The Hanged Man’s Song

by John Sandford

  WE HEADED up to Slidell on I-10, not one of the nation’s scenic roads. The Carp place was a mobile home in a mobile-home neighborhood on the east side of town, or maybe out of town, to the east. From the street, nothing was visible except a chin-high concrete-block wall, over which we could see the tops of the homes and willowy-looking trees clogged with Spanish moss.

  “These places are a problem,” LuEllen said, as we cruised by. “I know people who live in places like this. Everything is close together and the streets are more like lanes, and you can’t get in and out fast, and everybody sees you coming and going.”

  “That’s encouraging,” John said.

  “And they’re pretty segregated,” LuEllen said. “The ones I’ve been in, anyway. If this is a white park, you’re gonna be noticeable, John.”

  “Even better.”

  IN THE end, we drove through just at dusk, looking for the right place. All the streets were named after trees, like Cherry, Chestnut, Olive, and Peach. As LuEllen had suggested, the lots were small, and cut at odd angles to each other, some neatly kept, some not. We went past a couple who were barbequing on a small grill, then wandered past a double lot with an aboveground pool to one side of the home; we saw a few young kids here and there, and one older kid blading along the main drag, hands locked behind his back, earphones cutting him off from the world. Other than that, the streets were mostly empty, probably because it was still so hot.

  The streets were marked, at least, and we found Quince Street at the southeast corner of the neighborhood, a loop that ran just inside the concrete-block wall. The Carp place was a once-forest-green mobile home, now sun-faded, with a white roof, closed-curtained windows, and a rickety carport at the far end. A dusty red Toyota Corolla squatted in the carport. Light could be seen through a back window, but the front of the place was dark.

  “What do you want to do?” LuEllen asked.

  “How about if we drive around for two minutes, figure out these roads, then you take the car while John and I brace the guy? We look enough like cops.”

  “I wonder who Melissa Carp is? Mother? Wife? Ex-wife? Sister?”

  WE DROVE around until we were oriented, then LuEllen dropped us off a hundred feet down the street from Carp’s. Most of the homes around us showed lights, or the bluish-white glow of TVs. I could hear somebody playing an old Cream recording called “Strange Brew” somewhere down the block; other than that, it was all the hum of air conditioners.

  “If I was a cop, walking up to doors like this would scare the shit out of me,” John muttered as we walked up a flagstone walk to Carp’s front door. I knocked, and the door rattled in its frame, and we felt a change from inside, as though something not quite audible had been going on, and now had stopped. Maybe, I thought, somebody had stopped typing.

  Then footsteps. A curtain moved. Whoever looked out-the window was dark, and he was invisible-could see only John, because I’d moved to the other side of the door, away from the window. Then more footsteps inside, and the inner door rattled, and finally a man looked out.

  He was younger than we were, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, large, with a fatty, football-shaped face, a long, fleshy nose, and a thatch of brown hair. He hadn’t shaved, and a wispy beard showed on his jowls and under his full lips. He had small eyes, and he blinked at us and then asked, “Who’re you?”

  “Are you James Carp?” John asked.

  His forehead wrinkled. “Uh, that’s my brother.”

  “Is he here?” John asked.

  He was about to lie to us. I could see it in his face. “He’s uh, back in the… he’s in the back.”

  “We really need to talk to him,” John said. John sort of wedged himself in the doorway. “It’s really pretty important.”

  “I’ll, uh, go and get him,” the man said.

  He pushed the door mostly shut, looked at us one more time, and John said, “That’s you, isn’t it, Jimmy James?”

  CARP broke for the back of the mobile home and John and I went after him. We crunched into each other trying to get through the door, and then, once inside, in the dark, I hit the front edge of the folding table and almost went down-a near fall that might have saved my life, because as I was twisting off to the side, Carp, in the back, fired three quick shots at us with a pistol.

  I continued down, hearing the gunfire and seeing the muzzle flashes, and heard John crash out through the door and I thought, He’s hit, and I scrambled that way and fed myself through the door like a snake.

  I thought Carp might be coming after us, and I reached up and pulled the door shut and looked for a place to run. John was on his knees, getting to his feet as I rolled out, and now he was looking down the length of the trailer and calling, “Hey!” and I looked that way.

  There was a back door, somewhere out of sight, or he’d gone out a window: Carp was there, the laptop under his arm, a power cord trailing away. He was climbing into the Corolla and when I rolled to my feet he pointed the pistol at us, and we both dodged back, toward the back of the trailer, and he started the car with his computer hand and rolled out and down the street, and a second later was gone in the twilight.

  JOHN looked at me. “You okay?”

  “I’m okay, you hit?”

  “No, no.”

  Then LuEllen arrived and we climbed in the car and she took off, fast for the first hundred feet, then slowing, slowing, and then she asked, “Was that a gun?”

  “That was a gun,” I said. I felt like I could start shaking. “That was Carp. He’s somewhere out ahead of us in that Corolla.”

  “Wasn’t very loud,” she said. “Maybe a.22.”

  “Even a.22’ll shoot your ass off,” John said. Then, “Maybe not your whole ass.”

  Two minutes later, we were back on the street, heading toward I-10. We were coming up to a gas station and I saw a “Telephone” sign. “Pull over, there,” I said. We’d only been out of the place for three or four minutes.

  I got on the phone, dialed 911, and when the emergency center came up, I shouted, “There’s been a shooting at 300 Quince Street in the Langtry mobile home park. There’s a guy shot. He’s hurt real bad. I gotta go, I gotta go.”

  The woman at the other end was calling, “Wait, wait,” when I hung up.

  Most 911 centers will show a phone number and location when you call. We got out of there as quickly as we could, losing ourselves in traffic.

  “What was that all about?” John asked.

  “I’m hoping they’ll send a cop car or two.” Then we heard the first siren, and we all shut up to watch a squad car zip by, going in the other direction. “I’m hoping it’ll keep Carp on the run. I hope he thinks he shot a cop.”

  “I just hope nobody got our plates in there,” LuEllen said.

  “I didn’t see anybody close enough to do that… or curious enough,” I said.

  “I thought that motherfucker had shot you, Kidd,” John said. “You went down like a dropped rock.”

  “No damage,” I said.

  “I HATE surprises,” LuEllen said. And she did-whenever she was working, she was a meticulous planner. Our planning on Carp had not been the most meticulous.

  “Lost the laptop,” John said. “But we sure as shit got some answers: Carp did it, and he’s got it.”

  We heard another siren and then another cop went by.

  “Keep running, Jimmy James,” I said. “The hounds are on your ass.”

  Chapter Nine

  AFTER THE FIASCO at Carp’s, we retreated to the motel to think it over. If this had been a thriller novel, we would have tried trolling the back roads, looking for Carp, and might even have found him. But this wasn’t a novel, and since we weren’t cops, and didn’t know the town, we had no resources for tracking him. Even if we located him, he had a gun and we didn’t. Nor did we have a way to get one quickly, if we wanted one.

  “If we find him again, we need to surprise him, disarm him, and grab the laptop,” John said. “If we’d known
for sure what he looked like, we could’ve grabbed him at the trailer before he had a chance to get the gun.”

  “We should have researched him before we tried to grab him,” LuEllen said. “At least, we should have found a picture of him.”

  “Yeah. We blew it,” John said. To me: “What do you want to do?”

  “Go out on the ’net and do what we should have done before-research him,” I said.

  “When he shot at you guys, I could barely hear the shots,” LuEllen said. “He was inside. There wasn’t anybody else around, and with everybody using air-conditioning, it’s possible nobody else heard the shots. If nobody called the cops and pinpointed Carp’s place, we might be able to get back inside.”

  “That’d be a last resort,” I said.

  “It might be full of stuff that would tell us where he’s going-if the cop sirens chased Carp away, and nobody heard the shots.”

  I looked at John and he nodded.

  “THE other thing,” LuEllen said. “I hate to keep harping on it, but I can’t see any downside to telling somebody that Bobby is dead. If we don’t, they’ll start going after people they think might be associated with him. Might know something. There’s no way to tell where that would stop. The thing is, Carp is fucking with politicians. You know how they hate that.”

  John shrugged. “I don’t see a huge problem with telling somebody. Except, who’d believe us?”

  “There’s one person I can think of.” I looked at LuEllen. “Rosalind Welsh.”

  LuEllen thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. She’d do.”

  “Who’s she?” John asked.

  We’d only met Welsh once, I told him, during a spot of trouble that led to a car getting melted in a Maryland shopping center garage while LuEllen and I stole a van from a housewife, and black helicopters-well, sort of a greenish-black…

  “Just green,” LuEllen said.

  … green helicopters landed in the parking lot and people ran around like ants and waved their arms until the fire trucks came.

  “She works for the National Security Agency,” LuEllen said to John. “She’s a security expert, not a computer freak. She’s too heavy by fifteen pounds. She thinks Kidd’s name is Bill Clinton.”

  “Hmm,” John said. “Sounds perfect.”

  We decided to make the call that night-I had all of Rosalind Welsh’s phone numbers, unless she’d moved or died, and I was sure she’d be happy to hear from me. First though, we needed to find a Radio Shack.

  If there weren’t such things as Radio Shack stores, I probably would have become a humble shepherd, instead of the hardened criminal and painter that I am. But there are Radio Shack stores, and after the discouraging session with John and LuEllen, I looked at my watch, and figured I had about twenty minutes to get to one.

  Fortunately, there are as many Radio Shacks in the New Orleans area as there are blues singers: I ran in the door of my favorite store five minutes before closing, gathered up most of what I needed-a screw-on N-type female chassis mount connector, a little roll of 12-gauge copper wire, some solder, a pigtail with an N-type male connector at one end, and the cheapest wire cutters, tape measure, and soldering iron I could find-and carried it to the counter.

  The clerk recognized me as a one-time regular. He looked over my purchases, rang it up, and asked cheerfully, “Gonna do some war-driving?”

  “Huh?” I said as I paid him.

  “Ah, you know,” he said. He was too tall, too skinny, and had spent twelve seconds getting dressed for work that morning. Maybe less. “Or maybe you don’t need a Lucent gold card.”

  “What’s that about?” I asked.

  “About ninety dollars,” he said.

  I took two fifties out of my billfold and stood there. He disappeared into the back for a minute, then came back with a Lucent card in the kind of Ziploc bag usually used to hold marijuana and cocaine… and maybe peanuts and raspberries and other legal stuff, for all I know. He handed me the card and I handed him the money and said, “Keep the change,” and he put it in his shirt pocket.

  “If you go about nine blocks that way, there’s an all-night supermarket that sells Dinty Moore beef stew,” he said for the extra ten dollars. “I recommend the can. It’s just about perfect for a waveguide. And the area around Tulane is your happy hunting ground.”

  “You are a prince among men,” I said. “Have a nice day.”

  Did I mention the service at Radio Shack?

  I STOPPED at the supermarket, got the can of Dinty Moore and a can opener, drove back to the motel, and built the antenna. The worst part was trying to flush the cold beef stew down the toilet: it just didn’t want to go. John stood there, grimacing at the bowl, flushing it over and over, saying, “Man, that’s nasty. It looks like somebody was really sick.” A bright orange ring-around-the-bowl was still there the next morning.

  After cleaning the beef-stew can, I went online to an antenna site with a calculator, did some figuring, and with the soldering iron put together a nice little wi-fi antenna. Wi-fi stands for “wireless fidelity” and works as a high-frequency wireless local network-it’s cheap, and it allows several people, in several different places around the house, office, or classroom to use the same Internet connection. It’ll probably be obsolete by tomorrow, but today, it was spreading around the country like a rash. Usually, the range is limited to just about the area of a big house. With an antenna, though…

  Normally, I wouldn’t ride on somebody else’s Internet connection, simply because it wasn’t necessary. Connections are a dime a dozen, if you’re legal. Most Starbucks have a wi-fi connection. But the Carp problem made me nervous, and if I rode on somebody else’s network connection, there’d be no way to backtrack our inquiries. And it would be faster than doing it from the motel: working over a telephone hookup was like having water drip on your forehead.

  The kid at the Radio Shack store had recommended the Tulane area as a happy hunting ground, but I had a different idea. I’d found that lots of warehouses use wi-fi because warehouses are constantly involved in inventory movements, and those movements are often uploaded via the Internet to central control offices. Few of them have any kind of protection.

  LuEllen and I took I-10 out toward Kenner and New Orleans International, LuEllen driving while I watched the laptop, and eventually we found a truck stop parking lot next to what looked like a warehouse, where we got a strong signal from a wi-fi network.

  And it was a fast one, maybe a T-1 line. In the next hour, I pulled every bit of information I could out of the National Crime Information Center, out of credit agencies and insurance companies, and from three different credit card companies. When I was done, I still didn’t have a photograph of Jimmy James Carp, but I had a different kind of picture, and it was one that scared us.

  “THE guy might be working for the Senate Intelligence Committee,” LuEllen blurted to John, when we got back to the Baton Noir. John was stretched on his bed, watching CNN. “He might be a spy or something.”

  He sat up, dropped his feet to the floor. “What?”

  “The last job I can find for him, the last one that paid Social Security taxes, was the U.S. government, and the reference number traces back to the Senate Intelligence Committee,” I said.

  “The government killed Bobby?”

  “I don’t know-the Social Security payments stopped a month ago, but if he’s fucking around with the intelligence community, that might not mean anything,” I said. “On the other hand, that didn’t look like a government operation out at the trailer park. If the feds knew what was on that computer, they’d have it locked in a vault somewhere.”

  “It feels bad, though,” LuEllen said.

  “Tell you something,” John said, pointing at the TV. “He’s done it again. Bobby. Carp. There’s a story out there, coming out now, about how some Homeland Security department might have sprayed a virus into San Francisco to see how it would spread. It was supposed to be a test in case of a smallpox attack, they w
anted to see what would happen, and they used a virus called, uh, Newport? That’s not right, but something like that. Anyway, a lot of people got sick and four people may have died… the shit is hitting the fan, and CNN says the leak involves a lot of classified government computer files and the sourcing resembles the Bobby releases of the past couple of days.”

  “ Norwalk? Norwalk virus?” LuEllen asked.

  He snapped his fingers. “That’s it.”

  “Weren’t there a whole bunch of cruise ships a while back, where they had epidemics?”

  “Exactly!” John said. “That’s the one. They’re saying-they say it’s only speculation-that those could have been a more controlled test, before they dumped it into San Francisco.”

  “Ah, man. That means there must be a bunch of stuff that’s not encrypted-or he found a key.”

  “We’ve gotta find the fucker,” John said.

  LuEllen said, “He’s probably not twenty miles from here.”

  “Might as well be in Chicago,” I said. “I got his credit card numbers, if he uses them…”

  “Everybody’s gonna be looking for him,” John said.

  “Everybody’s gonna be looking for Bobby, unless we tell them he’s dead. Or for one of Bobby’s friends, if we decide to tell them,” I said. “We’re the only ones looking for Jimmy James Carp.”

  WE TALKED about it as we watched CNN, and then LuEllen said, “Hey, we found out about Melissa. Melissa Carp.”

  “Yeah?” John said.

  “She was his mother. She’s dead. She was killed in an automobile accident a month ago.”

  “Maybe flipped him out,” John said.

  And we talked about other trips we’d been on together, we talked about Longstreet, we talked a little more about Rachel Willowby, and what would happen to her. “If she thought Jimmy James Carp wanted to talk to her because he wanted to fuck her… then there are people who are talking to her because they want to fuck her,” John said. “She’s about ten-to-one for winding up on the corner.”