John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

“So what now?”

“New Orleans,” I said. “Talk to the kid. If there is a kid.”

“And if she knows…”

“She had to talk to somebody about the package and somebody had to see the return address. If she’s real, she knows the killer.”

LYMAN BOLE,the President’s national security advisor, resigned that evening after conferring with the President. We listened to an all-news radio station as we whistled back through the dark to the river, and the general opinion seemed to be that Bole’s public life was over. So here’s a lesson for all you frat boys: At this point in the life of the Republic, you better pick your indiscretions carefully.

Back in Longstreet, we talked about New Orleans. I told LuEllen that there seemed to be no point in her coming along, but she insisted on it. She was bored, she said, and didn’t have any work shaping up. And she liked New Orleans -maybe we could spend some time looking for a new condo up on the lake. If she didn’t live where she did, she said, she might live there.

“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.”

AFTERsome 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 WEREout 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 DECIDEDto 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 YOUget 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.”