The Hanged Man’s Song

by John Sandford

  “I got a room at the La Quinta Inn, which is just off I-55. It’s what, almost ten o’clock now. See you at one?”

  “Soon as I can get there,” I said.

  WHEN I told her, LuEllen frowned, looked out the window at the slanting rain. “It’s a bad night for driving fast.”

  “I gotta go,” I said.

  “I know.” A couple of seconds later, “Shoot. I put some Chanel on. Now it’s wasted.” She stood on her tiptoes and gave me a soft peck on the lips, her hands on my rib cage. She did smell good; and I knew she’d feel pretty good. “You goddamn well be careful.”

  Some things to think about on my way north: sex and death.

  Chapter Three

  THE NIGHT WAS AS DARK as Elvis velvet, with nothing but the hissing of the tires on the wet pavement and the occasional red taillights turning off toward unseen homes. I listened to the radio part of the way, a classic rock station that disappeared north of Hattiesburg, fading out in the middle of a Tom Petty piece.

  As the radio station faded, so did the rain, diminishing to a drizzle. I turned the radio off so I could think, but all I could do was go round and round about Bobby. What had happened to him? What were the implications, if he was dead? Where were his databases, and who had them?

  Bobby had backed me up in a number of troubling ventures. People had died, in fact-that they’d most often deserved it didn’t change the fact of their death. Say it: of their killing. Bobby knew most of the details in the destruction of a major aerospace company. He knew why the odd security problems kept popping up in Windows. He knew why an American satellite system didn’t always work exactly as designed. He knew how a commie got elected mayor of a town down in the Delta.

  He had worked with John. John had been a kind of black radical political operator all through the deep South, especially in the Delta. He didn’t talk about it, but he was tough in a way you didn’t get by accident; and he had scars you didn’t get from playing tennis.

  So Bobby knew too much for our good health. He knew stuff that could put a few dozen, or even a few hundred, people in prison. Maybe even me.

  Thirty miles south of Jackson, I ran into a thunderstorm-what they call an embedded storm, though I wouldn’t know it from an unbedded storm. The rain came down in marble-sized bullets, lightning jumped and skittered across the sky, and I could feel the thunder beating against the car, flexing the skin, like the cover on a sub-woofer.

  I hoped John had made it all right. He had a treacherous route into Jackson, mostly back highways through rural hamlets, not a good drive in bright sunlight. I’d met John on one of my special jobs, set up by Bobby, a job that ended with me in a Memphis hospital. The scars have almost faded, but I still have the dreams…

  Still, we’d become friends. John had been an investigator with a law office in Memphis, and, underground, an enforcer of some kind for a black radical political party-and at the same time, an artist, like me. Instead of paint, John worked in stone and wood, a sculptor. He’d begun making money at it, and had started picking up a reputation.

  THAT last thirty miles of bullet-rain took forty minutes to drive through, and it was nearly two in the morning when I arrived in Jackson. I pulled into the La Quinta, stopped under a portico, and hopped out. Before I could walk around the car, John came through the door. He was wrapped in a gray plastic raincoat and was smiling and said, “Goddamnit, I’m glad to see you, Kidd. I was afraid you’d gone in a ditch.” He was a black man, middle forties, with a square face, short hair, broad shoulders, and smart, dark eyes.

  As we shook hands in the rain, I said, “Picked a good fuckin’ night for it.”

  “If you don’t have to pee…”

  “I’m fine, but I’d like to get a Coke.”

  He stuck his hand in his pocket and produced a can of Diet Coke. “Still cold. Let’s go.”

  AS SOON as he’d come into town, figuring that I’d be later, he’d gone around to convenience stores until he found one that sold a city map. In his room at the La Quinta, he’d spotted Bobby’s house and blocked out a route. “We’re a ways from where we need to be,” he said. He pointed down a broad street that went under the interstate. “Go that way.”

  I went that way and asked, “How’s Marvel?”

  “She’s fine. Up to her ass in the politics. Still a fuckin’ commie.”

  “Nice ass, though,” I said. Marvel was his wife, but John and I had met her at the same time, and I had commentary privileges.

  “True. How ’bout LuEllen?”

  “She’s with me, down in Biloxi, but we’re not in bed. I’ve, uh, I’d been, uh, seeing this woman back home. She broke it off a couple of weeks ago. I’m kinda bummed.”

  “You were serious?” He was interested.

  “Maybe. Interesting woman-a cop, in fact.”

  A moment of silence, then, “Bet she had a nice pair of thirty-eights, huh?”

  We both had to laugh at the stupidity of it. Then I said, “What about Bobby?”

  “I don’t know,” John said. “He sounded good-I mean, bad, but good for him-last time I talked to him. That was like two weeks ago, one of those phone calls from nowhere.”

  “No hint of this.”

  “Nothing. I tried to remember every word of what he said, when I was coming over here, and I can’t remember a single unusual thing. He just sounded like… Bobby. Hey, turn left at that stoplight.”

  JACKSON, Mississippi, may be a perfectly nice place, assuming that we weren’t in the best part of it. The part we were in was run-down and maybe even run-over. Some of the houses that passed through our headlights seemed to be sinking into the ground. Driveways were mostly gravel, with here and there a carport; otherwise the cars, big American cars from the eighties and nineties, were parked in the yards.

  The streets got bumpier as we went along, and eventually we got into a spot that was overgrown with kudzu, the stuff curled up and down the phone poles and street signs. Water was ponding along the shoulders of the roads; street signs became hard to locate and, with the kudzu, even harder to read.

  “Too bad you can’t smoke that shit,” John said. “Solve a lot of problems.”

  At one point, a big black-and-tan dog, probably a Doberman, splashed in the rain through our headlights, looking at us with lion eyes that said, “C’mon, get out of the car, chump, c’mon…”

  We didn’t. Instead, John picked out streets on his map, confirmed it from one street sign to the next, and finally got us onto Arikara Street. “He ought to be in this block, if the numbers are right.” The street was bumpy, potholed, with trees hanging over it, and was lined with widely spaced houses with dark exteriors and dark windows. I’d brought a flashlight along with me, and John had it on his lap, but we didn’t need it. We came up to a bronze-colored mailbox, the best-looking mailbox I’d seen all night, and in the headlights saw 3577 in reflecting stick-on numerals.

  “That’s it,” he said.

  I went on by. We looked for light, for movement, for any kind of weirdness, and didn’t see or feel a thing. The house had a carport, but it was empty. Some of the houses had chain-link fences around the yards, but this one was open. A porch hung on the front of the place.

  “Take another lap,” John said. “Goddamnit. We shoulda worked out an alibi.”

  I shrugged. “Tell the truth. That we’re old computer buddies of his, that we knew he was near death, and that he asked us to check on him if he ever became nonresponsive.”

  “Yeah.” He sighed. “I wish we had something fancier.”

  “At two-thirty in the morning? We were out looking for Tic Tacs, Officer…”

  “Yeah, yeah. I just rather not have them run my ID through their database.”

  “No shit.” The next lap around, I said, “I’m gonna pull in, unless you say no. You say no?”

  “Pull in,” he said.

  I PULLED into the driveway, up close to the house and, before I killed the lights, noticed a wheelchair ramp going up to a side door fr
om the carport. The neighborhood was poor, but the lots were large and overgrown. The neighbors to the left could see us, if they were interested, and the people across the street might get a look, but there were no lights in the windows. Working people, probably, who had to get up in the morning.

  When I stopped, John climbed out, with me a second behind, and we shut the doors quickly and as quietly as we could, to kill the interior lights. Dark as a tar pit, rain pelting down; the place smelled almost like a northern lake. We squished through the wet side yard to the porch, then walked up to the door. John hesitated, then knocked.

  Nothing.

  Knocked again, then quietly, to me, “Jeez, I hope there’s no alarm. I never even thought of that.”

  “If there is, we run.” I tried the knob. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “It’s open. Don’t touch anything.” I pushed the door with my knuckles, and immediately smelled the death inside.

  “Got a problem,” I said.

  “I smell it.”

  The odor wasn’t of physical decomposition, but simply of… death. An odd odor that dead people gather about them, an odor of dying heat, maybe, or souring gases, not heavy, but light, intangible, unpleasant. Something best not to think about. I was afraid to use the flashlight, because nothing brings the cops faster than a flashlight in a dark house. Instead, I pulled John inside, closed the door, groped around, found a wall switch, and turned on a ceiling light.

  The first thing we saw was the wheelchair, and then what looked like a pile of gray laundry in a corner. We both stepped that way and saw the nearly weightless, eggshell skull of a young black man, with a scattering of books around his head. There was no question that he was dead. His face had been wrinkled, maybe from pain, and though you could tell he’d been young, he had a patina of age.

  “Ah, shit,” I said.

  “I would have liked to have met him,” John said softly.

  I moved closer, saw the gun in the corner, and said, “There’s a gun,” and then stepped over the body and saw the misshapen skull and the blood. “Somebody killed him.”

  “Somebody…” John stepped over, saw the blood. “Oh, boy.”

  “Let’s check around,” I said. I glanced at the wheelchair, noticed the tray with a series of clamps. “John, look at this.”

  “What?”

  “Looks like a laptop setup.”

  “No laptop.”

  We both knew that was bad. We did a quick run-through of the house and found a wi-fi router in a back closet, plugged into a cable modem. “No servers,” I said. “I wondered about that.”

  “What?”

  “He seemed to have servers, but that would have made him vulnerable. So he has virtual servers. All of his stuff is… out there, somewhere. What wasn’t on the laptop.”

  John said, “Let’s see if we can find some gloves, so we don’t leave fingerprints all over the place.”

  BOBBY’S house was a mix of old and new. The entire house had wooden floors-board floors as in old southern farmhouses-covered in the dining room by a semi-threadbare oriental carpet that looked as though it came from the turn of the twentieth century. But it wasn’t cheap; it fit the room well and looked inherited. A dozen plants were scattered through the half-dozen rooms, including five or six orchids, one blooming with gorgeous white flowers like a spray of silvery moons. An upright piano sat in one corner of the living room, the keyboard cover up, sheet music for Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You” perched on the music stand. There was all the usual stuff-a big TV, game cartridges, a stereo system with a CD player and maybe a thousand jazz and classical CDs, a modern turntable for vinyl records, and three or four hundred records to go with it. He liked Elvis Presley, I noticed, along with all the big blues masters.

  There were photographs. Framed photos of single faces, and groups of people gathered around cars or standing in front of houses, black people, all, smiling at the camera, dressed in suits and dresses as if they’d just gotten back from church, maybe a wedding; and the style of the photos, and the contents, judging from the cars that were visible, went back to the 1930s, and came forward, perhaps, to the eighties.

  And there were books. Big piles of computer stuff, but also detective and thriller novels, and general fiction. A copy of Annie Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole was split open over a chair that faced a wide-screen television. A comfortable house, a comfortable home, all come to a pile of laundry in a corner, with a starved-bony face and a pool of blood.

  We found a toolbox in a kitchen drawer, and a box of vinyl gloves: actually, three boxes of vinyl gloves, which suggested that Bobby had had allergies, as well as the problem that had been killing him, whatever it was.

  We spent an hour going through the house, working quickly, trying to cover everything. For practical purposes, the house was one-story-no basement, and while there was an attic space, access was through a ceiling hatch, and Bobby couldn’t have gotten to it. Anything important, we thought, would be on the main floor. We wanted computer disks, written files, anything that might involve Bobby’s complicated computer relationships.

  I spent a half hour going through two file cabinets, mostly income tax and investment records. Nothing, as far as I could see, that related to his computer work except for computer purchase records from Dell and IBM. I took those, dropping them in an empty Harry and David fruit-delivery box.

  Every time we went in the front room, we curled our faces away from the bundle in the corner-I saw John do it, and I felt myself do it. But there was the curiosity… what did the mysterious Bobby really look like? I couldn’t touch him, didn’t want to move him, but looking down at him once, forcing myself, I decided that he looked a little like photos I’d seen of Somalis on the ragged edge of hunger. He had been nice-looking, but there was not much left of him; and now he looked deflated, sad, unready to be dead. He gave us a sense of silence and gloom.

  Under some shoes in the bedroom closet, John spotted a board that looked out of place. When he rattled it, and then lifted it, he found a green metal box, and inside that, an expired U.S. passport with the photo of a teenaged Bobby inside, a small amount of inexpensive, old-fashioned women’s jewelry-his mother’s?-and $16,000 in twenties and fifties.

  “Take the money?” I asked John.

  “If we don’t, the cops might,” John said, looking at me over the cash. “I don’t need it.”

  “What if, uh, he has a will, and wants it to go to somebody?”

  “We find that out and send it to them,” John said. “But I’m afraid that if we don’t take it, it’s gonna disappear.”

  We put the money in the Harry and David box.

  The biggest find came in the front room, in a built-in book cabinet not far from Bobby’s outstretched hand. It was hard to see-it had been designed that way-but the cabinet was deeper from the side than it was from the front. In other words, if you looked at it from the side, it was a full fifteen inches deep. If you looked at it from the front, it was barely deep enough for a full-sized novel. Some of the novels that had been in the shelves had been pulled out and were scattered around the floor by the body.

  I turned and said, “Come look at this.”

  John stepped carefully past the body and I pointed out the depth discrepancy. It took a minute to figure out, but if you pressed on one corner of the back of each shelf, a board simply popped loose. When you removed the board, you found a narrow little space behind the books. It was convenient, simple, and mostly effective.

  Inside were seventy DVD disks: Bobby’s files. We put them in the Harry and David box. Working around the body, John said, morosely, “That smell-Jesus, Kidd, I feel like it’s getting into me.”

  “Keep working. Don’t look.”

  When we were done, we put our raincoats back on, put the Harry and David box in a garbage bag, and toted it out to the car. The rain was constant, but not cold, and I could hear it gurgling down drainpipes off the tin roof-a sound that was sometimes light an
d musical, but tonight sounded like Wagner. Before we finally closed the door and wiped the doorknobs, John said, “I hate to leave him like this.”

  I looked back at the crumpled body on the floor and said, “You know, we really can’t. Somebody killed him and the sooner the cops get here, the more likely they are to catch the guy.”

  “So we call the cops?” John didn’t like cops.

  “We call somebody,” I said. “We’ve got to think about it. The thing is, we didn’t find a computer, and it looks like whoever came in, took it. That means that Bobby’s main machine is floating around out there.”

  “You think… no.” John shook his head at his own thought.

  “What?”

  “Wishful thinking. I was gonna say, maybe this was neighborhood thieves, and he caught them at it, and they killed him. But then, if it was just a burglary, they would have taken other stuff. There was all kinds of stuff that thieves would take, just sitting around.”

  “Yeah. But they only took the laptop. That means that they came for it. And were willing to kill for it,” I said.

  “Shit.”

  “If we’re lucky, he encrypted the sensitive stuff. Every time he wanted to send me something serious, I’d get the key, and then after I acknowledged it, the file would come in. If he whipped some encryption on it, we’re okay.”

  “But if we’re not lucky and he didn’t encrypt…”

  “Then we could be in trouble,” I said.

  Chapter Four

  WE WERE AN ODD COUPLE, wandering around in the middle of the night, in a monsoon. If we’d been noticed at Bobby’s house by an insomniac neighbor, and if the cops later said something in the newspaper about looking for a white guy and a black guy seen together in the rain, I didn’t want the desk clerk at the La Quinta to have that memory.

  Instead of going back to the motel to talk, we drove a loop through Jackson, windshield wipers whacking away, windows steaming up, talking about what to do. We had two problems: getting some kind of justice for Bobby, and finding the laptop. The lives of a lot of us could be on that thing. Events, dates, times, places. Bobby knew way too much-it was as if the legendary J. Edgar Hoover files were out wandering around the country on their own.