“Getting ugly,” John said.
I went back to the laptop. In a file called Carly, I found thirteen letters to a woman. The earliest ones were friendly technical advice on printing photographs from a new digital camera. They gradually became more personal, and he began trying to cajole her into a date. That apparently didn’t work. In a file called Linda, there were six letters to another woman, with the same tone. There were other files named Shannon and Barb that were a bit more businesslike, but still had that feeling of attention that would make most women nervous.
Another file contained unremarkable glamour shots of super-models, along with a major selection of hard-core porn. Half of it seemed to be young Japanese schoolgirls in plaid skirts; or out of plaid skirts. Given the resolution of the photos, it appeared that most of it had been downloaded from the ’net.
In a file called Contacts, I found addresses and phone numbers for Thomas Baird and Rachel Willowby. In his Microsoft address book, there were several hundred e-mail addresses, and in a PalmPilot sync file, there were thirty or forty home addresses and phone numbers for people I’d never heard of.
Then I stumbled over a file called DDC Working Group-Bobby, and inside, a list of names, e-mail addresses, and a half-dozen phone numbers and a few memos. One of the memos referred to a Deep Data Correlation working group, which explained the “DDC.” I showed it to John and LuEllen.
“What the heck would that be?”
“I don’t know, but we better find out, if we can,” I said. To John: “Anything else?”
“Most of it can be tossed,” he said, patting the pile of paper on the bed. “It’s just bullshit.”
“So toss it,” I said. “I’m gonna call one of these numbers, and then get online, see if there’s anything new from the guys on the ring.”
BACK to the truck stop. From a phone inside, I called the first of the phone numbers for the Deep Data Correlation working group. After the usual long-distance clicking, I got a computer tone, and hung up. Called another number, got another tone. All right: computer access, but no way to get in, not yet.
Then I checked my blind addresses and got an alarm from the address I’d given to Rachel Willowby. It said, “Jimmy James Carp is parked outside-4:17 P.M.”
I looked at my watch: a few minutes past 4:30, so the note had just come in. I fired the car up, took it back to the motel in a hurry. John and LuEllen were flipping cards at a waste basket when I came in.
“We gotta go get her,” John said, when I told them about the note.
“If there’s trouble…” I remembered what Marvel had said about his fingerprint status. “And he’s got a gun.”
“Gotta go anyway,” he said. He was already headed toward the door.
“Made a mistake not bringing a gun with us,” LuEllen said, a step behind him. “Every asshole in Louisiana has a gun in his car except us. And when you need one, like the NRA says, you need one.”
“I’m not sure the NRA would want me to have one,” John said.
“Let’s figure this out on the way over,” I said. “There’s gotta be something we can do. Besides trying to tackle him in the street.”
WE WORKED through a series of harebrained plans as we drove into New Orleans, but there wasn’t time, and there just isn’t much you can do when the other guy has a gun and you don’t.
“One big thing is that none of us can get hung up with the cops,” LuEllen said. “We can’t just jump him in the street and then haul him away. That’s kidnapping and it looks like kidnapping and somebody’s gonna get the license plate number and then we’re toast.”
“Track him, get him inside, wherever he’s staying…”
“But what about the kid?” John asked. “There’s only one reason he’s after the kid, and that’s to find out who tracked him to the trailer.”
“Two reasons,” I said. “The other one is, to shut her up. She can connect him to Bobby.”
“Ah, Jesus. And since he already killed Bobby…”
“You better drive faster, Kidd,” LuEllen said.
“We still gotta figure out the gun.”
“Catch him in the open, and he might be afraid to use it,” I said.
“Gotta get to the girl, though,” John said. “That’s the number-one thing.”
WE WENT straight into Rachel Willowby’s. Didn’t see a Corolla, nothing but the usual beat-up full-sized Chevys and Oldsmobiles; one guy far down the street was washing off the floor mats of his car, but he was the only person we could see moving around outside.
At the Willowby place, John was out on the street before the car stopped rolling, heading for her door. I was out and called, “Take it easy, take it easy.” LuEllen was trailing, hurrying to catch me, and I was hurrying to catch up with John, but he was a dozen steps ahead of me and I didn’t want to run, because running attracts the eye.
Then he was at the door, and instead of knocking, pushed it, and then was inside and the shouting started, “Hey, hey, hey…” and then I was in, blinking in the sudden darkness of the interior. John was halfway across the small front room, Rachel Willowby was sitting at the kitchen table in front of her laptop, and Carp stood beside the table.
He had the gun.
“… are you motherfuckers?” Carp was shouting.
“Friends of Rachel’s,” John was saying over the top of Carp’s question. “We’re friends of Rachel’s and she says she’s in trouble.”
“Is this a friend of Rachel’s?” Carp asked, waving the gun barrel at me. “Where in the hell did he come from? And who’s that?” He looked past me, and I half turned. LuEllen peeked around the door frame and said, “We called 911, they’re on the way.”
Carp glanced toward the back door on the other side of the kitchen, and his tongue flicked out. “You guys are from the working group. Tell Krause to stay the fuck away from me or I will bomb them. I will fuckin’ blow them up.”
“Who? What group? What are you talking about?” John asked. He stepped toward Carp, but he looked at me. He needed a couple more steps.
“Krause,” Carp said.
“What?” John asked. Another short shuffle step.
CARP shot him.
The gun was a.22, but even a.22 sounds like a cannon when it’s fired in a small concrete cubicle, and the muzzle flash lit us up and John staggered and went down and Carp was already across the kitchen and banging out the door. I went as far as the door and saw him running toward the back of the lot, aiming for a space between two duplexes. He’d parked one street over, I thought. He was running awkwardly and I knew I could catch him and took two quick steps and was snagged by LuEllen’s voice: “Kidd!”
I stopped, then went back.
“John’s hit. We’ve gotta move.”
Rachel was frozen next to her laptop. John was on his feet, his left hand clapped over his right triceps, and looked at her and said, “I’m a pretty nice guy who lives up north of here on the Mississippi and I’ve got two kids and a nice wife. If you want to come with me, you can stay with us until we find your mom. But you gotta decide right now.”
She looked at him for a long three seconds, then turned and pulled the power cord on her laptop. “I’m coming. I gotta get my bag.”
JOHN was hit in the middle of his triceps, and though he didn’t think the bone was broken, he thought the bullet might have grooved it. The slug was still inside his arm, and he was shaky as he was walking out to the car: trembling now from post-fight adrenaline and shock. We were operating in full daylight yet, but I could hear traffic passing and a plane overhead and music from somewhere, and we didn’t seem to be attracting much attention. I’ve heard a theory that you can shoot a gun once anywhere and get away with it; it’s twice or three times that causes a problem. Maybe that’s right: in any case, we got John into the backseat of the car without any trouble.
LuEllen slid in beside him, on the wound side, and Rachel, carrying a plastic Wal-Mart shopping bag full of clothes, got in the front passenger seat.
/>
I had no idea where Carp had gone. Never saw a Corolla. And at that point, didn’t much care.
LuELLEN looked at the bullet hole and said, “There’s no pulsing blood, but he’s bleeding. What do you want to do?”
“Get back to Longstreet,” John said. “I can handle it if I can get back home.”
“That’s six hours, man.”
“Doesn’t hurt that much yet. Put a pressure bandage on it back at the motel.”
“I’ve got some Vicodin at the motel,” LuEllen said, looking at me. “We could get back to Longstreet, if he doesn’t bleed to death.”
“Is he gonna bleed to death?” I asked. Rachel was now kneeling on the front seat, looking wide-eyed at John over the seat back.
“I don’t think so,” LuEllen said. “Not if we keep some pressure on it. He may be down a pint when we get there.”
SO THAT’S what we did: checked out of the Baton Noir, a pressure bandage, made out of a fresh towel, tight against the wound. Couldn’t speed: had to stay right on the limit. On the way north, when we were clear of New Orleans, John placed a long-distance call to Memphis and asked to talk with Andy. He had to wait for a moment, and then said, “Hey, man, this is John. I been bit. Uh-huh. Went in right in the triceps, not too bad, there’s no artery bleeding, but it didn’t come through.” He explained the bandages, and where we were. “We’re about five hours out from Longstreet, coming up from New Orleans. I’d appreciate it if you could have George come down and take a look. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. That’d be good. Some shit this chick gave me, um, Vicodin, and it doesn’t hurt much. Uh-huh. I’ll see you then.”
We didn’t talk much. I was focused on driving, and John was trying to sleep. We caught snatches of news from various talk-radio stations and it was all about the Norwalk attack; that and the upcoming high school football season. At one point, John said, “Jesus, this is boring,” and then, “Carp said we should tell Krause to stay away from him. That’d have to be the senator. Head of the committee.”
“Carp said that?” LuEllen asked. “I didn’t hear that.”
Rachel said, “He asked me if a Mr. Krause had called, or somebody from the government, and I thought he meant you because he said it was a white man and a black man together.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I told him that a white man and a black man came and said they was Bobby’s friends, and they were looking for Bobby.”
John exhaled and said, “Not good.”
“He was gonna kill me, man,” Rachel said. “He said he’d shoot me right in the eyeball, and he would have. He’s a crazy man. And he does want to fuck me.”
ONCE in Longstreet, we paused at the local Super 8 just long enough for LuEllen to check in. LuEllen didn’t want to see any new faces-she’d already seen too many that day, and there wasn’t any point to her coming along. After she had a room, John and I and Rachel continued to John’s place. A new Chevrolet was parked in the driveway, and Marvel was pacing around in the yard. When she saw me coming, she ran up to the car window and looked in the back and saw John and jerked open the door and cried, “How bad? George is here, how bad?”
MARVEL was angry and unhappy and scared, and also worried about Rachel, never quite understanding from me what was going on with the girl. George, as it turned out, was a doctor, a big squared-headed, square-chested guy who might have been a tight end in another life, and he was prepared to operate right in the house. He frowned when he first saw me, a white guy, but never asked a question.
John was the calmest of us all, and took some time to explain to Marvel the exact situation with Rachel. As he did that, George was checking his blood pressure: checked it once, checked it again, then nodded. “Good blood pressure,” he said to Marvel.
When that was done, John told Marvel to go away-“Go anywhere, I just don’t want you fussin’ around”-and we went into the kitchen, where George had spread a sterile sheet on the kitchen table.
After washing John’s arm with an antiseptic, George gave him a blocking shot, pulled on some sterile plastic gloves and a mask, and went to work on the arm. He didn’t have any X rays, but he seemed familiar with gunshot wounds, and located the.22 slug with a probe. He had to work it awhile, with a variety of small tools that would have looked at home on a dentist’s tray. In twenty minutes he’d winkled the slug out into his glove.
“Gonna hurt like heck in the morning,” he told John. “I’ll give you some stuff to take, some painkillers and antiseptics, but it’s still gonna be sore.”
There was more to it than that-especially on Marvel’s side, because she was royally pissed-and sometime after two o’clock, I went down to the Super 8 and fell into bed next to LuEllen.
THE next morning, first thing, without bothering with security, I went out on the Super 8 phone line and checked my mail-boxes.
There was nothing from the ring, but there was a letter from Bobby.
Kidd:
I’ve been gone for a while now. I assume that I’m dead, though maybe I’m just too sick to stop this from going out. Here is the important thing: a good friend of mine, who calls himself Lemon, has a selected set of my working documents, and will continue my operation now that I am gone. He does not know you or of you (unless you have a connection that I don’t know about) but will take you as a client. To sign on with him you need to identify yourself as 118normalgorgeousredhead at [email protected] and provide him with a dump address. I leave that to you, if you want a new hookup. He’s not a bad guy and has substantial resources. Anyway, good luck and good-bye; it’s been interesting working with you.
– Bobby
That gave me a chill: a voice from beyond, more or less.
LuEllen got the same chill. “Dead people should stay dead. You shouldn’t be talking to people after you’re dead.”
“He might not be completely dead.”
“What?”
“He’s like Janis Joplin or Frank Sinatra. I heard ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ on the radio the night I drove up to Jackson. Janis is dead, but I never knew her personally, and I keep hearing her song, so to me, it’s the same as if she was still alive. Her song keeps going.”
“Yeah, but this… I mean, the guy’s talking to you, personally.”
GEORGE, the doctor, had gone home. No longer worried about another person seeing her face, LuEllen came with me to John’s. Marvel ushered the kids out into the yard, where they wouldn’t hear it, and said-shouted-something like this at us:
“I don’t know what the three of you could have been thinking of. What the fuck could you have been thinking of? You already got shot at once. You already got your asses shot at in the trailer. Why did you think he wouldn’t shoot you again? You knew the crazy motherfucker had a gun, because he already shot at you. Why didn’t you call the cops? Fuck this laptop. What was going on in your stupid heads? Is there anything in there at all? Look at this silly motherfucker sitting at the kitchen table with a big bandage on him and that shit-eating grin on his face like some watermelon-eatin’ coon in a goddamned travelin’ show. Oh, Lord, why does Thy servant have to put up with this shit? Why is that…”
You get the idea.
JOHN was okay. He was going to be okay, though George was right: he hurt like hell. And Rachel was okay. She and Marvel had come to an understanding, and she sat at the kitchen table with John, pounding down the Cream of Wheat, enjoying the Marvel show. After we got Marvel calmed down-calmed down wasn’t exactly the idea, but quieted down, anyway-I went back to the motel and continued mining Carp’s laptop, going online to look for names, places, dates. LuEllen went visiting, out to see a farmer friend who lived across the river. She came back in the early afternoon and told me that the Norwalk attack was getting more and more play, and that there was virtually nothing else on television.
“It’s like the days after nine-eleven,” she said. “It’s really brutal.”
I KEPT working, since I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
Two-thirds of
the names in the PalmPilot sync list were identifiable through Google: I’d stick the name in and the information would pop up. Most of the names were associated with the Intelligence Committee and belonged to minor political onions in the Washington stew. Others belonged to computer people, and only a few seemed to be personal.
The personal names were the hardest to get information on. Of the dozen names in the file, I struck out on four of them, and while I found the other eight, I couldn’t determine any particular connection between Carp and the person named, except in the case of his dentist.
The DDC Working Group-Bobby remained a mystery.
“WE’RE coming to a blank wall,” I said. We were back at John’s, the three of us together. Marvel was down at city hall, perpetrating some commie plot. Rachel had gone with her, and the two kids were taking a nap.
“Could we hack into CNN and when he attacks, figure out where it’s coming from?” John asked.
I shook my head. “Not unless we had the phone line, right when he was on it. We’d have to monitor thousands of calls.”
“You can’t tell just from his address.”
“Naw. He can just grab a wi-fi system like we did and ship it from some one-time e-mail address. I’m sure that’s what he’s doing, or the feds would have grabbed him by now. He’s like Bobby-he’s coming out of nowhere.”
LuEllen asked the key question: “What do you think about him?”
I said, “He might be nuts. He probably killed Bobby, he lost his job and he has no money and he’s way deep in debt, he doesn’t seem to have any friends, women don’t like him, his mother just died, he feels like he’s been ripped off by this lawyer.”
The Hanged Man’s Song Page 11