John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

A half-mile in, Marvel said, “You think we’ve gone a mile yet?”

“No. Half-mile, maybe.”

“Carp told John it was a mile. He said he checked it with a GPS. A mile in a straight line.”

“Ten more minutes, on this trail,” I said, “if we don’t lose the trail.”

We went on, getting hotter and hotter by the step. There was good leafy overhead, but the air was so hot that even the shade didn’t account for much; both of us had sweated through our shirts by the time we were at the top of the hill. The path continued just below the crest-a good sign of a deer trail-and after a few more minutes, I said, “We gotta be close.”

The woods were thick, and brush was piled up beside the trail. We couldn’t see more than fifty feet in any direction. Marvel tilted her head back and screamed, “RACHEL!”

Nothing.

“RACHEL.”

And faintly, “He-e-e-el-l-l-lppp.”

SHEwas a noisy little kid, with a fine set of lungs. We found her, another two hundred yards along the trail, in a little open patch of grass. She was standing next to a tree, laptop under her arm, a skinny girl with big eyes, wearing a blue, flowered blouse and jean shorts, a chain around her waist, closed with a padlock. The other end of the chain was wrapped around a two-foot-thick tree, also padlocked. Just like Carp had said; a chilly breeze swept through my soul, as I realized that he would have left her there.

Marvel ran the last hundred feet, fell down, bruised herself, popped back onto her feet, and closed in and grabbed Rachel and lifted her up, and started crying, and Rachel looked at me and said, “I got bugs all over me,” and she began to cry, and I took the laptop from her, and between gasps she said, “Jimmy James hurt me. Jimmy James hurt me. Jimmy…”

I caught on with the first word; Marvel didn’t, not right away. She was just cooing, “We can fix it, honey, we can fix it, you’re okay now, where’d he hurt you?”

Rachel started sobbing again and screwed the heels of her hands into her eyes and then looked at Marvel and said “He made me do it with him. He hurt me.”

Marvel said, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, baby…” She looked at me; she was horrified. So was I.

The bolt cutters took care of the chain. Rachel was heavy, and Marvel not that big, but she carried the kid out anyway. I offered to help, but Rachel shook her head and Marvel said, “Better not,” and I figured that maybe Rachel didn’t want to have much to do with anybody male. Not for a while.

“I was afraid the motherfucker might take my laptop,” Rachel told me over Marvel’s shoulder. And a minute later, “I had to pee in the woods.”

HALFWAYdown the hill, I called John. “Got her.”

“Thank God. I’ll see you back in Longstreet. She okay?”

“Not exactly,” I said. Pause, and he knew.

“See you back in Longstreet,” he said.

“What about Carp?”

“See you back in Longstreet.”

I didn’t ask again.

AT THE TOP OF A GENTLE RISEthat begins at a rambling country highway-a highway that might be in New England-Mansard Penders had built himself a two-million-dollar arts-and-crafts house. The porch looks over a sweeping lawn, a stone fence, the highway, and his forest. He owns the forest, twenty thousand acres of plantation pine, with some mixed hardwoods, in the Rufus Chamblee Bend of the Mississippi River above Mansardville, Louisiana.

A messy, English-style cottage garden twists along gravel paths on the back and sides of the house. The garden was created by Florence Penders, and has all the color of Monet’s garden at Giverny. But while Monet’s garden is confined in beds, Flo’s garden sprawls and scampers and climbs, flaring up in the spring, muting a bit in June and July, roaring back in the summer: red, white, and yellow roses, pink hollyhocks and chrysanthemums, flaming gladioli, deep blue irises, scarlet poppies, cornflowers and larkspur, orange cockscomb, red and purple dahlias.

From anywhere among the flowers, you can see the river twisting below like a blue-steel snake. Sometimes, when the wind is right, you can smell the dead fish and mud of it, and on stormy days, you’ll see the weather rolling in from the west.

Inside the house, in the west wing, is a study with walnut walls and bookcases. Walnut is a dark wood with a touch of gray; the room is brightened by clerestory windows, arts-and-crafts lamps, and several thousand hardcover books with bright, variegated dustcovers.

Five oil paintings will hang in a band on one wall, on the theme of The River, with books both above and below. Mansard Penders is paying me three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to do the paintings.

As part of the deal, Manny had insisted on the right to specify the sites of the paintings, although not the details of them. After looking at the sites, I accepted. My dealer, who thinks I’m an asshole, and who was sure I’d turn the offer down, went out for a large whiskey and soda, or maybe two, and, I suspect, to a snug little whorehouse down by the river in New Orleans.

God bless him. He puts up with a lot.

I WORKEDon the preliminary oil sketches for most of September, trying to get it all just right. I was dreaming about them every night; I wanted them to glow from the walls, to hold the colors of the river, and to stand up to the house.

But some nights, I’d wake up in the motel, in the middle of a painting dream, and when I couldn’t get back to sleep-I can never get back to sleep anymore-I’d wander over to my laptop, load the Bobby files, read and think and work.

One thing I worked out: Bobby had penetrated the DDC. Some of the files on the laptop certainly came from there. It’s also possible that he was directly in touch with Carp-maybe that’s why Carp was so confident about flicking that little fly out there, about dragging Rachel in front of Bobby’s computer eyes.

AS FORJimmy James Carp, he was gone and he wouldn’t be back.

John and his friends had split up, going their own ways, after we got Rachel back. When John arrived at the house, he was grim as the reaper himself. He said, “Hi,” in a quiet voice, when he came through the living room, and I nodded toward the bathroom. Marvel and Rachel had been inside for the best part of an hour. I could hear them talking and sometimes, crying.

John knocked on the door, talked with them for a minute, then came back into the living room. “That jerk,” he said. He was calm enough. He went to the refrigerator and got out a beer and popped the top. “You want one of these?”

“Yeah, I’ll take one,” I said. The beer tasted pretty good, cold and spiky against the heat. “She’ll be okay,” I said. “Marvel will fix her.”

“She might grow up to be okay, but she’s not okay right now,” he said, tipping the bottle up.

“How did you get Carp to tell you where she was?”

“He made the mistake of thinking death was the worst thing that could happen to him,” John said. I opened my mouth to ask another question, but he tipped the bottle toward me and said, “Don’t ask, okay? Those guys you saw…”

“What guys?”

He nodded. “Exactly.”

He took another calm pull on the bottle, looked at it, and then screamed, “That motherfucker,” and he pitched the bottle right through one of the plate-glass windows on the front of the house, which blew out as though it had been hit by a bomb.

Marvel came wide-eyed out of the bathroom: “What was that?”

“Window broke,” John said.

All right.

THATevening, as the sun was going down-and after we’d gone to the hardware store for glass and putty and I showed John how easy it is to replace a window-John, Marvel, Rachel, and I headed for Memphis, all jammed into John’s car. They dropped me at the airport, where I caught a plane back to Cleveland, to retrieve my car. They went on to see a doctor, not George, but a lady friend of George’s, who’d give Rachel a complete exam. Nobody said anything about it, but if Rachel had been made pregnant…