The Hanged Man’s Song

by John Sandford

  “Where do you live?” John asked.

  “Up north,” she said, and smiled.

  John thought he should go, because the computer girl was almost certainly black, and his being black might give him an edge in talking with her. Marvel didn’t like the idea of John going.

  “Kidd could probably talk to her better, geek to geek.”

  “I’m not a geek,” I said.

  “You’re a cutie, but you have geek-like thoughts,” Marvel said. She reached out and pinched one of my cheeks and shook it. She went back to John. “You know what the cops are like down there. You can get picked up for walking around black. You don’t want to get picked up.”

  “I won’t,” he said, with a little heat. “I’m tired of never going anywhere. And if we both go, I can talk to her black to black and Kidd can talk to her geek to geek.”

  “Sounds like a fuckin’ dance,” said LuEllen. “Dancin’ geek to geek.”

  They all laughed, and I said, “I’m getting pretty tired of this geek shit.”

  AFTER some more talk, we decided to head down to New Orleans the next day, and at least take a look around. LuEllen went off to the bathroom before we headed out to our motel, and John went to kiss the kids good night. They’d been asleep for hours, but Marvel believed that they subliminally knew when their father had tucked them in-and Marvel caught me alone in the kitchen.

  “I’ve never said anything to anybody about this, Kidd, but when John was a young man he got into serious trouble,” she said. “He’d still be in prison if they’d caught him, but they didn’t-but they’ve got his fingerprints and his real name there with the FBI. If they catch him and get his fingerprints…”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You take care of him,” she said, profoundly serious. “I’m putting it on you.”

  WE WERE out of Longstreet at eight o’clock the next morning, still yawning and sleepy, and rolled into New Orleans in the middle of a steamy afternoon, with rain clouds building in the west. The car thermometer said it was 92 degrees on the freeway, and in the blacktop of an E-Z Way convenience store, where we stopped for water and Cokes, it felt closer to 100. The air was absolutely still, and completely saturated.

  In the same convenience store, I caught a few minutes of Fox News and what looked like a photograph of a man wearing desert camo and an American helmet pointing a pistol at the head of an Arab man in Middle Eastern robes. The Arab seemed to be reacting in shock, as though he’d just been shot-a photo something like the famous Viet Cong execution photo from the sixties. The sound was down, so I didn’t know what they were talking about.

  A skinny white kid was standing there, probably a skater because, even in the heat, he was wearing a black wool watch cap pulled all the way over his head, and I asked, “What’s going on?”

  “Shot that dude in the head, man,” he said. Then, “Guns are bad.” I left not knowing whether he meant that guns are evil or that guns are desirable-getting old, I guess.

  WE DECIDED to set up a base-a bolt-hole if we needed one-at the Baton Noir Motel in Metairie, a nice place with a good dining room and a friendly attitude toward multiracial convocations. I’d spent a month there before buying my New Orleans condo, and a couple of weeks while I sold the place.

  After checking in, I went to a map program in my laptop and we pulled up the kid’s address and a map. As I was doing that, LuEllen clicked on the TV and a few minutes later, while I was writing down directions to the girl’s house, she said, “Hey! Hey! Look at this! Look at this!”

  She was watching the same story I’d seen in the convenience store. The anchorwoman was saying, “… denies that any such execution took place and that the photo may be a composite. The person called Bobby says that the officer in the photograph is Captain Delton Polysemy of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces then stationed in Yemen. Fox News has learned that there is a Captain Polysemy, but his current assignment and whereabouts are not known. Presidential Press Secretary Anton Lazar said that the President is aware of the photograph but had not seen it, and said that further comment would have to come from the Department of Defense. Lazar said that the U.S. government does not support summary executions, but repeated that there is no evidence that any such execution had taken place and that the photograph may be a composite…”

  “AH, MAN,” John said. “He’s gonna have every fuckin’ federal agent in the country chasing him.”

  “But they still don’t know it’s not Bobby,” LuEllen said.

  “We might have to tell them,” I said. “They’ve got some ideas about Bobby, and people who might know about him. If this shit keeps up, they’ll start knocking down doors under some Homeland Security pretense. A lot of good guys could go down.”

  “Maybe you,” LuEllen said, looking at me.

  “I think I’m okay,” I said, but I was a lot more worried than that. I’d been working for a long time, and there were dozens of people who had ideas of what I’d been doing with my time, in addition to the painting. “We really gotta go see this Rachel Willowby.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” LuEllen said. “You said, tip them off on Bobby being dead. We gotta think about that. That might be an idea. If they believe he’s dead, they’ll look somewhere else. Problem solved. Mostly.”

  “Maybe-but we don’t have to do it right now,” I said. “Let’s think about it.”

  IF YOU get off the main roads of Louisiana, back in the marshy ground, you find the worst poverty in America -worse than some of the South Dakota Indian reservations, which is saying a lot. Rachel Willowby’s address came down to a crumbling concrete-block-stucco triplex, painted a harsh limey green, a dusty place with sick-looking thorn bushes in front of the windows as burglary deterrents. The neighborhood was marked by oil-stained driveways and crumbly carports full of junk and junkers, old and fading gang symbols on the sides of stores and service shops. Black kids with tough, calculating eyes looked out of their cars at us as we drove through. They put us down as cops. “No car,” John said, as we drove past the Willowby place. “Her folks may be working.”

  “If she’s got folks,” LuEllen said from the backseat. “The place looks deserted. And if she had to get a laptop from Bobby, there can’t be much money around-you can get a used one for almost nothing.”

  “But it’d have to be a priority,” John said. “Might not be a priority with her folks.”

  “We’re stalling,” I said. “What do we do?”

  “What we do is, we go in. Right now. It’s our best shot,” John said. “We know she goes to school, but she should be home by now, and there’s no car.”

  “All three of us?” I asked.

  John said, “Really, the best combination would be me and LuEllen, ’cause I’m black and could be a cop and LuEllen could be a social worker-but you’re the one who knows the computer shit, so you gotta come.”

  “Man, I love this. I could do this for a living,” I muttered. I made a U-turn, drove back past a kid in a striped shirt and shorts, who had a bicycle helmet on his head, and who shook a finger at us and then laughed.

  “That kid worries me,” LuEllen said, looking back at the kid in the street. “Why’s he walking around in this sun with a helmet on? Why doesn’t he have a bicycle?”

  WE ALL went together to the Willowby apartment, a little cluster, a scrum, three sweating, cranky people in clothes that suddenly looked too good, knocked on the door and got nothing. We were standing there, listening for anything inside, and LuEllen said, “Now what?”

  “Try again later,” I said, and stepped back. We were headed reluctantly back to the car when a woman pushed open a door on an adjoining apartment, sweeping dust out on the sidewalk. She fussed at it and then called, “You looking for somebody?” She wasn’t actually sweeping anything-the broom was an excuse to see what we were doing.

  John stepped toward her and put out his best official vibration. He was wearing slacks and a yellow short-sleeved shirt, and looked like he might just have taken off a s
port coat in the heat. He said, “We’re looking for Rachel Willowby.”

  “She in trouble again?” The woman’s head was cocked away from us.

  “No. Not exactly. But we would like to talk with her. Have you seen her?”

  “Playing hooky again,” the woman speculated. Her eyes hit me, then went to LuEllen, and finally back to John. “Takes three of you, now.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we’re really not allowed to talk about it,” John said. “Do you know where she might be?”

  Another long pause, but John’s official stare got on top of her. “She’s home. Probably hidin’ under the bed.”

  “Where’s her mother?”

  “Her mother took off. Two months ago. I wouldn’t tell you about the girl, ’cept I don’t know what she eats, and she ain’t gonna be let live there much longer. It’s been rented. She sneaks in now.”

  “Thank you.” John walked straight back to the door and knocked on it, then tried the knob. The door was locked, but was so loose in its frame that he put a shoe against it, pushed, and it popped open. He called, “Rachel? We know you’re home.” A moment later, “There you are.” He stepped inside, out of sight, then stepped back to the door, looked at the woman, and said, “Thank you,” and to us, “Come on in.”

  WE ALL trooped inside and found ourselves looking at a skinny little girl in shorts and a tube top. She wore big unfashionable plastic-rimmed glasses and had a ferociously unhappy look on her face. The house was unlit, with most of the blinds pulled, so she was working in semidarkness. The place smelled of onions and sweat. I could see one piece of furniture in the front two rooms, and that was a kitchen table. A laptop sat on the table, with a wire leading to a telephone. The laptop screen showed three open windows; a digital counter blinked in the lower right corner. She said, “That ol’ bitch gonna get her snoopy nose cut off, one of these days.”

  John shook his head and said, “We need to talk.”

  “I’m sick.” A sick look slipped onto her face. “I really am.”

  Fuck it: she was a hacker. I said, “We’re not from the schools. We’re not from the cops. I’m a hack and I want to know what you have to do with blowing Bobby out of the system.”

  That stopped her. She looked at me, forgot the others. “Where’d he go?”

  “We don’t know,” I lied. “We’re part of his backup group. He’s not at his house anymore, and something you did caused the trouble.”

  “Not me,” she said shrilly. She stepped protectively toward her laptop, eyes wide. “I hardly even know the man.”

  “He sent you the laptop,” I said. “You’re the only person who could’ve given anything away.”

  “I did not.”

  “You did something. You might not even know it.” I bent over the laptop, looking at the screen. “What’re you doing here, running a dictionary? What’re you trying to get into?”

  She flinched, put a protective hand out toward her screen. “I didn’t give shit to nobody.” She was loud, defiant, and still pretty small; I loomed over her.

  “Then somebody came over and got an address from you. Got it off the FedEx package. Who was that?”

  Her tongue curled over her bottom lip and she glanced at LuEllen and John and saw nothing but more adults, all ganged up on her. So she just said it. “That was Jimmy James Carp. He said he was gonna get me a laptop from Bobby and he did.”

  “Where does he live?”

  She shrugged, and relaxed a notch: she felt the blame shifting. “I don’t know. He used to be a teacher up to Adams and then he moved to Washington, D.C., and I only saw him when he said he came back to visit his momma. He told me to call him if I got the computer. I called him when I got it and he came over.”

  “Came over right away?”

  “Next day.”

  “White man or black man?” John asked.

  “White man. Really white.”

  “You know his phone number?”

  “I got it on my machine. You gonna do something to Jimmy James?”

  “Talk to him. We’re trying to find Bobby.”

  She went to the machine and her fingers danced across it. She was a hack, all right; the best way to tell is to watch the hands. Hacks are so deep into it that they essentially will a computer to act, their thoughts appearing on the screen as if by magic, the fingers working by reflex and so quickly it’s like watching a spider’s spinners as it weaves a web. In a few seconds, she’d closed down her online connection so we wouldn’t see it, dumped whatever program she was using, called up the Address Book from the Windows accessories program, and located Carp’s number.

  As she did it, I said, “If you call this Carp guy and tell him we’re coming over, he’s gonna hide out, and we’re not gonna find out what happened to Bobby. The only reason he got you the computer was so he could find Bobby. Carp might pretend, but he’s no friend of yours.”

  “I know,” she said grudgingly. She poked one of the laptop keys and the address program vanished. She looked back up at me; her face was thin, hungry. “He’s a creep. I wondered why he helped me. He didn’t even know me when he worked at Adams and then I see him and he’s all, ‘Hey, Rachel, how are you doin’?’ I thought he wanted to fuck me or something and then he goes on about computing, you know?”

  “He’s a hack?”

  “He knows some shit,” she admitted.

  “Jimmy James is a strange name,” LuEllen ventured. “Is that his real name?”

  “That’s what everybody called him,” she said. “I think it’s real.”

  “I’LL tell you what,” I said. “If you don’t call Carp and tell him that we’ve been looking for him, then I’ll give you three phone numbers.”

  “To what?” She was interested. Good phone numbers, to hacks, are like little diamonds.

  “Won’t tell you. And I won’t give them to you until after we talk to Carp. But if you’re any good on that laptop, you’ve been looking for them.”

  She considered that for a moment and then said, “What do you know about Wal-Mart?”

  “What do you need?”

  “I’d like to get good access into their computer system. Just to see how it works.”

  “What do you have now?”

  “Can’t get further than the front end.”

  She had a friend who worked at a Wal-Mart somewhere, I thought. “One of the ways hacks get caught is when they try to use a computer system to deliver inventory to people who’ll steal it. Inventory systems are pretty carefully protected from beginners.”

  “I just want to look at the system,” she said sullenly.

  “I don’t know about Wal-Mart, but I can suggest a piece of social engineering that’ll get you in.”

  “Like what?”

  “If I tell you, you’re on your own,” I said. “And you can’t call Carp.”

  “Let’s have it,” she said. “And I’ll want those three numbers, too.”

  “When I know you can’t hurt us. Do you have a chat name?”

  “Yes. You can get me anytime.” I got her AIM name and told her I’d call back.

  “So tell me how to get into Wal-Mart.”

  I told her. John was watching while we talked, and finally he asked, “Where’s your mother?”

  “She took off with Leon-her boyfriend. She told me to go over to my aunt’s, but my aunt said she didn’t know nothin’ about it, so I come back here and I been waitin’ ever since.”

  “You don’t know where they went?”

  “Said it was to Hollywood, to dance, but she’s dreamin.’ She’s gonna go out there and whore around, just like here. Nobody’s gonna pay her to dance. Or Leon neither.”

  “The lady next door said they’re gonna rent the apartment to somebody else,” John said.

  “I’ll figure that out when I get there,” Rachel said, but she was worried.

  John shook his head, looked at the girl, then at me, then said, “Shit.”

  BACK in the car, with all the win
dows down and the air conditioner running full blast, John said, “This isn’t gonna work. I gotta do something about the kid.”

  “Like what?”

  “Take her with me. We can leave the number with her aunt, for when her mom gets back.”

  “I don’t think her mom is coming back,” LuEllen told him. “But taking her with you… John, you ought to talk to Marvel, first.”

  John finally went back with some money, pushed his way into the house, and left it with her.

  “She can get something to eat, anyway,” he said, miserably, when he got back. “I only had a hundred bucks. How in the fuck could somebody ditch a kid like that?”

  “She’s probably on her way to CompUSA,” I said. “Computer memory is better than food, at that age.”

  We turned a corner, and all three of us looked back: nothing good could happen to that kid, not as things were.

  WITH Carp’s name and phone number, I suggested to John that we access a local analog database and see if we could come up with an address.

  “Which database?” John asked. He was hot, unhappy, and mopped his forehead with a paper towel he’d taken out of the Willowby kitchen. “You got a number?”

  “It’s an old, old, old geek joke,” LuEllen said, sounding deeply bored. “He means, we look in the phone book.”

  “You can kiss my analog,” John said to me. He looked out the window. “How can it be so hot here? I thought Longstreet was hot.”

  “It’s not the heat,” I began, earnestly.

  “Shut up,” LuEllen said.

  We took a while finding a phone book, but finally got one at a shopping center. While LuEllen went off and got three cinnamon rolls, I found one Carp in the White Pages-a Melissa Carp, in Slidell, which was on the opposite shore of Lake Pontchartrain. The phone number was right.

  “We’re on a roll,” John said. “Let’s go right now.” On the way over, still looking out the window, he said, “That fuckin’ kid.”