The Hanged Man’s Song

by John Sandford

  “Is that bad?” she asked. She became very quiet and focused when I was doing a reading.

  “It’s ambiguous, just like the readings with the Hanged Man,” I said, as I rewrapped the deck in the silk rag. “It can mean treachery, but that doesn’t tell us a hell of a lot. Everything in this deal is treacherous.”

  “So are we stuck?”

  “I think… I may have a really bad idea. Either that, or I’m a genius.”

  She looked at me skeptically. “What idea?”

  “Remember when I went to see Rosalind Welsh? That moved some people around. I’m thinking… what if we go after Senator Krause? Face to face. Figure out where he lives, hit him sometime when he’s alone, or maybe with only another guy or his wife.”

  A few minutes earlier, she’d run down the hall to get a bottle of orange juice, and now she stood drinking it, draining it, looking at me. She licked the last of the juice off her upper lip, and she said, “That sounds like a last resort.”

  “We don’t have that many resorts left. And this DDC business scares the shit out of me. I can’t believe that they’re running a test on public officials-somebody in there is goofy. It’s already out of control.”

  “So let’s keep it as a last resort and figure out a couple of other resorts that we can go to first.”

  One thing we did, right away, was drive over to our wi-fi site and go online looking for Lemon. He wasn’t around-Bobby had always been around, but then, Bobby was crippled-so we left a message telling him that Carp had killed two people, and that we were going to have to give up his name.

  Carp is undergoing psychotic collapse, may kill more people. We will wait until we hear from you.

  We had breakfast, and then went back online. Lemon had strayed, but not far. He was there when we went back:

  Don’t give up Carp name yet. Must get laptop. Can’t let feds get laptop. If they get laptop, we could be done. I have been doing research on Carp and find he has girlfriend Mary Griggs lives in Arlington. Suggest check before giving up name. Also searching possibility that he has been in contact with old employer. Nothing yet. Check Arlington and get back.

  – Lemon

  He appended a note with Griggs’s address and phone number.

  “Man, this Lemon guy has to understand that we’re not cops,” LuEllen said. “We can’t kick down the door and bust somebody.”

  “He might not understand that,” I said. “Half of these guys live on video games and never get out of their folks’ basement.”

  “Carp got out.”

  “Yeah. But he’s nuts. I think Lemon’s right: we ought to see if we can spot him. He can’t carry the laptop everywhere. If we can spot him, and we see him going out with Griggs, we can hit the apartment, or hit the car, grab the laptop, and call the feds in.”

  “I don’t know,” she said moodily. She shifted around in the car seat, looking over her shoulder. She was spooked by all the DDC stuff. “The whole feel of the thing is changing.”

  “Want out?”

  “I want to see what you’re gonna do. But this time, we take the gun.”

  I DIALED Griggs’s number. That seemed like an easy enough first step. The phone rang and I handed it to LuEllen, who listened for what seemed like a long time, and then said, “Hi, is, uh, Terry there?”

  She asked with the voice women use when an unknown male answers the telephone of a female friend, a voice that seems to ask, rapist? lover? plumber? Then she listened for a moment and said, “Gee, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did, I’m just silly.”

  She got off and turned to me. “Guy’s voice.”

  “So let’s go take a peek.”

  “Didn’t… mmm… sound like Carp. I only heard him for that one minute at Rachel’s, but he seemed kinda squeaky. High-pitched. This guy had some hormones. His whole attitude was sorta… cool.”

  “I dunno,” I said. And I didn’t.

  MARY GRIGGS lived in a small brick apartment building in the Ballston area of Arlington, an upwardly mobile neighborhood with a little rolling contour, a four-acre park in the middle of it, the whole thing almost as green as Longstreet. The day was insufferably hot and humid. By contrast, the park looked pleasant and cool, with big spreading trees and what I took to be government workers sitting on the park benches eating their bag lunches.

  We left the car a block off the park, down toward a busy street. LuEllen had spotted a deli as we went in, and we stopped and got sandwiches-apparently the source of the government sandwiches and white paper bags-carried our own lunches up the block and across the street to the park, found a bench where we could see the front of the Griggs apartment building, and nibbled on the sandwiches. Off to our left, a woman was lying on a blanket, reading a book. A bunch of kids were sliding down a curvy slide at a playground, and a park worker was changing a net at a beach-volleyball court that featured real ankle-deep yellow sand.

  Because I was carrying a gun, I’d worn a sport coat, despite the heat, and had the revolver in the left breast pocket. There might have been a little fullness on that side, but nothing obvious. Still, I could feel the weight hanging off my chest.

  “That kind of building,” LuEllen said, looking at Griggs’s apartment, “is the worst of all possibilities.”

  “Worse than a Saddle River jeweler’s house with a hundred-thousand-dollar alarm system?”

  “In some ways,” she said, launching into a burglar’s analysis. “You have an insider in the jeweler’s house, so you eventually figure out a way to handle the system. You’ve got somebody telling you when the house will be more or less empty, and even if it’s not empty, you can spot the people still inside. But you get a place like this, people are coming and going all the time-nobody knows who’ll be coming and going, or why. It’s random. And the building is older so it’s probably got relatively thin walls: if you have to break a door, somebody’ll hear you. Or they’ll see the damage. Plus, everybody inside probably recognizes strangers.” She took a bite out of her sandwich and studied the building.

  “Just don’t tell me you’d go in over the roof,” I said. She liked ropes and climbing.

  “I was just thinking that was a possibility,” she admitted. “You avoid a lot of issues that way. And look at the windows. They’re the old-style windows that open, with a twist-lock. You poke a hole through the glass, twist the lock, slide it up, and you’re in. You don’t meet anybody in the hallways, you don’t have to break any doors. No visible damage.”

  “Of course, you have to get on the roof.”

  “That can be done.” She studied it some more. A guy in a funny old-fashioned snap-brimmed hat strolled by, led by a bulldog on a leash. The guy took a good look at LuEllen; the bulldog sniffed what I assumed was a bed of pansies-they looked like the African violets in Strom’s sink from the day before, but in lighter colors, and with more variety-and then lifted a leg and peed on them.

  I was following them on their path through the park when I saw the guy with the binoculars. I casually turned back to LuEllen and said, “If you look past the back of my head, you’ll see a guy in a blue shirt looking at us with binoculars. Either that, or he’s looking at a really low bird.”

  She turned toward me and laughed, threw back her head, and said, “I see him. Yup. Who is it? Somebody tagged us? How did that happen? So now what? We run?”

  “Maybe not run, but we go. I’ll wad up the sandwich bag and walk over to the trash can to throw it in, and you can sit here. Then I’ll call you over, like I’m looking at something. That’ll get us a hundred feet toward the car.”

  “I hope he doesn’t have a camera. I hope he doesn’t have a long lens. I hope he doesn’t have our faces.”

  “Just binoculars so far,” I said. When people look at you with binoculars, or shoot your picture with a long lens, they unconsciously take a particular position that gives them away. A guy looking at you with binoculars, for example, will have his arms and hands in almost a perfect triangle, elbows out, fists meeting in
front of his eyes. Photographers, on the other hand, scrunch their arms together as they support the camera and lens, and their faces are completely obscured by the camera body. When you see either one of them, you won’t mistake the positions for anything else.

  I got up, took LuEllen’s bag, made a little show of scrunching it up. She pulled her feet onto the park bench, while I strolled toward the trash basket. I dumped the bag, did a double take at something, then waved LuEllen over.

  She got up and strolled toward me. I was looking at her, and past her. The guy with the binoculars was gone. “We better hurry,” I told her when she came up. “He’s out of sight.”

  She nodded and we turned, walked a little way toward the edge of the park, and then I turned and walked backward with her, saying, “Yadda yadda yadda yadda,” so that I appeared to be talking with her, but still couldn’t pick up the guy with the binoculars. “Okay,” I said. “Time to move faster.”

  She nodded and we both started jogging down the diagonal sidewalk to the corner, the car a block farther on. At the cross street I looked back at the park, but didn’t see anything-and then Carp broke out of a little copse of trees a scant seventy yards away. He was running fast, for as big as he was, a pair of binoculars dangling from his neck, and he had a gun in one hand.

  “He’s coming,” I said. “It’s Carp and he’s got the gun.” LuEllen looked the same way and we broke into a hard run. Carp was about as close to us as we were to the car. He hip-checked a Cadillac in the street as we ran down the sidewalk toward the car, and I said, “We’re gonna slow down getting in and getting started.” I pulled the car keys out of my pants pocket and handed them to her. “You drive. If he opens up on us, I’ll slow him down.”

  She didn’t say anything: that would have been a waste of time. She was moving, breaking off the sidewalk to run between two parked cars, then up the street toward the driver’s side of our car. Carp broke around the corner deli when we were still twenty yards away from it. Then LuEllen was inside and I dragged open the passenger-side door, slipping the revolver out of my jacket pocket, and she shouted, “Get in,” and Carp, now forty yards away, slowed to a walk, brought his weapon up, and fired at me.

  I wasn’t aware of the slugs going by-you can actually hear them go by if you’re far enough from the blast of the gun, a whip-snap sound. That’s if you’re not preoccupied by something else, like shooting back. I was shooting back, carefully, taking my time, aiming everything into a tree next to him. I could see people far down the street, and while I didn’t think the.38 would reach that far, I didn’t want to kill some old lady or her dog.

  I fired four shots and suddenly he stopped shooting, looked at his gun, looked at me. I took a step toward him and he turned and ran back around the corner.

  I jumped in the car and said, “Go,” and LuEllen ripped out of the parking space and we were down the street, fast for the first hundred yards, down to the corner, then we were around the corner and away. As we went, I was looking out the rear window. He was gone.

  “You shot at him,” LuEllen said in her calmest voice, which she uses only when she’s intensely cranked.

  “Not exactly. I shot an elm tree to death. Can’t shoot him until we get the laptop. Sure as shit slowed him down, though.”

  “You’re okay?”

  “Never touched me,” I said. “He fired every shot he had, I think. Six shots, probably. It’s not like doing Quake in your basement.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He was too far away,” I said. “Too freaked out. I was trying to be careful to hit the tree and I was shaking like a leaf.”

  “You’re still shaking like a leaf. You’re talking about a hundred miles an hour.” She started to laugh. “I don’t think anybody saw us. All those people sitting in the park, and when I looked back there was nobody down the street or on the street. I don’t think anybody saw us. And we were right in the middle of everything.”

  “Fuckin’ crazy,” I said. “If somebody saw him running with that gun… Wouldn’t have got a good look at us, anyway.”

  She laughed some more, started driving too fast and I had to slow her down. “What a rush,” she said. “What a rush.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  WE DROVE A HALF-MILE or so, taking it easy, watching for anything that was moving fast. Three or four minutes out, I turned LuEllen around and we went back into the neighborhood, looking for the Corolla. We didn’t find it, nor did we see Carp again. Life went on around the park-there were no cops, no people standing around scratching their heads. We both turned toward a running body, but it was a kid, having a good time. We’d given a gunfight, and nobody came.

  “Let’s go to a zoo or something,” LuEllen said. She was manic, her eyes sparkling, her cheeks pink. “Let’s go on a hike. Let’s go for a run. Let’s do something. We gotta get out of that hotel room. I can’t think in there anymore.”

  “Maybe we could, uh…” I was struck by a thought.

  After a moment LuEllen said, “What?”

  I looked out the car window at a large woman in a poppy-orange blouse, leading, on a leash, a dog the size of a biscuit. “Just drive, don’t talk to me.”

  I kicked the seat back as far as it would go, put an arm over my eyes, and tried to work it out. Doing the numbers. Thinking about the tarot, about the King of Cups reversed. At some point LuEllen asked, “You all right?” I could feel the wheels bumping along the road, feel us rolling to a stop at a light-feel LuEllen looking at me.

  Five minutes, doing the numbers, and then LuEllen said, “C’mon, Kidd. What happened? You’re not having a stroke?”

  I exhaled, cranked the seat back upright, and looked out the window. We were at a little business intersection and I could see the Washington Monument ahead and off to the left, a white arrow against the blue sky. Nice day. “That motherfucker.”

  “Who?”

  “Carp is Lemon.”

  We sat halfway through a red light before she noticed. As we went through, she said, “Tell me.”

  “We get a note out of the blue-doesn’t have to be from Bobby, just has to be from somebody who knows Bobby is dead. Doesn’t demand contact, just allows us to make it on our terms, so that we feel safe. Guides us into Washington. John’s black and I’m white, and the two guys who went to his apartment…”

  “Black and white.”

  “And it was almost dark, and he was waiting for us, a black-and-white pair. He knew we’d be coming because he gave us the address, and he knew at that point that we weren’t from the government, because we’d responded to his e-mail. He knew we were Bobby’s pals because we told him so. He knew we’d check the address he gave us, to see if it was really Carp’s. We did. It’s the same technique he used to get Bobby. It’s like fly-fishing. You throw the fly out there, let it drift, wait for a strike.”

  “But he-”

  “Yeah. His big mistake-this must have really mind-fucked him-was that he didn’t know that there were two groups looking for him, that there were two black-and-white pairs. He must’ve thought that if two unknown people from Minnesota and wherever else got shot in a bad neighborhood, who could connect it to his apartment? But he kills a couple of government guys who were going to his apartment, so now…”

  “He’s screwed.”

  “Well. Maybe they can’t prove it. He was wearing that wig; he’ll have been reported as a blond.”

  She thought about it for a minute “And he didn’t know John was shot…”

  “Right. He didn’t know that for sure. He was already running when he pulled the trigger. And if he slowed down when he realized he wasn’t being chased, and circled back and looked at the car, he would have seen John walking out and getting in with the rest of us. And that’s where he got the tag number off the car.”

  “Then, after the miss at his apartment, after he sees in the paper that he got the wrong guys, he sets us up,” she finished. She thought about it for a moment and then said, “Ah, shit.”

  �
�Yeah. Maybe I’m wrong. But I’d say it’s at least ten to one that Carp and Lemon are the same guy.”

  “We were chumps.”

  “That’s not the major problem. I mean, we’re not dead, anyway. The major problem is, he contacted me. By name. He knows who I am.”

  I was looking at her, and she turned her head and I saw something like fear in her eyes. “That’s… doesn’t get any worse than that.”

  “Not this side of being dead. But we’ve gotta get back online. I can check this.”

  THE state of Minnesota allows anyone to check anyone else’s license plate, but requires you to identify yourself before the information is released. Your name is then put on the file, and the person whose plate you pulled is notified. That’s if you go in the front door. I never did, and I didn’t think Carp-Lemon-would be likely to go in the front door, either. But…

  “How can you tell?” LuEllen said, peering at the laptop screen as I went online and dialed into the DMV.

  “There’s a counter. You’d really have to tear up a system to beat it.” I got the plate database, checked my tag number. My name and address came up. The counter said the information had been accessed the night of the collision at Rachel Willowby’s apartment.

  “There it is,” I said. “He had to have seen the car at Rachel’s place. That’s the only way he could have known.” It was a queer feeling. I’d been so careful, for so long, so unbelievably, unhealthily careful, that to have somebody crack my cover was like having your house burglarized.

  “That fucker. He set us up.” A hint of admiration in her voice? She snapped her fingers as she remembered the tarot connection. “That was the tarot card. Remember? That was the-”

  “King of Cups, reversed. Yeah, that popped into my head back at the park. Coincidence jumps up and bites you on the ass.”

  “You been bit on the ass so many times you’re lucky to have an ass left,” she snorted. “When are you gonna believe? You’re some kind of fuckin’ gypsy spook or something.”