a receipt with your license tag number printed on it. This is four seconds after you pulled up, so your tag is being automatically read somewhere along the line.

Both LuEllen and I had a couple of alter egos who had their own credit cards, all carefully paid, and we used hers in the only motel we needed while heading north. Building an alter ego is almost like identity theft, but backwards. You build a nonexistent life, rather than steal someone else’s. It’s fun, if you’re careful.

The trip was pleasant enough, nine hundred miles or so with the inevitable side trips to look for decent food and places to run. We did it in one long and one reasonably short day, riding up I-40 to I-81 through the heart of the summer, along the Appalachians and up the Shenandoah, then over to Washington on I-66.

The first night, in a mom-and-pop hotel, I went online and found a note from Lemon:

Find six calls last night and this morning from Carp’s Washington apartment.

I went back:

On the way. Need anything new.

WE WOUND up in a Holiday Inn in Arlington, checking in separately, for separate rooms, although we’d only use one or the other. It’s better to have a bolt-hole and not need one, than to need one and not have it.

LuEllen checked in first, dropped her bags, then walked back out to the parking garage and gave me her room number. I checked in, put a bag in my room, stuck a sport coat in a closet, rumpled up the bed, hung a “Do Not Disturb” ticket on the door, then toted the rest of my stuff up to LuEllen’s. There was one big bed, and the room was decorated with colors that you forgot when you weren’t looking at them. Like almost everything now, it smelled of cleaning fluids.

“So,” LuEllen said. She pulled back a curtain and looked out: cars and tarmac. The sun was still well above the horizon. “What’s first? Carp’s?”

“That seems reasonable. Take a look at it, anyway. Watch the news for a while.”

WE’D missed the initial newsbreak, being stuck in the car, but Senator David Johnson of Illinois was being accused of covering up a drunk-driving incident involving his oldest daughter. According to what CNN referred to as “the source known as Bobby,” Debra Johnson’s car had struck a middle-aged bicyclist in downtown Normal, Illinois. The man had suffered a broken wrist and bruises and scrapes, and his bike had been destroyed.

Debra Johnson had paid a ticket for careless driving, but the initial ticket had been for Driving While Intoxicated, issued to her after she had failed a Breathalyzer test. She’d been transported to a local hospital after the accident, complaining of head pain, and had never been taken to police headquarters.

The bicyclist had settled for twenty thousand dollars for pain and suffering. Initial reports said that the money had come from Johnson’s campaign fund, which is illegal.

Johnson hadn’t yet made a statement, but the vultures were circling. A photograph accompanied the news release-a picture of a drunk-looking young woman standing in a city street, between a cop car and a Saturn, looking at the camera, her eyes bright red with the reflected flash.

“Goddamnit,” I said. “He’s gotta let up.”

“Pouring blood in the water,” LuEllen said.

From the Johnson story, CNN went directly to the Norwalk virus-San Francisco story, which the talking head said was “consistent in style with other releases from the Bobby source.”

California was planning to sue the federal government for a trillion dollars for damage done by the Norwalk virus experiment, CNN said. The money would be used to provide educational programs on the virus and to close the state’s budget gap. A San Francisco law firm had signed up seventy thousand people on its website for a class-action suit claiming that the virus did irreparable damage to the victims’ health, destroyed their businesses, drove away tourists, caused building foundations to fail, encouraged cats and dogs to interbreed, and allowed Russian thistle to invade the ecosystem. They also wanted a trillion dollars.

A more serious study by UC Berkeley suggested that four people had died in San Francisco of complications arising from an initial Norwalk virus infection. Weeping members of all four families were shown, the cameras lingering lovingly on the tears rolling down overweight cheeks. The victims had all been good providers.

The government was now denying that the experiment took place, but nobody believed it anymore. There was too much money at stake.

In rounding up the Bobby stories, the anchorman said that the special forces officer accused of executing an Arab prisoner had been flown into Washington and was being questioned by members of the Army’s criminal investigation division.

THEN a second guy, a media specialist, went off in another direction: “The one question that everybody is asking is, ‘Who is this Bobby, where does he get this stuff, and what does he want?’ ” To help him with this conundrum, he interviewed two congressmen who were newly enough elected to be fairly clean, two media advisors-public relations guys, we supposed-and the mayor of San Francisco.

After cutting through the bullshit, the answer was that they had no idea of who Bobby was, where he got the stuff, or what he wanted. One of the PR guys guessed that Bobby was a hacker who was getting his information from government databases, said Bobby probably wasn’t acting alone, and referred to Bobby’s group as “Al-Code-a.”

“That’s bad,” I said.

“Carp’s gonna have a short life span as Bobby,” LuEllen said. “If we don’t get him soon, somebody else will.”

CARP’S apartment was in the District, two miles due north of the White House, on Clay Street between Fourteenth and Fifteenth, and a half-block east of Meridian Hill Park. The building was a crappy brown-brick five-story wreck; we cruised it once, and on the back side found that half the tenants had their wash hung out on the balconies. The whole area was run-down, with the kind of street life that suggests you might want to look over your shoulder every once in a while: idle guys, walking around with their hands in their pockets, surrounded by an air of hip-hop cool; clusters of skaters; a drug entrepreneur whose eyes skidded right past me; women in government secretarial dress who walked as if they had a cold wind at their back, shoulders hunched, heads down. Alleys, with people in them; trash on the streets and sidewalks; and some graffiti.

Up the hill from the apartment was Meridian Park, with a fountain that dropped in a pretty series of steps down a long hill toward the south. Down the hill was Fourteenth Street, with some ordinary strip-shopping-center businesses-nail places, a pizza parlor, a diner, a branch bank, like that. There was enough automobile traffic that nobody gave us a second look as we made the pass at Carp’s place. The curbs were packed with cars, mostly old and beat-up. No sign of a Corolla.

From his bills, we knew Carp’s apartment was on the fifth floor, which, from the outside, appeared to be the top one. As we got to the bottom of the hill, at Fourteenth, an aging Ford Explorer started backing out of a parking spot across the street. I barged through oncoming traffic and grabbed the spot.

We were now two hundred feet from the apartment entrance, parked in front of a place called either Lost and Damaged Freight or Major Brand Overstocks, or both; I never figured it out. We sat and watched for a while, then started working on a New York Times crossword puzzle, hung up on an eight-letter word across the middle of the puzzle, the clue being, “Old grape’s reason for being?”

“Raison d’être?” LuEllen suggested. She took the words right out of my mouth.

“Eleven letters,” I said, counting them on my fingers. “Unless I’m spelling it wrong.”

“Look it up. Gotta be ‘raison’ something-or-other. The question mark in the clue means it’s a pun.”

“Ah, man.” But I got out the laptop and called up the Merriam-Webster. Eleven letters.

We were in the car for two hours, off and on, watching the sun go down, still working on the puzzle, hung up on the old grape. There was nothing going on in my brain that would answer that question, but I was still working on it when the streetlights came on.

“Better think about what we’re gonna do,” I said.

“Shush,” LuEllen said. “Look at these guys.”

Two guys were walking up the street toward Carp’s apartment. They were hard to make out in the fading light, but one was black, one white.

“The guys from Carp’s place, the mobile home?” I whispered, even though there was nobody around.

“I think so. They look right. They’re built right,” she said. “They must be tracking him, just like we are.” The two stood on the low stoop for a minute, looking at the street, then up at the face of the apartment. One was dressed in khaki slacks, a T-shirt, and a sport coat, the other in slacks and a golf shirt. They were not from the neighborhood.

“Cops of some kind?” I suggested, as they disappeared inside the building.

“Probably not exactly cops,” LuEllen said. “They’re not carrying guns, unless they’re those little ankle things. They don’t have all that shit clipped to their belts that cops have. No beepers, no cell phones, no cuffs, nothing to conceal it with.”

“So we know Carp’s place is hot. Somebody’s inside, probably the feds.”

“Probably. All they’d need is one guy inside, in the hallway or on the stairs on the way up, and we’d be toast.”

My eye was pulled to another too-fast movement in the direction of Meridian Park. “Uh-oh. Look at this, look at this,” I said. A bulky figure was jogging down the sidewalk. “That’s fuckin’ Carp,” I said.

“This guy’s a blond, a blond.” Floppy blond hair fell around the jogger’s rounded shoulders.

“I don’t care, that’s Carp,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“Let’s go where?” She caught my arm.

“Up the hill. See what happens. See what we can see.”

“I don’t know,” she said, with a tone of urgency, but I was out of the car, and heard her car door slam behind me as I crossed Fourteenth and headed into Clay Street, toward the apartment.

Up ahead, most of a block away, Carp dodged a car and ran up the steps into the building. I was moving that way and LuEllen called, “Kidd, slow down, slow down.”

I slowed. Slow is always best. “He didn’t have the laptop,” I said. “It’s either in his apartment or it’s in his car. If we can find the car, a red Corolla, it’s gotta be close.”

“But if it’s in the apartment, then somebody else is in on the deal. Maybe he’s still working with these guys. Maybe they were in New Orleans to meet him, and we chased him away before they could meet.”

She had my arm again, restraining me, just a bit of back pressure above the elbow. But I was moving along and we’d started up the hill when we heard the shots.

This was not a.22. This was three or four shots from something a lot bigger. We stopped, then LuEllen said, “Turn around, turn around,” and we turned around so we were facing back downhill. A black guy was sitting on a stoop at an apartment across the street, reading a newspaper, and when he heard the shots, stood up quickly and stepped inside his door.

“Keep walking, keep walking,” LuEllen said. We were walking downhill, looking over our shoulders, stumbling on the uneven sidewalk. Then the white guy we’d seen go inside the apartment, the white guy from the trailer, we thought, smashed through Carp’s apartment door, fell down the stoop, tried to get up, and fell down again, into the street, hurt bad.

Carp was through the door, on top of him with the gun. He fired a single shot into the white guy’s head, and the white guy went down like a pancake, flat on his face.

“Ah, Jesus,” I said, and LuEllen was chanting, “No, no, no,” and her fingernails dug into my forearm.

Carp ran up the hill toward the park, stuffing the gun in his pocket as he went.

Above us, on the second floor of Carp’s building, a woman threw open a window and began screaming, “Nine-one-one, nine-one-one, nine-one-one,” and I wondered why she didn’t call it herself, until it occurred to me that she didn’t have a phone. An old white man came out on the steps and pointed a shaky finger at the vanishing Carp. “There he goes. There he goes,” but there was nobody to look, and nobody to chase him.

“Don’t run,” LuEllen said. Her fingernails were digging into me now. Carp was gone. “Do not run. Just walk away. Just walk.”

“Who were those guys?” I wondered.

“I don’t know, but I bet Carp thought he knew. I bet he thought they were you and John.”

“You think?”

“A white guy and a black guy, coming on to him just like you came on to him in the trailer and at Rachel’s.”

“But he knows John’s shot.”

“He doesn’t know it. He knows he fired the pistol, but he was running before John went down.” We could hear sirens now, and LuEllen pushed me down to the corner. “The cops. Keep walking. They’ll want witnesses, and people saw us.”

WE CROSSED Fourteenth, got into my car, and carefully drove away, going north. A few blocks up, I turned over to Fifteenth and followed it down past Meridian Park. We could look down the hill toward Carp’s, where two white District squad cars were jamming up the street. No sign of an ambulance, although there were more sirens in the air.

LuEllen said, “If we keep doing this, I might have to go out for some Hamburger Helper.”

“Naw. C’mon, goddamnit.” Hamburger Helper was her euphemism for cocaine. She’d had her nose into the stuff since I’d known her, and I’d given up trying to wean her off of it. But I hate that shit. If American civilization falls, it’ll happen because of the drug monkey on our backs.

“Might need to,” she said.

“Then why don’t you go home,” I said. “Better to have you out of it than sticking that shit up your nose.”

“Really?”

“It’s gonna kill you,” I said, avoiding the question. I really wanted her to stick around.

She was silent for a while, and then, a mile out of the motel, her voice morose, shaky, she said, “Raisinet.”

“What?” I was still irritated.

“Eight letters. Old grape’s reason for being.”