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.
Chapter
Twenty
>>> 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?”
Rachel started sobbing again and screwed the heels of her hands into her eyes and then looked at Marvel and said “He made me do it with him. He hurt me.”
Marvel said, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, baby . . .” She looked at me; she was horrified. So was I.
The bolt cutters took care of the chain. Rachel was heavy, and Marvel not that big, but she carried the kid out anyway. I offered to help, but Rachel shook her head and Marvel said, “Better not,” and I figured that maybe Rachel didn’t want to have much to do with anybody male. Not for a while.
“I was afraid the motherfucker might take my laptop,” Rachel told me over Marvel’s shoulder. And a minute later, “I had to pee in the woods.”
>>> HALFWAY down the hill, I called John. “Got her.”
“Thank God. I’ll see you back in Longstreet. She okay?”
“Not exactly,” I said. Pause, and he knew.
“See you back in Longstreet,” he said.
“What about Carp?”
“See you back in Longstreet.”
I didn’t ask ag
ain.
Chapter
Twenty-One
>>> AT THE TOP OF A GENTLE RISE that begins at a rambling country highway—a highway that might be in New England—Mansard Penders had built himself a two-million-dollar arts-and-crafts house. The porch looks over a sweeping lawn, a stone fence, the highway, and his forest. He owns the forest, twenty thousand acres of plantation pine, with some mixed hardwoods, in the Rufus Chamblee Bend of the Mississippi River above Mansardville, Louisiana.
A messy, English-style cottage garden twists along gravel paths on the back and sides of the house. The garden was created by Florence Penders, and has all the color of Monet’s garden at Giverny. But while Monet’s garden is confined in beds, Flo’s garden sprawls and scampers and climbs, flaring up in the spring, muting a bit in June and July, roaring back in the summer: red, white, and yellow roses, pink hollyhocks and chrysanthemums, flaming gladioli, deep blue irises, scarlet poppies, cornflowers and larkspur, orange cockscomb, red and purple dahlias.
From anywhere among the flowers, you can see the river twisting below like a blue-steel snake. Sometimes, when the wind is right, you can smell the dead fish and mud of it, and on stormy days, you’ll see the weather rolling in from the west.
Inside the house, in the west wing, is a study with walnut walls and bookcases. Walnut is a dark wood with a touch of gray; the room is brightened by clerestory windows, arts-and-crafts lamps, and several thousand hardcover books with bright, variegated dustcovers.
Five oil paintings will hang in a band on one wall, on the theme of The River, with books both above and below. Mansard Penders is paying me three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to do the paintings.
As part of the deal, Manny had insisted on the right to specify the sites of the paintings, although not the details of them. After looking at the sites, I accepted. My dealer, who thinks I’m an asshole, and who was sure I’d turn the offer down, went out for a large whiskey and soda, or maybe two, and, I suspect, to a snug little whorehouse down by the river in New Orleans.
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