John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

Jim’s eyes sort of drifted-I had the feeling he wasn’t the most dynamic of executives, though he might have been a hell of a guy-and I said, “Oh, yeah, better give you this,” and handed him forty-five hundred from my stash cash. He took it and nodded, not asking the obvious question, which I answered anyway. “I was up here buying pottery,” I said. “Lucky for me, a lot of those places only take cash.”

“Lucky,” he agreed.

JIM ROGERSwas a garrulous guy, and his wife smiled a lot and nodded at him. They took turns flying the plane, and Rogers talked us down to Greenville. Airplane stories, mostly-he’d been a bush pilot in Ontario for a few years. That was fine with me: I nodded and told him a couple of Ontario fly-fishing stories, and no real information was exchanged. I called John on his cell phone as we were passing near Louisville, and he told me that nobody could find Rachel.

“Sounds bad,” I said, without thinking. Jim and Marcia glanced at each other, misinterpreting it.

“Get your ass down here,” John said.

“I’ll be in Greenville in a little more than two hours,” I said.

When I rang off, Marcia said, “More trouble.”

“Pretty tense situation,” I said.

“Gotta pray for the best.”

John was waiting when we got there. He grabbed my bag with his good arm and started off to his car, while I shook hands with Jim and Marcia; I think they thought John was my faithful retainer, me being white, John being black, and all of us being in Greenville.

John and I were on our way to Longstreet by 3:30. John was as grim as I’d ever seen him. “He’s a crazy man,” he said. And, quietly nuts himself, “I’m gonna kill him.”

WE PULLED INTO LONGSTREETafter six, still bright daylight, and brutally hot. People tended to stay off the streets with these temperatures, and the downtown strip had that cheap-science-fiction-movie vacancy, the emptiness that makes you think the residents are off having their brains eaten by aliens. Two yellow dogs, sitting in the awning shade in front of the Hardware Hank, were doing nothing but staying alive.

Marvel had been roaming the town in her car, methodically, street by street, looking for Rachel and for Carp’s red Corolla. She found neither. John called her when we were a mile out of town and she pulled into their short driveway just a few seconds ahead of us.

Marvel watched us park, and when I got out of the car she stepped over to me, looked up, and asked, “What’s going on, Kidd? What’d you do?”

“It’s all part of the same thing that got Bobby killed and John shot,” I said. “Bobby’s goddamn laptop turns out to be worth its weight in plutonium, and Carp’s crazy to get it.”

“Then give it to him,” she said. “Get Rachel back.”

“We’re gonna get Rachel,” John said from behind her. “We’re gonna get her, one way or another.”

Marvel almost got launched again, spinning around. “You, Mr. Shot-in-the-Arm bigshot spook secret agent-”

“Shut up,” he said, and walked into the house. Marvel’s mouth snapped shut, and a moment later tears started. I’d never seen John speak to her in anything like the tone, even without the words. She hurried after him and I stood in the yard with my bag full of computers, feeling like the world’s leading asshole for just being a part of it.

THEYdidn’t take long to make up, and spent the next hour taking care of each other-which didn’t prevent some hard talk. “Call the cops,” Marvel was saying. “We’ve got four guys down there at the police station that we can count on. We get them going…”

But John was shaking his head. “Don’t you see? It’s all tangled together. We can’t tell anyone anything, or it unrolls. The next thing we know, we’ve got wall-to-wall feds in the front room. We can get her back, but we have to do it.”

Nobody said, “ If she’s still alive .”

JOHNhad mentioned during the ride from Greenville that his kids were staying with their grandmother overnight, and maybe for a couple of nights, to clear out some space. I didn’t ask what he meant by that, the space comment, because we were talking about three things at once, but an hour after we got in, a couple of black guys arrived at the house. They were not particularly big or prepossessing, but you probably wouldn’t want to fight either of them. They were smart, and smiling, and said hello to John and gave hugs to Marvel, and went back to a third bedroom like they’d been there before.

A half hour after the first two guys arrived, another two came in. Two more arrived before midnight. More talk, a few bottles of beer, lots of ice water and Cokes for three of them who were former alkies:

“They could just be ditched in a hotel or motel anywhere up and down the highway.”

“Fat white guy with a beard and a little black girl? A real little black girl? I don’t think so, he doesn’t want to be noticed and Rachel’s smart, she’ll holler her head off first chance she gets.”

“… got the same problem with any kidnapping, how do you trust each other to make the trade?”

“The other question is, is this laptop worth saving?”

“It’s not the laptop, man. It’s Bobby and all the rest of it.”

“Cut our losses.”

“Can’t cut Rachel.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

DURINGthe course of the conversation, I told them about the last time I’d seen Carp, as he rode off on his mountain bike to make the deal with Krause. They all listened carefully, and then one of them, Kevin, said, “So he’ll try something tricky with us, too. Maybe the bike, maybe something else.”

I said, “When I talk to him tomorrow, I’ll make the point that we’ve all got trouble if this trade caves in. We’ve got trouble because he knows my name, some of what we’ve done, and our association with Bobby. So we can’t go to the cops. And he’s got trouble because we know he killed those two guys at his apartment, and he killed Bobby, and he can’t go to the cops. I’ll tell him we just want Rachel back and I’ll trade the laptop because I can’t get into the laptop anyway.”

“The question is, where does he make the trade?” asked a man called Richard. “What’s the tricky thing that he’s gonna do? We’ve got five cars, and we all got cell phones, so we can talk, but if he sees us chasing him, and he’s got something tricky going, and shakes us, what do we do? Then we’re really fucked.”

We argued about that for a while, and with all the talk of tricks, a thought popped into my head. “John, do you have a decent map?”

He had a county map, and one of the other guys had a big Rand McNally map book, and together they worked well enough. We spread them out on the kitchen table and the others gathered around as I pulled my finger down the curlicue of the Mississippi.

“Look at this. This could be the trick. If he has me go to someplace pretty far north or south of town… and if he bought a canoe or a boat, or stole one, or rented one… If he leaves his car on the other side of the river, paddles across, meets me, gets the laptop, and then paddles back to his car… we’d never catch him. We’d all be stuck over here, on the wrong side. If he takes us twenty miles downriver, it’d take the best part of an hour just to get back to the bridge and down the other side where he was.”

“How long you think to paddle across?” one of the guys asked, tapping his finger on the blue line of the river. “I don’t know shit about canoes.”

“If he knows what he’s doing, ten minutes,” I said. “Two minutes in a powerboat.” I pointed at a couple of narrow points, where the river looked like it was no more than a half-mile across. “He wouldn’t pick one of the wider parts. And he’d get himself all set before he calls us.”