John Sandford: The Hanged Man’s Song

“Shit.” He muttered the word aloud. He’d killed a man for a laptop? There had to be more.

Back in the front room, he found a stack of blank recordable disks, but none that had been used. Where were the used disks? Where? There was a bookcase and he brushed some of the books out, found nothing behind them. Hurried past all the open doors and cupboards, feeling the pressure of time on his shoulders. Where?

He looked, but he found nothing more: only the laptop, winking at him from the doorway.

Had to go, had to go.

He stuffed the paper towels in his pocket, hurried to the door, picked up the laptop, power supply, and recharging deck, pulled the door almost shut with his bare hand, realized what he’d done, took the paper towels out of his pocket, wiped the knob and gripped it with the towel, and pulled the door shut. Hesitated. Pushed the door open again, crossed to the couch, thoroughly wiped the oxygen cylinder.

All right. Outside again, he stuck the electronics under his arm beneath the raincoat, and strolled as calmly as he could to the car. The car, a nondescript Toyota Corolla, had belonged to his mother. It wouldn’t get a second glance anywhere, anytime. Which was lucky, he thought, considering what had happened.

He put the laptop, still running, on the passenger’s seat. The laptop would take very careful investigation. As he drove away, he thought about his exposure in Bobby’s death. Not much, he thought, unless he was brutally unlucky. A neighbor trying a new camera, an idiot savant who remembered his license plate number; one chance in a million.

Less than that, even-he’d been obsessively careful in his approach to the black man; that he’d come on a rainy day was not an accident. Maybe, he thought, he’d known in his heart that Bobby would end this day as a dead man.

Maybe. As he turned the corner and left the neighborhood, a hum of satisfaction began to vibrate through him. He felt the skull crunching again, saw the body fly from the wheelchair, felt the rush…

Felt the skull crunch… and almost drove through a red light.

He pulled himself back: he had to get out of town safely. This was no time for a traffic ticket that would pin him to Jackson, at this moment, at this place.

He was careful the rest of the way out, but still…

He smiled at himself. Felt kinda good, Jimmy James .

HUH! WHACK! Rock ’n’ roll.

FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOWin St. Paul, over the top of the geranium pot, I can see the Mississippi snaking away to the south past the municipal airport and the barge yards. There’s always a towboat out there, rounding up a string of rust-colored barges, or a guy heading downstream in a houseboat, or a seaplane lining up for takeoff. I never get tired of it. I wish I could pipe in all the sounds and smell of it, leaving out the stink and groan of the trucks and buses that run along the river road.

I was standing there, scratching the iron-sized head of the red cat, when the phone rang.

I thought about not answering it-there was nobody I particularly cared to talk to that day-but the ringing continued. I finally picked it up, annoyed, and found a smoker’s voice like a rusty hinge in a horror movie. An old political client. He asked me to do a job for him. “It’s no big deal,” he rasped.

“You lie like a Yankee carpetbagger,” I said back. I hadn’t talked to him in years, but we were picking up where we left off: friendly, but a little contentious.

“I resemble that remark,” he said. “Besides, it’ll only take you a few days.”

“How much you paying?”

“Wull… nothin’.”

Bob was a Democrat from a conservative Mississippi district. He was worried about a slick, good-looking young Republican woman named Nosere.

“I’ll tell you the truth, Kidd: the bitch is richer than Davy Crockett and can self-finance,” said the congressman. He was getting into his stump rhythms: “When it comes to ambition, she makes Hillary Clinton look like the wallflower at a Saturday-night sock-hop. She makes Huey Long look like a guppy. You gotta get your ass down there, boy. Dig this out for me.”

“You oughta be able to self-finance your own self,” I said. “You’ve been in Washington for twelve years now, for Christ’s sakes.”

Pause, as if thinking, or maybe contemplating the balances in off-shore checking accounts. Then, “Don’t dog me around, Kidd. You gonna do this, or what?”

WHENall the bullshit is dispensed with, I am an artist-a painter-and for most of my life, in the eyes of the law, a criminal, though I prefer to think of myself as a libertarian who liberates for money.

At the University of Minnesota, where I had gone to school on a wrestling scholarship, I carried a minor in art, with a major in computer science. Computers and mathematics interested me in the same way that art did, and I worked hard at them. Then the Army came along and gave me a few additional skills. When I got out of the service, I went to work as a freelance computer consultant.

Aboveground, I was writing political-polling software that could be run in the new desktop computers, the early IBMs, and even a package that you could run on a Color Computer, if anybody remembers those. I was also debugging commercial computer-control programs, a job that was considered the coal mine of the computer world. I was pretty good at it: Bill Gates had once said to me, “Hey, dude, we’re starting a company.”

Underground, I was doing industrial espionage for a select clientele, entering unfriendly places, either electronically or physically, and copying technical memos, software, drawings, anything that my client could use to keep up with the Gateses. The eighties were good to me, but the nineties had been hot: a dozen technical memos, moved from A to B, could result in a hundred-million-dollar Internet IPO. Or, more likely, could kill one.

All that time, I’d been painting. I can’t tell you about whiskey and drugs and gambling and women, because those things are for amateurs and rock musicians. I worked all the time-maybe dabbled a little in women. Unlike whiskey, drugs, and gambling addictions, I’d found that women tended to go away after a while. On their own.

As did the political-polling business. I sold out to a competitor because I was losing patience with my clients, with my clients’ way of making a living.

Politicians fuck with people. That’s what they do. That’s their job. Every day, they get up and wonder who they’re gonna fuck with that day. Then they go and do it. They’re not of much use-they don’t make anything, create anything, think any great thoughts. They just fuck with the rest of us. I got tired of talking to them.

So the years went by, with painting and computers, and now here I was, talking to Congressman Bob. I wheedled and begged, even pled poverty, but eventually said I’d do it-truth be told, I needed a break from the fever dreams of my latest paintings, a suite of five commissioned by a rich lumberman from Louisiana.

Then there was my love life, which had taken an ugly turn for the worse.

Getting out of town didn’t look that bad. That’s why, for the past two weeks, I’d been working in the belly of the Wisteria .

THEWisteria was a casino and hung off a pier on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, between Biloxi and Gulfport. Designed to look like a riverboat, it was the size of a battleship. Sweeping decks of slot machines, which would take everything down to your last nickel, sucked up most of the space. There were also three restaurants, two bars, and a poop deck for the low-return games.

Muzak, mostly orchestrated versions of old Sinatra sounds, kept you happy while you cranked the slots, and gave the place its class. All of it smelled of tobacco, alcohol, spoiled potato chips, sweat, cleaning fluids, and overstressed deodorant, with just the faintest whiff of vomit.