John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

“I got the map,” I called to John.

“He’s got a boat. The guys on the other side can see him, he’s got a jon boat with a motor, he’s putting the bike in the boat. They can’t find his car. They say they don’t see a car over there.”

“Gotta be there somewhere. Watch him, he may have a gun.”

“How about Rachel?”

“He said she’s chained up in the woods. I got a map. I’m going.”

“Where?”

I told him, and I heard him talking with Marvel, and he said, “Fifteen minutes. We’ll see you there.”

I HADto go four miles north before I could get a crossroad out of the valley that would take me west toward Rachel. On the way, John called. “He’s running down the river, he’s not coming across.”

“Shit. What’s he doing? Can the guys still see him?”

“They can see him, but they don’t know where he’s going. He’s on their side, just under the levee.”

“Must’ve hid the car somewhere that wasn’t straight across,” I suggested.

“They’re still on him, and Marvel and I are on the way out to you.”

A MOMENTlater, he called again. “Shit. He’s crossed back over the river. That’s his second trick, that’s his second trick. He faked us out. He’s leaving the boat, he’s getting out of the boat, he’s on the bike.”

I could hear him shouting into a second cell phone. “Gotta stay with him. Henry, get back south, get back south, his car’s gotta be down there somewhere. Kevin, you go on down toward Greenville, get moving… I know, I know… but that’s the only way you’re gonna get ahead of him if he keeps going south… I know.”

Henry was the driver of the car that had been south of me. He’d closed in when the trade took place, and when Carp crossed the river, had started back to Longstreet, and the Longstreet bridge. Now Carp was south of him, and nobody was south of Carp, and on the same side of the river.

“We’re gonna lose him,” I shouted into the phone, helpfully.

“No, no, no,” John shouted back.

Then I heard him on the other phone, just his side of the conversation. “You see it? You see it? Get down south, keep going, Henry, keep going.” And to me: “Henry spotted the Corolla. Carp’s not there yet. Henry’s going on ahead.”

Okay. Now we had Carp between two cars. Two cars with smart guys. I couldn’t hear it, but I assumed that they were tagging him.

In the meantime, I closed on the crossroads where Rachel was-two left turns, to get me around a lopsided net of gravel roads, into the old abandoned schoolhouse.

John and Marvel were already there, sitting in their car, looking at their map. I stopped, got out, jogged to John’s driver’s-side window, the sun burning down on my shoulders. “Let me see the map,” John said.

I gave him the map. It was all very clear: we were at the right spot. We squabbled about it for a minute, quacking like a gaggle of geese, but that did no good.

There was no schoolhouse. There was no power line going back into the woods.

There was nothing but a burning hot gravel crossroads, with cotton fields stretching away on all four corners, stretching away forever. The kind of crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil.

WE WERE STANDINGnext to the car, triple-checking the map we’d been given by Carp with our own maps, when John’s cell phone rang. He listened for a minute, then said, “Twenty minutes,” and hung up.

To Marvel, he said, “I’m going with Kidd. You go on back to the house in case somebody calls about Rachel.”

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Nothing, yet. But it looks like this tailing job might take some help. He’s gonna spot our people if they can’t switch out more often. You go on.”

Something was up, and Marvel knew it. She squinted at him, and seemed about to say something, but he shook his head and she said, “All right.”

“Don’t do anything stupid, like try to follow us,” he said. “We need you back at the house.”

TWOminutes later, she’d gone one way and we another, at right angles to each other, and even from a mile away, we could see the plume of gravel dust she left behind her as she headed back into Longstreet.

“He’s at the RayMar Motel in Bradentown,” John told me. “He’s in his room, so he’s gonna be cracking the laptop pretty soon. We’ve got two cars on him now and another two coming in.”

“How far?”

He looked at his watch. “If we’re not lazy about it, we can be there in half an hour.”

“What’s the layout like?”

“One-level mom-and-pop, an office at one end and then a long string of rooms in a straight line. Not busy. I don’t know the people that run it, but black folks stay there-no color line, so we won’t be too noticeable.”

A HALF-HOURlater, we were still not there and my phone rang. I dreaded picking it up, but had no choice.

“You motherfucker,” Carp shouted. “You cheated me.” You could hear the spit flying.

“We’ve just been at the crossroads, James, so don’t tell me about cheating. I can tell you where to get a set of keys-and I would have done it if we’d found Rachel-but now… I’d say your head’s in trouble. You remember what I told you.”

“I want the fuckin’ keys,” he shouted. “You want the girl back, you better cough ’em up.”

“Are you still close to Universal?” I asked.

“Never mind where I am,” he said. He was slowing down now. “How are we gonna do this? I don’t want the kid to die, I got nothing against her, but I’ll leave her out there if I don’t get the keys.”

“Can’t figure out a way to trust you, James.”

“I’ll tell you-”

“I’ll tell you , James,” I said. “I’m still out here in the woods. I’ve been driving around, hoping I was at the wrong place, hoping I’d find that abandoned schoolhouse. I’m gonna hang up now and see if I can think of something. It’s gonna have to be something weird.”

“She’s out in the woods, on a chain,” he said.

“Call me back in half an hour,” I said.

FIVEminutes later, we were parked down the block from the RayMar, in front of the Bradentown Bakery. Bradentown was just as hot as Longstreet, and smaller. Nothing stirred under the midday sun. I got out, went inside the bakery, and bought two Diet Cokes and two apple strudels, mostly to keep the cashier behind her counter. Back outside, I found two of John’s friends in the backseat of the car.

“We got it figured out,” Henry said to John. “If you want to go in, we can get him.”

“He has a gun,” I said.

“We can be on top of him in three seconds,” Henry said. “We need somebody to go into the office and talk to the clerk while we go in.”

They all looked at me, and I shook my head. “I need to talk to Carp. I need to hear what he says. One of the other guys’ll have to talk with the clerk.”

They did a quick eyeball vote and John finally said, “Kidd’s okay. Let’s get Terry to talk to the clerk. He’s a bullshit artist.” The other two glanced at each other and Henry nodded and took a cell phone out of his pocket. “Terry, you’re going in to talk to the clerk. Park right in front where he can see your car, and don’t touch anything when you get inside. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Whatever, you make it up.”

He hung up and nodded to John. “We’re good.”

I said, “His room doesn’t connect to another one, does it?”

Henry said, “Nope. None of them connect.”

TERRYtook a few minutes to get organized, and then we saw his car pull in to the RayMar. We backed out of our parking space, and as soon as Terry went through the motel’s office door, we started down the block. Another car, an old Chevy, pulled into the parking lot a few doors from the end of the line of motel rooms.