The Hanged Man’s Song (20 page)

I called, and got a man’s quiet voice. “Rogers Air Transport.”

“I need to get a plane to Greenville, Mississippi, in the next couple of hours,” I said, and my voice reflected it. “Do you have one, or do you know where I could get one?”

“What do you want, exactly?”

“To get down there as fast as I can. I’ve got a family emergency.”

“Well, uh, I can get you a Lear into Greenville, have you down there in a couple of hours or a little more. But, uh, it won’t be cheap.”

“How much?”

“Mm, I’d have to figure it.” There was a moment of silence, and I had the feeling that he was staring at the ceiling, rather than running an accounting program. He came back. “About forty-five hundred. That’s if I don’t have to hang around down there.” He sounded apologetic.

“I’ll take it,” I said. “I’m on the way to your place now. I’m maybe thirty or forty miles out. You won’t have to hang around, I’ll fly back commercial to pick up my car.”

“About payment, uh, we require-”

“You can have it any way you want it,” I said. “Cash, check, or credit card.”

“Cash would be fine.”

ROGERS
Air Transport had its worldwide headquarters in a cream-colored metal pole barn that served as both hangar and office. I parked in front, dug my stash cash out of the trunk, got one bag with clothes and another that had all three laptops, and carried them around to the office, which smelled pleasantly of aviation gas and hot oil, and was empty.

“Hello?” I called. Nothing. A side door led out of the office, and I stuck my head out and saw a redheaded man walking toward me. He wore denim overalls and a train engineer’s hat, and was wiping his hands on a rag. “Mr. Kidd?” he asked cheerfully.

“Yes.”

“I’m Jim Rogers.” He stuck out a hand and I shook it. “We’re ready if you are.”

“My car’s outside.”

“It’ll be okay there until you can get back. I hope it’s nothing terrible down in Greenville.”

“It’s bad enough,” I said. I wasn’t going to be able to avoid saying something. “My dad’s had a heart attack. They’re gonna try to fix things, but nobody knows what’s going to happen.”

“Aw, too bad,” he said. A woman came around the corner, mid-thirties with smile lines around her eyes, a good tan, a ponytail, and a flight suit.

“This is Marcia, our co-pilot,” Rogers said.

“I’m his old lady,” Marcia said. “You ready?”

Jim’s eyes sort of drifted-I had the feeling he wasn’t the most dynamic of executives, though he might have been a hell of a guy-and I said, “Oh, yeah, better give you this,” and handed him forty-five hundred from my stash cash. He took it and nodded, not asking the obvious question, which I answered anyway. “I was up here buying pottery,” I said. “Lucky for me, a lot of those places only take cash.”

“Lucky,” he agreed.

JIM ROGERS
was a garrulous guy, and his wife smiled a lot and nodded at him. They took turns flying the plane, and Rogers talked us down to Greenville. Airplane stories, mostly-he’d been a bush pilot in Ontario for a few years. That was fine with me: I nodded and told him a couple of Ontario fly-fishing stories, and no real information was exchanged. I called John on his cell phone as we were passing near Louisville, and he told me that nobody could find Rachel.

“Sounds bad,” I said, without thinking. Jim and Marcia glanced at each other, misinterpreting it.

“Get your ass down here,” John said.

“I’ll be in Greenville in a little more than two hours,” I said.

When I rang off, Marcia said, “More trouble.”

“Pretty tense situation,” I said.

“Gotta pray for the best.”

John was waiting when we got there. He grabbed my bag with his good arm and started off to his car, while I shook hands with Jim and Marcia; I think they thought John was my faithful retainer, me being white, John being black, and all of us being in Greenville.

John and I were on our way to Longstreet by 3:30. John was as grim as I’d ever seen him. “He’s a crazy man,” he said. And, quietly nuts himself, “I’m gonna kill him.”

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.”