The Hanged Man’s Song

Chapter Nineteen

WE PULLED INTO LONGSTREET after six, still bright daylight, and brutally hot. People tended to stay off the streets with these temperatures, and the downtown strip had that cheap-science-fiction-movie vacancy, the emptiness that makes you think the residents are off having their brains eaten by aliens. Two yellow dogs, sitting in the awning shade in front of the Hardware Hank, were doing nothing but staying alive.

Marvel had been roaming the town in her car, methodically, street by street, looking for Rachel and for Carp’s red Corolla. She found neither. John called her when we were a mile out of town and she pulled into their short driveway just a few seconds ahead of us.

Marvel watched us park, and when I got out of the car she stepped over to me, looked up, and asked, “What’s going on, Kidd? What’d you do?”

“It’s all part of the same thing that got Bobby killed and John shot,” I said. “Bobby’s goddamn laptop turns out to be worth its weight in plutonium, and Carp’s crazy to get it.”

“Then give it to him,” she said. “Get Rachel back.”

“We’re gonna get Rachel,” John said from behind her. “We’re gonna get her, one way or another.”

Marvel almost got launched again, spinning around. “You, Mr. Shot-in-the-Arm bigshot spook secret agent-”

“Shut up,” he said, and walked into the house. Marvel’s mouth snapped shut, and a moment later tears started. I’d never seen John speak to her in anything like the tone, even without the words. She hurried after him and I stood in the yard with my bag full of computers, feeling like the world’s leading asshole for just being a part of it.

THEY didn’t take long to make up, and spent the next hour taking care of each other-which didn’t prevent some hard talk. “Call the cops,” Marvel was saying. “We’ve got four guys down there at the police station that we can count on. We get them going…”

But John was shaking his head. “Don’t you see? It’s all tangled together. We can’t tell anyone anything, or it unrolls. The next thing we know, we’ve got wall-to-wall feds in the front room. We can get her back, but we have to do it.”

Nobody said, “If she’s still alive.”

JOHN had mentioned during the ride from Greenville that his kids were staying with their grandmother overnight, and maybe for a couple of nights, to clear out some space. I didn’t ask what he meant by that, the space comment, because we were talking about three things at once, but an hour after we got in, a couple of black guys arrived at the house. They were not particularly big or prepossessing, but you probably wouldn’t want to fight either of them. They were smart, and smiling, and said hello to John and gave hugs to Marvel, and went back to a third bedroom like they’d been there before.

A half hour after the first two guys arrived, another two came in. Two more arrived before midnight. More talk, a few bottles of beer, lots of ice water and Cokes for three of them who were former alkies:

“They could just be ditched in a hotel or motel anywhere up and down the highway.”

“Fat white guy with a beard and a little black girl? A real little black girl? I don’t think so, he doesn’t want to be noticed and Rachel’s smart, she’ll holler her head off first chance she gets.”

“… got the same problem with any kidnapping, how do you trust each other to make the trade?”

“The other question is, is this laptop worth saving?”

“It’s not the laptop, man. It’s Bobby and all the rest of it.”

“Cut our losses.”

“Can’t cut Rachel.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

DURING the course of the conversation, I told them about the last time I’d seen Carp, as he rode off on his mountain bike to make the deal with Krause. They all listened carefully, and then one of them, Kevin, said, “So he’ll try something tricky with us, too. Maybe the bike, maybe something else.”

I said, “When I talk to him tomorrow, I’ll make the point that we’ve all got trouble if this trade caves in. We’ve got trouble because he knows my name, some of what we’ve done, and our association with Bobby. So we can’t go to the cops. And he’s got trouble because we know he killed those two guys at his apartment, and he killed Bobby, and he can’t go to the cops. I’ll tell him we just want Rachel back and I’ll trade the laptop because I can’t get into the laptop anyway.”

“The question is, where does he make the trade?” asked a man called Richard. “What’s the tricky thing that he’s gonna do? We’ve got five cars, and we all got cell phones, so we can talk, but if he sees us chasing him, and he’s got something tricky going, and shakes us, what do we do? Then we’re really fucked.”

We argued about that for a while, and with all the talk of tricks, a thought popped into my head. “John, do you have a decent map?”

He had a county map, and one of the other guys had a big Rand McNally map book, and together they worked well enough. We spread them out on the kitchen table and the others gathered around as I pulled my finger down the curlicue of the Mississippi.

“Look at this. This could be the trick. If he has me go to someplace pretty far north or south of town… and if he bought a canoe or a boat, or stole one, or rented one… If he leaves his car on the other side of the river, paddles across, meets me, gets the laptop, and then paddles back to his car… we’d never catch him. We’d all be stuck over here, on the wrong side. If he takes us twenty miles downriver, it’d take the best part of an hour just to get back to the bridge and down the other side where he was.”

“How long you think to paddle across?” one of the guys asked, tapping his finger on the blue line of the river. “I don’t know shit about canoes.”

“If he knows what he’s doing, ten minutes,” I said. “Two minutes in a powerboat.” I pointed at a couple of narrow points, where the river looked like it was no more than a half-mile across. “He wouldn’t pick one of the wider parts. And he’d get himself all set before he calls us.”

“That’d be a good trick, the river thing, ” John said, “if it’s not too obvious.”

“I can’t think of anything else. If he tries the bicycle thing… he’d still have to get to his car sooner or later. And when I think about it, around here, I believe he will try to do the exchange out in the countryside. If he just does the bike, we could figure out where the car has to be. Not that many roads. We could choke him off almost anywhere.”

By one o’clock in the morning, we’d worked out a plan. We’d put two cars on each side of the river, each a few miles north or south of town. When Carp got me moving to a rendezvous, the cars on my side would move toward the meeting point, hanging a few miles off. The cars on the other side of the river would run parallel to us.

At the rendezvous, if he ran us around to more spots, the cars would maintain the interval. Once I met Carp, if he was on foot, or on his bike, or near the river, the people in the cars would look at his location as I called it in, and figure out where he’d most likely park his car.

“I’m not going to give him the actual files-I mean, they’ll be the actual files, but they’ll be re-encrypted so his keys won’t work,” I said. “He won’t be able to tell the difference until he actually tries to open them. By then, we’ll know if he double-crossed us on Rachel.”

Marvel objected. “But you’d have double-crossed him first. What if he kills Rachel because of it?”

“He’s gotta have the laptop with the files or he’s done,” I said. “If we double-cross him and he double-crosses us, and he manages to get away from us… he’ll call us back. He’s gotta have the files. But if he has both the files and the keys, and he’s still got Rachel-then he can do whatever he wants.”

“No computer files are worth that much,” Marvel said. “Not worth a child.”

“People have already died for this one-three people that we know of, and he tried to kill us,” I said. “Carp is nuts. You think killing Rachel, getting rid of her as a witness… you think that would bother him?”

After a couple moments of silence, I got my stuff together and said good night. Marvel had gone off to the kitchen and was banging silverware around, although she hadn’t cooked anything. Before I left, I stopped and said to her, “I’m sorry about this mess-I can’t tell you how sorry I am. We’ll get her back.”

“You better get her back,” Marvel said. As I stepped away, she added, “She was only here for what, a week? But she fit in with the family. And now, where is she? Some crazy guy’s got her.”

“But that really wasn’t us. The crazy guy was talking to her before we ever met her,” I said.

“You don’t feel like any of this is… our fault?”

I exhaled, wagged my head, and said, “Yeah. Some of it is. I feel like shit. But… we’ll get her.”

She patted me once on the back as I went out, on down to the motel. In the motel room, I transferred the critical files and the keys to my own notebook, then re-encrypted the files on Bobby’s computer, deriving new keys, which I erased. No one, including me, could now open the files on Bobby’s laptop.

I took two Ambien and got six hours of bad sleep. Rachel’s face kept floating up out of the dark; I didn’t want to think about her with Carp.

THE next morning, on the way back to John’s, my cell phone rang. The day before, I’d been expecting LuEllen to call, and got Carp. This time I was expecting Carp, and got LuEllen.

“You about back?” she asked, without even a hello.

I took a second to recalibrate on the voice. “I’m in Longstreet,” I said. “We’ve got a big Carp problem.”

“Oh, no.”

I worry about talking on cell phones-they’re radios of a kind-but I gave her a slightly cleaned-up version of what had happened. She was silent, and then said, “You’re gonna handle it.”

“Best we can,” I said.

“There’s nothing I can do.”

“Not that I can think of. Are you okay?”

“I’m paranoid. Honest to God, I’m paranoid. I’m afraid to go to shopping centers because of that face-recognition stuff. There are cameras everywhere you look.”

“I’ll talk to you about it when I get back,” I said. “Where’re you going to be?”

“I was thinking… your place.”

“You know where the key is.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Nope. I’m flattered. I gotta get off this phone because Carp might call-but I’ll call you when we’re done here.”

“I’ll wait.”

JOHN, Marvel, and I sat around in the living room, watching television, for better than three hours, with no contact. Marvel didn’t entirely believe in air-conditioning, so all the windows and doors were open; they had a small vegetable garden out back, with a dense twenty-by-twenty-foot patch of sweet corn, and I could smell the corn in the warm air filtering in across their back porch. John’s friends were already out on the highways on either side of the river, both north and south, waiting. I kept looking at the river maps, trying to figure the odds.

Here’s the thing about the river, down South. After a catastrophic flood back in the late 1920s, the lower Mississippi was penned up behind levees. The levees weren’t built right at the water line, but followed the tops of the riverbanks, often hundreds of yards back from the normal high-water mark. A few towns, at major crossing points, remained open to the river, but most of the towns shut the Mississippi away.

If you travel south along the Mississippi through Arkansas, Mississippi, or Louisiana, you’ll hardly ever see the river, though you may only be a few hundred feet away for tens and dozens of miles. Conversely, if you’re traveling on the river itself, you may see the rooftops of any number of small towns over the distant levees, but you can’t get to them without walking through tangled, overgrown floodplain, marsh, bog, and backwater.

And if you ever need to find a poisonous snake in a hurry-rattlesnake, copperhead, cottonmouth-the strip between the levee and the water, anywhere between Memphis and New Orleans, is just the spot.

MAYBE I was crazy about this river-crossing thing. I was sure it would occur to him, but if he thought about it long enough, it would also occur to him that he’d be a sitting duck for a powerboat, out there in the middle of the river. By eleven o’clock, I’d convinced myself that he wouldn’t try crossing the river: he’d get himself lost in the woods, instead. Maybe try cutting cross-country on that trail bike. As far as we knew, he didn’t have the money to try anything more sophisticated.

My phone rang. We looked at it as though it might be a cottonmouth, and it rang a second time, and I snatched it off the end table where it was sitting. “Yeah?”

“You in Longstreet?”

“Just got here,” I said. “I’m beat, I can barely see. If we’re gonna do this, let’s do it.”

“You got the laptop?”

“Yes. But I got a couple of things to tell you. We think you might be planning to double-cross us on the girl. We’re gonna give you the laptop, but don’t double-cross us. You don’t know exactly what you’ve gotten into with us, but if you hurt Rachel, we’ll find you, and you won’t be given a free phone call. We’ll cut your fuckin’ head off. You understand that?”

“Fuck you. Bring the laptop.”

“Look, there’s no point in a double-cross.”

“I’ve thought of all that. So listen: You know where Universal is?”

“Universal? What is it?”

“It’s a town, fifteen miles south of Longstreet. A cafe, a gas station, a feed store. Ask your friends.”

I looked at John. “A town called Universal?”

He nodded. “Down south.”

I went back to Carp: “Okay. They know where it is.”

“Go down there. Stay off your cell phone. If you leave right now, you should be there in about twenty-one minutes, from your friend’s door. I will call you on your cell phone in twenty-one minutes.”

“Rachel…”

“I’ll tell you about Rachel next time I call.” And he was gone.

BEFORE I got out of there, John pointed to the town on the map. “There’s a whole line of hills off there, all tree-covered. I’ll bet he’s up in the woods, where he can look right down into the town. And look at this-just a little south of there is one of the river’s narrow spots, where it goes around Cutter’s Bend, and the highway on the other side runs close. He’s gonna do the river trick.”

“I gotta go,” I said. “You get everybody ready. Marvel, I’m gonna need your cell phone.”

She gave me the phone, but asked, “Why?”

“Because I want to be able to talk to you guys while I’m talking to him on my cell. I want you to be able to hear what I’m saying to him. I’ll call John on your phone when I’m a few miles out, and keep talking while I go in and wait for him to call on my phone.”

We were out the door as I explained, and I got in the car and waved. John was already talking on his phone, bringing the guys who’d gone north back into the action.

THE highway south from Longstreet has been featured in blues, jazz, country, and even rock tunes, from musicians running up and down the river between Memphis and New Orleans, stopping off in Baton Rouge, Natchez, Vicksburg, Greenville, and Helena. The highway’s an old one, a cracked patchwork of tarmac and concrete, with lots of wiggles-half of them, it seems, known as “dead man’s curve” by the locals-and mostly used for short runs, since they put in I-55 to the east.

I wasn’t alone on the highway, when I headed south, but the nearest car in front of me was a half-mile away, and there was nobody in my rearview. Every minute or so, I passed cars coming the opposite direction, which meant that two-mile spacing might be typical.

The day was hot: August in the Delta. Heat waves and six-foot mirages hung over the roadway. A line of low hills ran parallel to the river, but well back from it, at Longstreet; but as I got farther south, the river and highway turned into the hills, tightening the valley. Ten miles south of Longstreet, the bottoms of the hills came right down to the road. The levee was a half-mile away, with a few narrow farm fields-cotton and beans-using up the space between the road and the levee. I called John on Marvel’s cell phone, got him, then dropped the cell phone onto the seat between my legs where I could talk down into it. “Just coming into Universal now,” I said, a few minutes later. “No call yet.”

Universal was a dusty spot in the road, three buildings and an old postwar galvanized steel Quonset hut that appeared to have been long abandoned. The Quonset hut had a small sign on its side, the name of its maker, apparently-Universal-which answered one question I had about the place. I pulled into the parking area in front of the Universal Cafe, and my cell phone rang. “Got a call,” I said to the phone between my legs.

I picked up my own phone and clicked it on. Carp: “Get the laptop and start walking down the highway.”

“Walking down the highway?” I repeated, mostly for John. “Listen, James, we gotta get something straight. I’m not going to put myself where you can kill me and get the laptop and keep Rachel. I’m not walking anywhere.”

“I’m not going to kill you, for Christ’s sakes.” He squeaked, sounding exasperated.

“I’m sorry, James, I can’t trust you. Tell me where to go and leave the laptop, and I’ll do it.”

“Your girl is already chained out in the woods. Nobody’ll ever find her-just some hunter ten years from now will find a skeleton chained to a tree.”

“And somebody will find your goddamn head in a wastebasket,” I said. “I wasn’t kidding about that.”

A moment of silence. Then: “Okay. Drive south some more. Slow. I’ll tell you when to stop, I’ll tell you where to put the laptop. I’ll be watching you.”

“What about Rachel?”

“Stay on the phone. Drive south. We’ll handle this.”

“How far south?” I asked for John’s benefit.

“Not far.”

“Okay. If it’s not far.” I drove south, thirty miles an hour. Thirty seconds, and he said, “Pull over on the right shoulder when you see the red flag tied to the bush on the left side. Just pull over.”

I saw the red flag, a kerchief. I pulled over. “What now?”

“Look back the way you came.” I looked and saw him pedaling his mountain bike along the left shoulder, talking into his cell phone. “You can see me. I’m not holding a gun. If you do anything to me, Rachel is gonna starve out there.”

“All right, I can see you. I’m giving you the goddamn laptop,” I snarled. “Just come and get it. You want me to get out now?” More for John.

“Get out.”

“I’m getting out,” I said.

THE sun was blistering, but the day, this far out in the country, was absolutely silent except for faraway car sounds; I could smell the ragweed cooking in the sun. Carp was forty yards away from me, on the bike, not moving, but balanced on it. No chance to run him down. He held up a piece of paper and spoke into the phone. “Map of where Rachel is at. If you go there, and yell around, she’ll call to you. I marked the old store where the path starts, you can’t miss it.”

I held up Bobby’s laptop. “This is the laptop. What do you want to do?”

“Leave the laptop. Leave it on the side of the road. I’ll look at it, and if it’s right, I’ll put the map down. If you do anything, I’ll run, and you’ll never hear from me again. And Rachel won’t hear from you.”

“Cut your fuckin’ head off,” I shouted into the phone.

“Yeah, yeah… leave the laptop.”

I CROSSED the highway and left the laptop on the side of the road, then crossed back and pulled away in the car, south for another forty or fifty yards. He slowly rode down the shoulder behind me, to the laptop. I’d turned the laptop on in the car. He picked it up, flipped open the top, looked at it, hit a few keys, then closed it and put the map on the shoulder, weighed down with a couple pieces of gravel. A car zipped past, the driver looking at us curiously; but he kept going.

Carp was on the bike again, and he rode away from me and said into the phone, “You can get the map.” He sounded gleeful. The phone went dead, and as I watched, he took the bike off the road, down the short slope of the shoulder and onto what must have been a path that ran down to the levee, across the end of one of the farm fields. I picked up Marvel’s phone.

“He’s left the map, and he’s off the road riding down to the levee. I’m about a half-mile south of Universal. He’s doing the river thing.”

“We’re closing on the other side. We’re coming in on the other side,” John said back.

I BACKED along the shoulder until I was opposite the map, then walked over and picked it up. As I did, Carp crossed the levee and disappeared down the other side, into a forest of cottonwoods. From where I was standing, I could see a narrow path through the weeds, leading down to the levee. Local fishermen, I thought.

The map consisted of two pieces of paper: A Xerox of a road map, pinpointing a crossroads ten miles west of Longstreet, and a little south, probably fifteen road miles from where I was. The second piece was a hand-drawn map starting at the crossroads. There was a square, with the notation, “old abandoned schoolhouse,” and another, with an arrow, that said, “power-line easement back into the woods.” It appeared that the map would take you about a mile and a half off-road. The thing looked so good I began to believe that we were gonna get Rachel back.

“I got the map,” I called to John.

“He’s got a boat. The guys on the other side can see him, he’s got a jon boat with a motor, he’s putting the bike in the boat. They can’t find his car. They say they don’t see a car over there.”

“Gotta be there somewhere. Watch him, he may have a gun.”

“How about Rachel?”

“He said she’s chained up in the woods. I got a map. I’m going.”

“Where?”

I told him, and I heard him talking with Marvel, and he said, “Fifteen minutes. We’ll see you there.”

I HAD to go four miles north before I could get a crossroad out of the valley that would take me west toward Rachel. On the way, John called. “He’s running down the river, he’s not coming across.”

“Shit. What’s he doing? Can the guys still see him?”

“They can see him, but they don’t know where he’s going. He’s on their side, just under the levee.”

“Must’ve hid the car somewhere that wasn’t straight across,” I suggested.

“They’re still on him, and Marvel and I are on the way out to you.”

A MOMENT later, he called again. “Shit. He’s crossed back over the river. That’s his second trick, that’s his second trick. He faked us out. He’s leaving the boat, he’s getting out of the boat, he’s on the bike.”

I could hear him shouting into a second cell phone. “Gotta stay with him. Henry, get back south, get back south, his car’s gotta be down there somewhere. Kevin, you go on down toward Greenville, get moving… I know, I know… but that’s the only way you’re gonna get ahead of him if he keeps going south… I know.”

Henry was the driver of the car that had been south of me. He’d closed in when the trade took place, and when Carp crossed the river, had started back to Longstreet, and the Longstreet bridge. Now Carp was south of him, and nobody was south of Carp, and on the same side of the river.

“We’re gonna lose him,” I shouted into the phone, helpfully.

“No, no, no,” John shouted back.

Then I heard him on the other phone, just his side of the conversation. “You see it? You see it? Get down south, keep going, Henry, keep going.” And to me: “Henry spotted the Corolla. Carp’s not there yet. Henry’s going on ahead.”

Okay. Now we had Carp between two cars. Two cars with smart guys. I couldn’t hear it, but I assumed that they were tagging him.

In the meantime, I closed on the crossroads where Rachel was-two left turns, to get me around a lopsided net of gravel roads, into the old abandoned schoolhouse.

John and Marvel were already there, sitting in their car, looking at their map. I stopped, got out, jogged to John’s driver’s-side window, the sun burning down on my shoulders. “Let me see the map,” John said.

I gave him the map. It was all very clear: we were at the right spot. We squabbled about it for a minute, quacking like a gaggle of geese, but that did no good.

There was no schoolhouse. There was no power line going back into the woods.

There was nothing but a burning hot gravel crossroads, with cotton fields stretching away on all four corners, stretching away forever. The kind of crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil.