The Hanged Man’s Song

by John Sandford

  “You’re not man enough,” she said, unimpressed. “I’ve been working out three hours a day. I can kick your ass now.”

  “Working out with what? Golf? You’re gonna putt me to death?”

  She pointed a Tater Tot at me, a little edge in her voice. “You may speak lightly of my crevices, but do not say bad things about golf.”

  THE JOB: Miss Young Republican Anita Nosere-who was, from the pictures I’d seen of her, fairly boobilicious herself-got her money from her mother. Her mother was managing director of a syndicate that owned the Wisteria. Congressman Bob had been told that the casino was skimming the take, thus shorting both the U.S. government and the state of Mississippi on taxes. The skim was one of those simple-minded things that are almost impossible to spot if the casino does it carefully enough.

  It works like this: the casino advertises (and reports to the tax authorities) a given return on the slot machines. If that return is even a little lower than the rate reported, the income increases sharply. That is, if you report that your machines will return 95 percent to the players, but you really only return 94 percent, and a million bucks a night goes through the slots, you’re skimming $10,000 a night. In a few months, that adds up to real money.

  Of course, you have to be careful about state auditors. For a politically well-connected company, in Mississippi, that wasn’t a major problem: “Them boys is crookeder than a bucket of cottonmouths,” Bob said.

  The congressman could have hired one of the big independent auditing companies to do his research, but that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. Me, he could get for free, and get a good idea if the charges were true. If they were, then he’d hire the big auditing company, do the research, and hang the Noseres, momma and daughter together, all in the name of truth, justice, and the American Way.

  EXACTLY what we did was, we dropped dollars-and quarters and nickels-into slot machines and counted the return, and then ran the results through a statistics package. We wanted 98 percent confidence that we were less than half of a percent off the true return. We therefore needed to take a large random sample of machines and had to run enough coins through each machine that we’d get a statistically accurate return on each.

  I’d chosen the target machines the first night, using a random numbers program in the laptop I carried. We’d been at it ever since, dropping the dollars, quarters, and nickels, doing the numbers at night, avoiding crackers with bent noses, and generally dancing around the possibility of acts of unfaithfulness, if that’s what it would have been.

  Can you be unfaithful to a mood, to a sense of guilt? I mean, the woman was gone…

  But Marcy’s departure had driven me into an emotional hole. A number of good women have walked out on me, and there’s no way that I can claim it was always, or even usually, their fault. When the first bloom of romance fades away, they begin to pay attention to my priorities. Sooner or later, they conclude that they’ll always be number three, behind painting and maybe computers.

  They might be right, though I still hate to think so. There was no question that as I got older, I’d become more and more involved in the work. I’d sometimes go days without talking to anyone, and become impatient when a woman wanted to do something ordinary, like go out to dinner.

  That was not a problem with LuEllen. I’d known her for a decade, spent hours rolling around in various beds with her, and still didn’t know her real last name or where she lived. I knew everything about her but the basic, simple stuff.

  At this point, we were not in bed. I don’t know exactly what she was doing, in her head, but I was just drifting along, dropping coins, thinking about painting and sex and listening to the rain fall on the casino roof, the car roof, and the motel roof, thinking about getting back to St. Paul and the serious work.

  LuELLEN and I were staying in separate rooms at the Rapaport Suites on I-10, one of those concrete-block instant motels with a polite Indian man and his wife at the front desk, a permanent smell of cigarette smoke in the curtains, and a dollar-a-minute surcharge on the telephone. The place wasn’t exactly bleak, it was simply nothing. I can’t even remember the colors, which were chosen not to show dirt. My room was a cube with a can, a candidate for existential hell. And we couldn’t get out.

  Rain had been falling since the day we arrived. A hurricane was prowling the Gulf, well down to the south, but had gotten itself stuck somewhere between Jamaica and the Yucatán. The storm wasn’t much, but the rain shield was terrific, reaching far enough north to cover half the state of Mississippi. We’d been kept inside, Noseres to the grindstone.

  And life was looking grim for the mother-daughter duo. The numbers said they might be skimming two percent.

  WE HAD just finished a three-hour session with the slots, and after freshening up-taking a leak, I guess-LuEllen came down to my room, pulled off her cowboy boots, and sprawled on the bed to read Barron’s.

  She’s a slender dark woman with an oval face, a solid set of muscles, a terrific ass, and a taste for cocaine and cowboy gear, to say nothing of the odd cowboy himself.

  “Numbers?” she asked, without looking at me.

  “Yeah.” I was sitting with my head thrust toward the laptop screen, the classic geek posture, and my neck felt like it was in a vise. “How about a back rub? My neck is killing me.”

  “You haven’t been very attentive to me and I’m not sure a back rub would be appropriate,” she said. She turned a page in Barron’s. “Or any other kind of rub.”

  “You wanna do the fuckin’ numbers?”

  “I’m not getting paid the big bucks.”

  “Yeah, big bucks…”

  She sighed and tossed the Barron’s on the carpet; she was basically a good sport. “All right.” She popped off the bed, came over and went to work on my back. She has powerful thumbs for a small woman. “Wanna go out for a hot-fudge sundae?”

  “Sure. Keep working, let me check my e-mail.” She was knuckling the muscle along my spine, right at my shoulder, and I rolled my head and punched up the e-mail program on my laptop, and went out, at a dollar a minute, to see what I could see.

  An alarm came up for one of my out-of-sight e-mail addresses. Spam, probably, but I looked. No spam-it was a note from a man I didn’t know, who called himself romeoblue.

  The e-mail said, “Bobby down. Drop word. Ring on.”

  “Motherfucker,” I said, as I read it. I didn’t believe what I was seeing.

  LuEllen caught the tone and looked over my shoulder. She knew about Bobby, so I let her look. “Uh-oh. Who’s romeoblue?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How does he know Bobby?”

  I knew the answer to that, but I avoided the question. LuEllen and I trusted each other, but there was no point in being careless. “Lots of people know Bobby… Listen, now we gotta go out. I gotta make a call.”

  BOBBY is the deus ex machina for the hacking community, the fount of all knowledge, the keeper of secrets, the source of critical phone numbers, a guide through the darkness of IBM mainframes. As with LuEllen, I didn’t know his real name or exactly where he lived; but we’d done some business together.

  THE Gulf Coast could probably be a garden spot, but it isn’t. It’s a junkyard. Every form of scummy business you can think of can be found between I-10 and the beach, and most every one of them built the cheapest possible building to do the business in. It’s like Amarillo, Texas, but in bad taste.

  We ran through the rain from my room to the car, then trucked on down I-10 to the nearest Wal-Mart. We made the call from a public phone using a tiny Sony laptop I’d picked up a few weeks earlier. Dialed up my Bobby number and got nothing. No carrier tone, no redirect to some other number, just ringing with no answer. That had never happened before. I made a quick check again of my e-mail and had a second message, from a person named polytrope. He said, “Bobby’s gone. Out six hours now. Drop word. Ring on.”

  “Maybe they got him,” I said to LuEllen, popping the connection.
“The feds. I gotta make another call, but not from here. Let’s go.”

  LuEllen’s a professional thief. When I said, “Let’s go,” she didn’t ask questions. She started walking. Not hurrying, but moving out, smiling, pleasant, but not making eye contact with any of the store clerks.

  In the movies, the FBI makes a call while the bad guy is still on the telephone, and three minutes later, agents drop out of the sky in a black helicopter and the chase begins.

  In reality, if the feds had taken Bobby, and had a watch on his phone line, they could get a read on the Wal-Mart phone almost instantly. Getting to the phone was another matter-that would take a while, even if they went through the local cops. In the very best, most cooperative system, we’d have ten minutes. In a typical federal law-enforcement scramble, we’d have an hour or more. But why take a chance?

  We were out of the Wal-Mart in a minute, and in two minutes, down the highway. Ten miles away, I made a call from an outdoor phone at a Shell station, dropping an e-mail to two guys who, separately, called themselves pr 48stl9 and trilbee: “Bobby is down. Transmit word. Ring on.” I sent a third e-mail to pepper@evitable.org: “ 3577.” The number was my “word,” and I was dropping it into a blind hole.

  “THAT’S IT?” LuEllen asked, when I’d dropped the word.

  “That’s all there is. There’s nothing else to do. Still want that sundae?”

  “I guess.” But she was worried. We’re both illegal, at least some of the time, and we’re sensitive to trouble, to complications that could push us out in the open. Trouble is like a panfish nibbling at the end of your fishing line-you feel it, and if you’re experienced, you know what it means. She could feel the trouble nibbling at us. “Maybe chocolate will cure it.”

  THE ring had been set up by Bobby. A group of people that he more or less trusted were each given one segment of his address. If anything should happen to him-if his system went unresponsive-we’d each dump our “word” at a blind e-mail address.

  Whoever checked the e-mail would assemble the words, derive a street address, and go to Bobby’s house to see what had happened. I didn’t know who’d been designated to go. Somebody closer to Bobby than I was.

  To keep the cops from breaking the ring, if one of us should be caught, we knew only the online names of two members of the ring. I didn’t know until that day that romeoblue, whoever he was, was a member of the ring, or that he had one of my blind addresses. The guys I called, pr48stl9 and trilbee, didn’t know that I was part of it; and I had no idea who their guys were, further around the ring.

  Nobody, except Bobby, knew how many ring members there were, or their real names-all we knew is that each guy had two names. Two, in case somebody should be out of touch, or even dead, when the ring was turned on.

  And the ring on thing-if one of us was caught by the cops, and extorted into contacting the ring, a warning could be sent along with the extorted message. If the message didn’t end with ring on, you’d assume that things were going to hell in a handbasket.

  All of this might sound overblown, but several of us were wanted by the feds. We hadn’t been charged with any crimes, you understand. They didn’t even know who we were. They just wanted to get us down in a basement, somewhere, with maybe an electric motor and a coil of wire, to chat for a while.

  “YOU think he’s dead? Bobby?” LuEllen asked. We’d been visiting a particular ice-cream parlor, named Robbie’s, about three times a week. The place was designed to look like a railroad dining car, but had good sundaes, anyway. We’d just pulled into the parking lot, to the final thumps of the Stones’ “Satisfaction” on the radio, when she asked her question.

  I nodded. “Yeah. Or maybe unconscious, lying on the floor,” I said. That made me sad. I’d never actually met him, but he was a friend, and I could feel that hypothetical loneliness. “Or… hell, it could be a lot of things, but I think he’s probably dead or dying.”

  “What’ll you guys do? He’s always been there.”

  “Be more careful. Take fewer jobs. Maybe get out of it.”

  “I’ve been thinking about getting out,” she said suddenly. “Maybe stop stealing.”

  I looked at her and shook my head. “You never said.”

  She shrugged. “I’m getting old.”

  “Pressing your mid-thirties, I’d say.”

  She patted me on the thigh and said, “Let’s go. We’re gonna get wet.”

  THE guy who ran the ice-cream parlor wore a name tag that said “Jim” and a distant look, as though he was wishing for mountains. A paper hat perched on his balding head, and he always had a toothpick tucked in one corner of his mouth. He nodded at us, said, “The regular?” and we said, “Yeah,” and watched him dish it up. Lots of hot chocolate. The sundaes cost five dollars each, and I’d been leaving another five on the table when we left. Jim was now taking care of us, chocolate-wise.

  In the booth, over the sundaes, LuEllen asked, “You think you could really quit?”

  “I don’t need the money.”

  She looked out at the rain, hammering down on the street. A veterans convention was in town, and a guy wearing a plastic-straw boater, with a convention tag, wandered by. He’d poked a hole in the bottom of a green garbage bag and had pulled it over himself as a raincoat.

  We watched him go, and LuEllen said, “Drunk.”

  “Seeing your old war buddies’ll do that,” I said. “World War Two guys are dropping like flies now.”

  “Wonder if Bobby…” Her spoon dragged around the rim of the tulip glass; she didn’t finish the sentence.

  BOBBY had a degenerative disease, although I had no clear idea of what it was. The ring had been set up to take care of things should he die or suffer a catastrophic decline. If he went slowly, the ring wouldn’t know until the very end. At the last extreme, we would have all gotten files of information that he thought we might individually want-a kind of inheritance-and he would have erased everything else.

  I had hoped that he’d go that way, in peace. Quietly. He apparently had not.

  Of course, it was also possible that the feds had landed in a silent black helicopter, kicked in the door, and slid down his chimney and seized him before he could enter his destruct code, and that they were now waiting for us in an elaborate trap, armed to the teeth with all that shit that they spend the billions on-the secret hammers and high-tech toilet seats.

  But I didn’t think so. I thought Bobby was dead.

  BACK at the motel, I tried to work on the casino stats. I had a feeling I better get them done, just in case the Bobby problem turned into something ugly. Trouble tapping at the line. Every few minutes I’d check my e-mail. Two hours later, I picked up an alarm from another one of my invisible addresses: “Call me at home-J.”

  “Gotta go back out,” I told LuEllen. She was bent over the bed with a lightweight dumbbell, doing a golf exercise called the lawn mower pull. “Got a note from John.”

  “Is he part of the ring?” she asked, doing a final three pumps. She knew John as well as I did.

  “I’d always assumed he was, but we never talked about it,” I said. “He’s not like the rest of us.”

  “Not a computer geek.”

  “I’m not a computer geek,” I said. “Computer geeks wear pocket protectors.”

  “You’ve got five colors of pens, Kidd,” she said, pulling on her rain jacket. “I saw them once when I was ransacking your briefcase.”

  “I’m an artist, for Christ’s sakes,” I said.

  JOHN lived in a little Mississippi River town called Longstreet. He and his wife and LuEllen and I were friends. I’d stop and see them a couple times a year, as I migrated up and down the Mississippi between St. Paul and New Orleans. LuEllen would stop if she was stealing something nearby.

  I called him from a Conoco: gas stations with pay phones should get a tax break. He answered on the first ring.

  “John, this is Kidd, calling you back,” I said. Rain was hammering on the car, and I could see a disc
ouraged-looking redneck behind the plate glass of the station window.

  “You know about Bobby?” John asked. He had a baritone voice, calm and scholarly, with a trace of a Memphis accent.

  “I know he’s down. Are you a member of the ring?”

  “I’m the guy who puts the words together. Do you have a pen?”

  “Just a minute.” I got out a pen and found a blank page in a pocket sketchbook. “Okay.”

  “Here’s his address.”

  “You sure you want to give it to me?”

  “Yes. Just in case something happens… to me. Ready? Robert Fields, 3577 Arikara Street, Jackson, Mississippi 38292. Or it might also have been Robert Jackson, 3577 Arikara Street, Fields, Mississippi 38292, except that there isn’t a Fields, Mississippi, as far as I can tell.”

  “The name I had for him, the rumor I had, was that his name was Bobby DuChamps-French for ‘fields.’ ”

  “That’s the name I had,” he said. “What’s an Arikara?”

  “An Indian tribe, I think. Did you try to call him?”

  “Can’t find a phone number.”

  “Yeah, well-he might not have one of his own,” I said. “He didn’t need one, since he practically owned the phone company.”

  “That’s what I figured. Listen… I checked airlines from St. Paul into Jackson -”

  “I’m down by Biloxi,” I said, interrupting. “Between Biloxi and Gulfport.”

  “Really?” His voice brightened. “Could you meet me in Jackson? You could be there in three hours, right up U.S. 49. It’ll take me an hour and a half at least. It’s raining like hell up here.”

  “Down here, too.”

  “But I got bad roads. Kidd, I need some backup. We gotta try to do this before daylight.”

  I thought about it for a minute. This could be a bad move, but John was an old friend who had helped us through some hard times. I owed him. “All right. Where do you want to hook up?”