“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?”
&nb
sp; 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.
Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4 Page 93