The Hanged Man’s Song (21 page)

“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.

WE WERE STANDING
next to the car, triple-checking the map we’d been given by Carp with our own maps, when John’s cell phone rang. He listened for a minute, then said, “Twenty minutes,” and hung up.

To Marvel, he said, “I’m going with Kidd. You go on back to the house in case somebody calls about Rachel.”

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Nothing, yet. But it looks like this tailing job might take some help. He’s gonna spot our people if they can’t switch out more often. You go on.”

Something was up, and Marvel knew it. She squinted at him, and seemed about to say something, but he shook his head and she said, “All right.”

“Don’t do anything stupid, like try to follow us,” he said. “We need you back at the house.”

TWO
minutes later, she’d gone one way and we another, at right angles to each other, and even from a mile away, we could see the plume of gravel dust she left behind her as she headed back into Longstreet.

“He’s at the RayMar Motel in Bradentown,” John told me. “He’s in his room, so he’s gonna be cracking the laptop pretty soon. We’ve got two cars on him now and another two coming in.”

“How far?”

He looked at his watch. “If we’re not lazy about it, we can be there in half an hour.”

“What’s the layout like?”

“One-level mom-and-pop, an office at one end and then a long string of rooms in a straight line. Not busy. I don’t know the people that run it, but black folks stay there-no color line, so we won’t be too noticeable.”

A HALF-HOUR
later, we were still not there and my phone rang. I dreaded picking it up, but had no choice.

“You motherfucker,” Carp shouted. “You cheated me.” You could hear the spit flying.

“We’ve just been at the crossroads, James, so don’t tell me about cheating. I can tell you where to get a set of keys-and I would have done it if we’d found Rachel-but now… I’d say your head’s in trouble. You remember what I told you.”

“I want the fuckin’ keys,” he shouted. “You want the girl back, you better cough ’em up.”

“Are you still close to Universal?” I asked.

“Never mind where I am,” he said. He was slowing down now. “How are we gonna do this? I don’t want the kid to die, I got nothing against her, but I’ll leave her out there if I don’t get the keys.”

“Can’t figure out a way to trust you, James.”

“I’ll tell you-”

“I’ll tell
you
, James,” I said. “I’m still out here in the woods. I’ve been driving around, hoping I was at the wrong place, hoping I’d find that abandoned schoolhouse. I’m gonna hang up now and see if I can think of something. It’s gonna have to be something weird.”

“She’s out in the woods, on a chain,” he said.

“Call me back in half an hour,” I said.

FIVE
minutes later, we were parked down the block from the RayMar, in front of the Bradentown Bakery. Bradentown was just as hot as Longstreet, and smaller. Nothing stirred under the midday sun. I got out, went inside the bakery, and bought two Diet Cokes and two apple strudels, mostly to keep the cashier behind her counter. Back outside, I found two of John’s friends in the backseat of the car.

“We got it figured out,” Henry said to John. “If you want to go in, we can get him.”

“He has a gun,” I said.

“We can be on top of him in three seconds,” Henry said. “We need somebody to go into the office and talk to the clerk while we go in.”

They all looked at me, and I shook my head. “I need to talk to Carp. I need to hear what he says. One of the other guys’ll have to talk with the clerk.”

They did a quick eyeball vote and John finally said, “Kidd’s okay. Let’s get Terry to talk to the clerk. He’s a bullshit artist.” The other two glanced at each other and Henry nodded and took a cell phone out of his pocket. “Terry, you’re going in to talk to the clerk. Park right in front where he can see your car, and don’t touch anything when you get inside. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Whatever, you make it up.”

He hung up and nodded to John. “We’re good.”

I said, “His room doesn’t connect to another one, does it?”

Henry said, “Nope. None of them connect.”

TERRY
took a few minutes to get organized, and then we saw his car pull in to the RayMar. We backed out of our parking space, and as soon as Terry went through the motel’s office door, we started down the block. Another car, an old Chevy, pulled into the parking lot a few doors from the end of the line of motel rooms.

“He’s in the second room from the end,” Henry said. “Pull in right next to Bob’s car, the Chevy, and wait.”

Henry and the other guy-I never knew his name-got out and walked over to Bob’s Chevy, and Bob got out one side, and a guy named Rote on the other. Bob was holding a heavy sledge-hammer at his side. I wanted to say something about a safety chain on the door, but before I could, John muttered, “Rote’s got the bolt cutters.”

The four guys knew what they were doing. In fact, they looked a lot like cops; the night before, they’d even talked like cops. Bob got lined up on the door, taking his time, being quiet, while Henry and the others blocked the view from the street and the office. When Bob was ready, he nodded, and Rote showed a big pair of bolt cutters. The bolt cutters turned out to be unnecessary, because when Bob hit the door, there was a single loud whack like a car accident, the door flew open-no chain, or at least, no chain that held-and the four men went straight into the room.

I was a step behind them. Carp had been sitting on his bed, typing on a laptop, and when we came through he hurled himself at a nightstand on the opposite side of the bed, where a big military-style Beretta sat under the lamp. He almost made it; his hand was six inches from the gun when Bob landed on him, then Rote, and they had him by the neck, dragging him across the bed, and he screamed once and Rote hit him in the nose with a closed fist and his nose broke and he stopped screaming and started to gag; then the door was shut and he was on the floor, three guys on him.

“Roll him over,” John said.

They controlled him-I thought
cops
again-and rolled him, and Rote sat on his chest while John knelt next to his head. “Where is she?” he asked.

Carp’s eyes were wild, and his torso was shaking under Rote’s weight, from adrenaline. But he choked out, “Fuck you. Go ahead and kill me, motherfucker. You’ll be killing the kid, too.”

Rote stuck the heel of his hand on Carp’s lips, and pressed his jaw open; he pressed down harder until his fist filled Carp’s mouth. John looked at Carp for five seconds, then dug in his pocket and took a red Swiss Army knife out. He chose one of the blades, looked down at Carp, and said, “I’m gonna ask you one question. If you don’t answer it, I’m gonna cut your nose off. Then I’m gonna cut your eyes out. Here’s the question. What town is Rachel closest to? Universal? Longstreet? That crossroads? Here in Bradentown? Which town? Don’t have to tell us where, just which town she’s closest to.”

Rote pulled his hand out of Carp’s mouth. Carp gasped for air, groaned, and then said, “I don’t care if you kill me, I’m not gonna tell you where she is. You cocksuckers, you cocksuckers.”

John leaned forward with the knife. “I’m gonna cut your nose off,” he said. “In ten seconds, your nose gonna be gone. Nobody’s gonna put that nose back on.” He was talking quietly, but his face was a stone; he was scaring the shit out of me. “So answer my question. Not where she is, just what town she’s closest to.”

Carp stared at him for six of those seconds, then finally spat out, “Universal. If you’d really given me the keys, I would have told you.”

John turned to me and said, “Get back up there.”

“I need to-”

“Just get back up there,” he said impatiently. To the others, “Let’s move him. Terry’s gonna be running out of bullshit.”

ROTE
handed me the bolt cutters, said, “For the chain, if there is one,” and that was the last I saw of John’s friends. John was running things now, and I got in the car and did what he told me: I headed up to Universal.

GETTING
there took a while. Driving at the speed limit, watching the yellow lines, scared to death that a cop might stop me for anything. Saw no cops; Universal was as dead as ever.

Fifteen minutes after I got there, I was sitting in a booth in the cafe, one of two customers. The other guy looked like a farmer, and he was eating pie at the far end of the line of booths, reading the local newspaper. I was picking at a BLT and a plate of fries-I wasn’t hungry, but I needed a reason to wait there-and Marvel arrived.

I saw her get out of her car in the parking lot, and she looked at me through the window. As she came in, the counter lady said, “Hello, Miz Marvel,” and Marvel smiled and asked, “How are things?” Then she turned as if checking out the rest of the cafe, spotted me, did a double take, and said, “Say, aren’t you Mr. Barnes from the highway department?”

“Yup. And you’re the mayor of Longstreet.”

“Can I join you? I’ve been meaning to call you about the bridge approach lanes.”

“I was afraid of that,” I said. I made a gesture to the seat opposite. Marvel asked the counter lady for a Coke and a piece of apple pie, and came and sat across from me. We talked about the bridge until she got her pie, and then, when the counter lady went to talk to the other customer, Marvel leaned forward and said, “John called. We’re waiting. He said he’d call again on my phone.”

“Where are they?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think we want to know too much about it.” She looked suddenly bleak. “I love that man. I know he’s done some things in the past and I love him anyway. But I haven’t seen him like this. He scared me this morning.”

“He scared me this afternoon,” I said. I spotted the cafe lady coming with a carafe of Diet Coke, and added, “But if there’s no way you can push the millage rate, I really can’t see the state sequestering the money long enough for you to make it up through the regular road revenue.”

“There’s gotta be some loose money somewhere,” Marvel said. “It shouldn’t be up to the taxpayers in Longstreet alone to take care of that bridge. People use it for hundreds of miles around.”

“You’ll have to talk to the legislature about that,” I said.

We went on like that for ten minutes, and were running out of bullshit. Then John called, and Marvel’s dark eyes lit up; she got a map out of her purse and said, “Yes, I see. Yes, I see. Okay. I’ll go now.”

She hung up and said to me, “I’ve got to go. I hope to see you at the public hearings this fall. Any help you can give us with the regional supervisor would be welcome.”

“Got to go myself,” I said. I dropped a couple of bucks on the table, and we paid our bills separately at the cash register. I lingered, talking a minute with the cashier, buying a couple bottles of Dasani water, and let Marvel get outside. She was headed south on the highway when I got in my car. I caught her a minute later, and she took us, moving fast, south down the highway for six miles, then turned away from the river and took us about five more miles back into the countryside.

She pulled to the shoulder at a dusty crossroads that looked a little like the one we’d been at a few hours before-except this one was in rougher country, small cut-up fields spreading away from three-quarters of the crossroads, with a steep wooded hill on the other quarter.

At the bottom of the hill was an abandoned wood-frame building with a fading sign that said “Charm Township Hall.” Marvel got out of her car and said, “We’re supposed to use the map from this morning, but the old town hall is the abandoned school.”

I nodded and said, “There should be a trail on the side of the building.”

I got the bolt cutters and the two Dasani bottles, and we found a trail right where it should have been, and headed up into the woods. “Watch for snakes,” Marvel said as I led off.

THERE
were no snakes. The trail got narrower but was always visible, as we went up the hill. It was half game trail, and maybe used by hunters in the spring and the fall, I thought, guys going into the woods. We spooked three does a quarter-mile back and watched them bounce off ahead of us.

A half-mile in, Marvel said, “You think we’ve gone a mile yet?”

“No. Half-mile, maybe.”

“Carp told John it was a mile. He said he checked it with a GPS. A mile in a straight line.”

“Ten more minutes, on this trail,” I said, “if we don’t lose the trail.”

We went on, getting hotter and hotter by the step. There was good leafy overhead, but the air was so hot that even the shade didn’t account for much; both of us had sweated through our shirts by the time we were at the top of the hill. The path continued just below the crest-a good sign of a deer trail-and after a few more minutes, I said, “We gotta be close.”

The woods were thick, and brush was piled up beside the trail. We couldn’t see more than fifty feet in any direction. Marvel tilted her head back and screamed, “RACHEL!”

Nothing.

“RACHEL.”

And faintly, “He-e-e-el-l-l-lppp.”

SHE
was a noisy little kid, with a fine set of lungs. We found her, another two hundred yards along the trail, in a little open patch of grass. She was standing next to a tree, laptop under her arm, a skinny girl with big eyes, wearing a blue, flowered blouse and jean shorts, a chain around her waist, closed with a padlock. The other end of the chain was wrapped around a two-foot-thick tree, also padlocked. Just like Carp had said; a chilly breeze swept through my soul, as I realized that he would have left her there.

Marvel ran the last hundred feet, fell down, bruised herself, popped back onto her feet, and closed in and grabbed Rachel and lifted her up, and started crying, and Rachel looked at me and said, “I got bugs all over me,” and she began to cry, and I took the laptop from her, and between gasps she said, “Jimmy James hurt me. Jimmy James hurt me. Jimmy…”

I caught on with the first word; Marvel didn’t, not right away. She was just cooing, “We can fix it, honey, we can fix it, you’re okay now, where’d he hurt you?”