The Hanged Man’s Song (8 page)

“Reorient themselves,” she suggested.

“That’s good,” I said. “Reorient themselves.”

JOHN
was in one room, LuEllen and I in another. We were beat. We’d been flying, driving, hacking, and getting shot at for twenty hours and needed some sleep. We arranged to meet at eight the next morning, and LuEllen and I said good night to John and crawled into bed.

Just before we went to sleep, LuEllen said, “Think about Carp’s trailer. Ten o’clock in the morning is the best time to hit an open target like that. Think about it in your sleep.”

I did that.

THERE’S
no better source for burglary supplies than your local Target store. You can get cheap, disposable entry tools, plastic gloves, Motorola walkie-talkies, backpacks, and everything you need to change your appearance. Like khaki shorts.

Everybody knows what a burglar looks like-an ethnic minority, probably, lurking in the bushes until the coast is clear. After dark, on a moonless night. Wearing a ski mask. Which is why most professional house-breakers go in at ten o’clock in the morning or two o’clock in the afternoon, during the workday, when school is in session and the house is probably empty. And they always knock first.

We synched the walkie-talkie channels on the way over to Carp’s, and I changed into the shorts, tore the price tags off a pair of wraparound sunglasses and put them on, along with a Callaway golf hat.

We first made a pass outside the park, but could see no activity over the wall near Carp’s. Then we went in and cruised down his street. There was a door on the back end of the Carp mobile home, the one we hadn’t seen the night before, that Carp had gone through, and it was hanging open an inch or two.

The front door, where John and I had spilled out onto the lawn, was closed, as we’d left it. Just around the corner, and about four houses up, an old guy was mowing his tiny lawn with a tiny electric lawn mower. He glanced at us as we went past and LuEllen said to John, “When we pull into the place, go straight ahead and get out on another street, so you won’t drive past that guy again.”

John nodded. “All right.”

LuEllen looked at me. “Ready to try it?”

“I didn’t see anything that said no.”

John would be waiting outside the park. If we called and said, “Dave, come on,” he’d come in through the park, taking his time. If we said, “Hey, Dave, hurry it up,” he’d come down the outside street, and we’d jump the wall.

IN OUR
shorts and golf shirts and over-the-shoulder pack, LuEllen and I were an unremarkable, almost invisible, couple knocking on Jimmy James Carp’s door, knocking just loud enough to attract somebody inside. There was no answer and I tried the door. It opened and we waved at John. As he left, we stepped inside as though we’d been invited.

The place was dark, with curtains and shades on all the windows. I hit the lights and found that we were in the kitchen. The place was a mess, with dirty dishes stacked around a sink. An overflowing garbage bag sat on the floor between a small dinette table and the line of cupboards on the opposite wall. The garbage bag was jammed with pizza boxes, corn-curl sacks, instant dinner cartons, and microwave popcorn bags, and that’s what the place smelled like: like every kind of stale cheese you can think of.

The next room along was the living room, with the furniture arranged to focus on a large-screen TV. Most of the furniture had a patina of dust, and the room was littered with paper: the
New York Times
, the
LA Times
, tabloids, popular science magazines, a facedown copy of
Penthouse
. An all-in-one stereo sat on a corner table, with a couple dozen CDs. On the wall, somewhat askew, was a full-color framed copy of the Praying Hands.

There were two bedrooms along a single hallway in the back: the first was a woman’s room, not much neater than the rest of the place, and even dustier. The second bedroom belonged to Carp. A dozen computer books and manuals were scattered on the floor around the bed, all but two on IBM hardware. One of the others dealt with encryption, and the last one was an
O’Reilly’s Guide
to the C++ language.

I moved the pack to the back door, closed and locked the door, and we started tearing through the room. We didn’t take long: we’d done this before. In two minutes, I had a ream of paper-old bills, new bills, bank statements, notes, employment records-a dozen floppy disks, and a half-dozen recordable CDs. I was loading it into our backpack when LuEllen, who’d moved back out to the front room, said, “Hey.”

I poked my head out of the bedroom. “What?”

“Laptop,” she said.

“What?” I went out, and sure enough, a Toshiba notebook sat under the edge of the couch. The power supply was still plugged into the wall. It looked exactly like somebody had been lying on the couch with the laptop on his stomach, while watching TV, had shut down the laptop and then pushed it under the couch so it wouldn’t be stepped on. I know that because I’d done it about a thousand times. We pulled the plug and took it.

“Bobby’s?” LuEllen asked. “Is that too much to expect?”

“Yeah, that’s too much,” I said, as we put it with the pack. “Baird said Bobby’s was an IBM. And this one doesn’t have a built-in optical drive. It’s a travel machine like my Vaio. Bobby’s was probably a lot heavier, with a bunch of built-in stuff. He didn’t travel.”

We’d been inside for five minutes at that point and my internal egg timer was telling me to get the fuck out. Same with LuEllen. “Unless you’ve got something special to look at…”

“Let’s go,” I said. That’s when we heard a car’s tire crunching on the gravel outside.

LuEllen touched my arm and moved to a window. She could see out through a crack in the blind, and she hissed at me, “Two guys,” and then, “Coming to the door.”

I couldn’t see out, but I glanced at LuEllen’s face: she seemed pleased. She liked this shit, because it cranked her up, and she lived for the crank.

She pointed to the bedroom, and we tiptoed to the back door, hardly daring to breathe. The thing is, houses give off vibrations-footfalls, weight shifts, voices. Mobile homes, which are more lightly built than regular houses, are the worst. At the back, LuEllen put her hand on the doorknob, and we waited. The idea is to open your door at the same time the other person is entering the other one; the noise and vibrations cancel each other out.

But they didn’t come in. They knocked, loudly. We heard them talking, and then one of them crunched around to the back, and a second later, knocked on the door where we were standing. The knob rattled-LuEllen lifted her hand when she realized what was happening-and then the guy crunched back around the house.

I moved to the window and peeked out. Two guys: one black, one white, both wearing short-sleeved dress shirts and khaki slacks. They looked like hot, out-of-shape office workers, both too fleshy and with careful, thirty-dollar haircuts. The white guy, blond, pink-faced, chubby, had a tidy spade-shaped soul patch, the kind worn to demonstrate cool; he was probably taking saxophone lessons somewhere. The black guy was wearing a pink cotton shirt, and he looked terrific.

They were talking, nervously, I thought, then they looked up and down the street, as if checking for somebody they might interrogate. Then they got in the car, bumped back onto the road, and left. I read their license number to LuEllen, who wrote it on her arm with a ballpoint pen. Then she put the Motorola to her mouth and said, “Dave, come on.”

We went out the back door and walked sideways across the narrow lawn, then up the street, carrying the backpack. John came up behind us, slowed, and we got in. The old guy had finished mowing his lawn and was sitting in a lawn chair drinking beer out of a brown bottle. He never turned his head as we went by.

“Goddamnit,” I said.

“Nothing?” John asked.

“Two guys came by and knocked on the door. We got their tags,” LuEllen said.

“Ah, shit. I didn’t know. I was outside.”

“Ford Taurus. Could have been a rental.”

“Cops?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “They were indoors people. Office workers. Maybe we’ll find out from the tags.”

“Damn,” John said. “We waste our time and almost get caught at it.”

“No, no-we got a laptop,” I said. “We found a laptop.”

“What?”

He checked my face to see if I was joking. “Jimmy James left it behind when he ran last night. It’s not Bobby’s, but it might tell us a lot about Jimmy James.”

I STILL
had the stew-can antenna. Before we started messing with Carp’s laptop, we went back to the truck stop and warehouse, went online, checked with a few friends for entry routes, and then went into the Louisiana auto registration database. The two guys’ license tag went back to Hertz. Hertz was an old friend. I was in the Hertz database two minutes later and pulled out the name William Heffron of McLean, Virginia. He was using a credit card issued to the U.S. government.

“McLean,” LuEllen said. “Weren’t we there when…”

“Yeah. It’s about a foot and a half from Washington.”

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.”