John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

“Fuck Microsoft. I’m more worried about the people in Washington.” She wouldn’t even say the initials.

THEmeatball sandwich met the Wisteria standard, which wasn’t good but at least filled some space. When I finished, we went back to the slots. To avoid the notice of cracker thugs, we’d been carefully taking our time and moving around. Now we just pounded quarters, and nobody noticed. We had our numbers and were out of the casino at 2:30, and out of the motel by three o’clock. I resisted the urge to pee on the carpet before I left, though it would have given the place some character.

Because the hurricane had taken a bit more of a northeasterly track, we headed west on I-10. Until recently I’d had a condo in New Orleans, but the place had been taken over by a group of Ohio retirees, who’d begun messing with the association rules, and I’d sold out. I’d been planning to buy another one, but got distracted and hadn’t. Now I would have given my eyeteeth to have the old place back, to be where I was comfortable and had really good gear to use on Bobby’s files.

As it was, we were homeless. We took I-12 north of the city, stopped at a CompUSA in Baton Rouge, and bought a heavy-duty external DVD box that I could hook into my laptop. Because LuEllen said she couldn’t stand the rain any longer, we got back on I-10 and pushed on into the night. We finally stopped at a motel in Beaumont, Texas, just over the Louisiana border, still under a cloud deck, but no longer in the rain; the weather stations were promising sunshine in the morning.

By the time we stopped, we’d both grown tired of speculating about Bobby, tired of the casino job, and a little tired of each other. We got separate rooms and crashed.

CRASHEDfor five hours, in my case. I don’t like short nights, but I’d been running on sugar and caffeine, and found that as I got older, they tended to screw me up. At four in the morning, I was looking at Bobby’s DVDs. Looking at them, as they sat in a plastic bag on top of a pile of clothes in my open suitcase. Not doing anything with them. The idea of all that stuff was intimidating. I walked down the hall and got a couple of straight Cokes and another roll of vending-machine chocolate doughnuts-more sugar and caffeine-and went back to the room, fired up the laptop, and finished the casino numbers.

Finishing the casino job was like knitting: it used some time and calmed the nerves. I was checking my work when LuEllen rang. “You up?”

“Since four,” I said. “We’re done with the casino.”

“What’s the verdict?”

“They’re taking two percent.”

“The greedy fucks,” she said, aghast. “That’s my money.”

“Technically, it was Congressman Bob’s money.”

“It’s the principle,” she said. Then, “You wanna run across the street for some French toast?”

“Give me ten minutes.”

“Well, give me a half hour. I just got up.”

I USEDthe time to call Congressman Bob in Washington, where it’d be after eight. I called on his direct line and he answered, with his rustiest voice, on the second ring. “Yeah?”

“Congratulations on your reelection to the U.S. Congress,” I said.

He took a minute to sort out my voice, then he roared with laughter. “You got ’em.”

“They’re taking two percent. Two or three million a year, cash money, is going up in smoke and mirrors.”

“How sure?”

“Extremely sure. Exactly ninety-eight percent sure that we aren’t more than a half-percent off. What I’m not sure of is whether they’re doing it all the time. But they’re doing it right now, and if you want to do an audit, you better move on it.”

“Sincy, Blake and Coopersmith are sitting in my driveway with the engine running,” Bob said. “We been waiting to hear from you.”

“You got a hurricane down there.”

“Nah. Just a pissant storm. It ain’t nothing.”

“Okay. Well, you owe me.”

“I do,” he acknowledged. “You know I’m good for it.”

He was. Crooked as a crutch and absolutely good for his word.

WHENI hung up, I clicked on the TV, watched until LuEllen knocked on the door. As I went to answer it, the talking head on CNN came around to the burning-cross story. We both stood and watched it, and learned nothing. FBI said that they were developing leads and working in cooperation with the Jackson police. Yeah. A black reporter interviewed some fleshy guy who was pulling a fiberglass bass boat up a launch ramp, and who acknowledged that he was, in fact, an Imperial Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan, and who said that the Klan believed in racial separation but not in hurting other people. Right. Eyes rolled nationwide and the talking head talked on.

“Did you look at the Weather Channel?” LuEllen asked, as we went down the hall to the parking lot.

“No. I was just finishing the numbers when you called. It’s not coming this way, is it?”

“It wasn’t even a hurricane when it came ashore. It’s up in Georgia, already, just a big bag of wind.”

“All right. What’re you gonna do today?”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Take a look at the DVDs. If they’re totally encrypted, that’ll take a couple of hours. See if I can figure out what’s going on with the FBI, if I can find a safe way to do it.”

“Then I’ll probably just look around town, I guess. See if I can find a driving range, hit some golf balls. Find a bookstore, get some magazines.”

WE HADbreakfast at a family restaurant, French toast and link sausage and coffee, and then, as long as I still had the car, we went out to a pay phone and I called a friend in Livingston, Montana. He hadn’t gotten up, apparently, and was a little grumpy when he answered on the twentieth ring.

“Sorry,” I said. “You told me if I ever needed a channel, you had one. You still got it?”

“Yeah, but you’d have to wait until after six o’clock tonight, Eastern time.”

“What, it’s on somebody’s desk?”

“Yup.” That didn’t seem to bother him. “He’s a primo source, though. He gets a daily memo on every hot case in the country… criminal case, he’s not good on espionage. You wanted criminal, though, right?”

“Yeah, that’s great. How much you want?”

“For you? How about a five-hundred-dollar gift certificate on Amazon?”

“I can get it to you this morning,” I said.

“Got a pencil?”

He gave me a phone number, a name, and a password, and I was good. We went down the road to another phone and I charged a $500 gift certificate to a Visa card belonging to my old invisible friend, Harry Olson of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the guy with the cleanest credit record in the United States of America. He kept it clean by not existing and by paying all bills immediately.

LuELLENspent most of the day screwing around. She was a jock, was quietly turning into a golf nut, and had always been a power shopper. I expected her back in the late afternoon with a sunburn and an armful of bags from the local shopping center.

As she was acquiring a burn and assuring the financial stability of Abercrombie & Fitch and the Gap, I was digging through Bobby’s DVDs. Since I didn’t have an index, I wrote a little four-line Perl script that sorted through the files on each one and eliminated all the encrypted files.

When all the encrypted files were eliminated, there wasn’t much left. I then sampled the remnant and found garbage-or if not garbage, then a pile of stuff that was simply useless unless you specifically needed it: databases from government agencies and newspapers, mostly. If, say, you needed sixteen hundred memos from the U.S. Department of the Interior written between August 1999 and January 2002, then I had them. But if you didn’t know what memos you wanted, you were wading in garbage.