The Hanged Man’s Song

Chapter Thirteen

LuELLEN HAD BEEN AWAKE half the night, occasionally poking me to ask, “Are you still awake?” and then following with a disturbing question. Like “What are our chances?” and “Why do you think Carp cracked Bobby’s computer?” and “Would Bobby really put the decryption codes on the same computer?”

“Our problem is,” I groaned late in the night, “is that we really didn’t know Bobby. We thought his security was almost perfect, but some low-rent federal technician figures out a way to get to him.”

She pushed herself up on her elbows and was looking down at me in the dark. Somehow, she still had nice-smelling breath. “We know they’re looking for us. Looking for you and me, I mean. Personally.”

“They have been since the satellite heist,” I said. “I never gave a shit before. We were covered.”

“So what’s going to happen?” she asked.

“Well, in the next three minutes, I’m going back to sleep. Unless you stick a finger in my ribs again. Christ, I almost pulled a muscle.”

“Why do you think Carp cracked Bobby’s computer?”

“Because I haven’t seen anything, anywhere, about the Norwalk virus. That’s the biggest thing he’s done so far, and I can’t find any trace of it in the DDC files.”

WHEN we finally got up the next morning, LuEllen insisted that we get out the tarot cards. I dug out the card box and did a spread called the Celtic Cross, which I like because it combines simplicity and flexibility. The Hanged Man came up again, but this time, as the basis of the problem rather than the outcome. The outcome spot was taken by a card from the minor arcana, the King of Cups, in the reversed position.

“Is that bad?” she asked. She became very quiet and focused when I was doing a reading.

“It’s ambiguous, just like the readings with the Hanged Man,” I said, as I rewrapped the deck in the silk rag. “It can mean treachery, but that doesn’t tell us a hell of a lot. Everything in this deal is treacherous.”

“So are we stuck?”

“I think… I may have a really bad idea. Either that, or I’m a genius.”

She looked at me skeptically. “What idea?”

“Remember when I went to see Rosalind Welsh? That moved some people around. I’m thinking… what if we go after Senator Krause? Face to face. Figure out where he lives, hit him sometime when he’s alone, or maybe with only another guy or his wife.”

A few minutes earlier, she’d run down the hall to get a bottle of orange juice, and now she stood drinking it, draining it, looking at me. She licked the last of the juice off her upper lip, and she said, “That sounds like a last resort.”

“We don’t have that many resorts left. And this DDC business scares the shit out of me. I can’t believe that they’re running a test on public officials-somebody in there is goofy. It’s already out of control.”

“So let’s keep it as a last resort and figure out a couple of other resorts that we can go to first.”

One thing we did, right away, was drive over to our wi-fi site and go online looking for Lemon. He wasn’t around-Bobby had always been around, but then, Bobby was crippled-so we left a message telling him that Carp had killed two people, and that we were going to have to give up his name.

Carp is undergoing psychotic collapse, may kill more people. We will wait until we hear from you.

We had breakfast, and then went back online. Lemon had strayed, but not far. He was there when we went back:

Don’t give up Carp name yet. Must get laptop. Can’t let feds get laptop. If they get laptop, we could be done. I have been doing research on Carp and find he has girlfriend Mary Griggs lives in Arlington. Suggest check before giving up name. Also searching possibility that he has been in contact with old employer. Nothing yet. Check Arlington and get back.

– Lemon

He appended a note with Griggs’s address and phone number.

“Man, this Lemon guy has to understand that we’re not cops,” LuEllen said. “We can’t kick down the door and bust somebody.”

“He might not understand that,” I said. “Half of these guys live on video games and never get out of their folks’ basement.”

“Carp got out.”

“Yeah. But he’s nuts. I think Lemon’s right: we ought to see if we can spot him. He can’t carry the laptop everywhere. If we can spot him, and we see him going out with Griggs, we can hit the apartment, or hit the car, grab the laptop, and call the feds in.”

“I don’t know,” she said moodily. She shifted around in the car seat, looking over her shoulder. She was spooked by all the DDC stuff. “The whole feel of the thing is changing.”

“Want out?”

“I want to see what you’re gonna do. But this time, we take the gun.”

I DIALED Griggs’s number. That seemed like an easy enough first step. The phone rang and I handed it to LuEllen, who listened for what seemed like a long time, and then said, “Hi, is, uh, Terry there?”

She asked with the voice women use when an unknown male answers the telephone of a female friend, a voice that seems to ask, rapist? lover? plumber? Then she listened for a moment and said, “Gee, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did, I’m just silly.”

She got off and turned to me. “Guy’s voice.”

“So let’s go take a peek.”

“Didn’t… mmm… sound like Carp. I only heard him for that one minute at Rachel’s, but he seemed kinda squeaky. High-pitched. This guy had some hormones. His whole attitude was sorta… cool.”

“I dunno,” I said. And I didn’t.

MARY GRIGGS lived in a small brick apartment building in the Ballston area of Arlington, an upwardly mobile neighborhood with a little rolling contour, a four-acre park in the middle of it, the whole thing almost as green as Longstreet. The day was insufferably hot and humid. By contrast, the park looked pleasant and cool, with big spreading trees and what I took to be government workers sitting on the park benches eating their bag lunches.

We left the car a block off the park, down toward a busy street. LuEllen had spotted a deli as we went in, and we stopped and got sandwiches-apparently the source of the government sandwiches and white paper bags-carried our own lunches up the block and across the street to the park, found a bench where we could see the front of the Griggs apartment building, and nibbled on the sandwiches. Off to our left, a woman was lying on a blanket, reading a book. A bunch of kids were sliding down a curvy slide at a playground, and a park worker was changing a net at a beach-volleyball court that featured real ankle-deep yellow sand.

Because I was carrying a gun, I’d worn a sport coat, despite the heat, and had the revolver in the left breast pocket. There might have been a little fullness on that side, but nothing obvious. Still, I could feel the weight hanging off my chest.

“That kind of building,” LuEllen said, looking at Griggs’s apartment, “is the worst of all possibilities.”

“Worse than a Saddle River jeweler’s house with a hundred-thousand-dollar alarm system?”

“In some ways,” she said, launching into a burglar’s analysis. “You have an insider in the jeweler’s house, so you eventually figure out a way to handle the system. You’ve got somebody telling you when the house will be more or less empty, and even if it’s not empty, you can spot the people still inside. But you get a place like this, people are coming and going all the time-nobody knows who’ll be coming and going, or why. It’s random. And the building is older so it’s probably got relatively thin walls: if you have to break a door, somebody’ll hear you. Or they’ll see the damage. Plus, everybody inside probably recognizes strangers.” She took a bite out of her sandwich and studied the building.

“Just don’t tell me you’d go in over the roof,” I said. She liked ropes and climbing.

“I was just thinking that was a possibility,” she admitted. “You avoid a lot of issues that way. And look at the windows. They’re the old-style windows that open, with a twist-lock. You poke a hole through the glass, twist the lock, slide it up, and you’re in. You don’t meet anybody in the hallways, you don’t have to break any doors. No visible damage.”

“Of course, you have to get on the roof.”

“That can be done.” She studied it some more. A guy in a funny old-fashioned snap-brimmed hat strolled by, led by a bulldog on a leash. The guy took a good look at LuEllen; the bulldog sniffed what I assumed was a bed of pansies-they looked like the African violets in Strom’s sink from the day before, but in lighter colors, and with more variety-and then lifted a leg and peed on them.

I was following them on their path through the park when I saw the guy with the binoculars. I casually turned back to LuEllen and said, “If you look past the back of my head, you’ll see a guy in a blue shirt looking at us with binoculars. Either that, or he’s looking at a really low bird.”

She turned toward me and laughed, threw back her head, and said, “I see him. Yup. Who is it? Somebody tagged us? How did that happen? So now what? We run?”

“Maybe not run, but we go. I’ll wad up the sandwich bag and walk over to the trash can to throw it in, and you can sit here. Then I’ll call you over, like I’m looking at something. That’ll get us a hundred feet toward the car.”

“I hope he doesn’t have a camera. I hope he doesn’t have a long lens. I hope he doesn’t have our faces.”

“Just binoculars so far,” I said. When people look at you with binoculars, or shoot your picture with a long lens, they unconsciously take a particular position that gives them away. A guy looking at you with binoculars, for example, will have his arms and hands in almost a perfect triangle, elbows out, fists meeting in front of his eyes. Photographers, on the other hand, scrunch their arms together as they support the camera and lens, and their faces are completely obscured by the camera body. When you see either one of them, you won’t mistake the positions for anything else.

I got up, took LuEllen’s bag, made a little show of scrunching it up. She pulled her feet onto the park bench, while I strolled toward the trash basket. I dumped the bag, did a double take at something, then waved LuEllen over.

She got up and strolled toward me. I was looking at her, and past her. The guy with the binoculars was gone. “We better hurry,” I told her when she came up. “He’s out of sight.”

She nodded and we turned, walked a little way toward the edge of the park, and then I turned and walked backward with her, saying, “Yadda yadda yadda yadda,” so that I appeared to be talking with her, but still couldn’t pick up the guy with the binoculars. “Okay,” I said. “Time to move faster.”

She nodded and we both started jogging down the diagonal sidewalk to the corner, the car a block farther on. At the cross street I looked back at the park, but didn’t see anything-and then Carp broke out of a little copse of trees a scant seventy yards away. He was running fast, for as big as he was, a pair of binoculars dangling from his neck, and he had a gun in one hand.

“He’s coming,” I said. “It’s Carp and he’s got the gun.” LuEllen looked the same way and we broke into a hard run. Carp was about as close to us as we were to the car. He hip-checked a Cadillac in the street as we ran down the sidewalk toward the car, and I said, “We’re gonna slow down getting in and getting started.” I pulled the car keys out of my pants pocket and handed them to her. “You drive. If he opens up on us, I’ll slow him down.”

She didn’t say anything: that would have been a waste of time. She was moving, breaking off the sidewalk to run between two parked cars, then up the street toward the driver’s side of our car. Carp broke around the corner deli when we were still twenty yards away from it. Then LuEllen was inside and I dragged open the passenger-side door, slipping the revolver out of my jacket pocket, and she shouted, “Get in,” and Carp, now forty yards away, slowed to a walk, brought his weapon up, and fired at me.

I wasn’t aware of the slugs going by-you can actually hear them go by if you’re far enough from the blast of the gun, a whip-snap sound. That’s if you’re not preoccupied by something else, like shooting back. I was shooting back, carefully, taking my time, aiming everything into a tree next to him. I could see people far down the street, and while I didn’t think the.38 would reach that far, I didn’t want to kill some old lady or her dog.

I fired four shots and suddenly he stopped shooting, looked at his gun, looked at me. I took a step toward him and he turned and ran back around the corner.

I jumped in the car and said, “Go,” and LuEllen ripped out of the parking space and we were down the street, fast for the first hundred yards, down to the corner, then we were around the corner and away. As we went, I was looking out the rear window. He was gone.

“You shot at him,” LuEllen said in her calmest voice, which she uses only when she’s intensely cranked.

“Not exactly. I shot an elm tree to death. Can’t shoot him until we get the laptop. Sure as shit slowed him down, though.”

“You’re okay?”

“Never touched me,” I said. “He fired every shot he had, I think. Six shots, probably. It’s not like doing Quake in your basement.”

“Jesus.”

“He was too far away,” I said. “Too freaked out. I was trying to be careful to hit the tree and I was shaking like a leaf.”

“You’re still shaking like a leaf. You’re talking about a hundred miles an hour.” She started to laugh. “I don’t think anybody saw us. All those people sitting in the park, and when I looked back there was nobody down the street or on the street. I don’t think anybody saw us. And we were right in the middle of everything.”

“Fuckin’ crazy,” I said. “If somebody saw him running with that gun… Wouldn’t have got a good look at us, anyway.”

She laughed some more, started driving too fast and I had to slow her down. “What a rush,” she said. “What a rush.”