John Sandford: The Hanged Man’s Song

“If you don’t have to pee…”

“I’m fine, but I’d like to get a Coke.”

He stuck his hand in his pocket and produced a can of Diet Coke. “Still cold. Let’s go.”

AS SOONas he’d come into town, figuring that I’d be later, he’d gone around to convenience stores until he found one that sold a city map. In his room at the La Quinta, he’d spotted Bobby’s house and blocked out a route. “We’re a ways from where we need to be,” he said. He pointed down a broad street that went under the interstate. “Go that way.”

I went that way and asked, “How’s Marvel?”

“She’s fine. Up to her ass in the politics. Still a fuckin’ commie.”

“Nice ass, though,” I said. Marvel was his wife, but John and I had met her at the same time, and I had commentary privileges.

“True. How ’bout LuEllen?”

“She’s with me, down in Biloxi, but we’re not in bed. I’ve, uh, I’d been, uh, seeing this woman back home. She broke it off a couple of weeks ago. I’m kinda bummed.”

“You were serious?” He was interested.

“Maybe. Interesting woman-a cop, in fact.”

A moment of silence, then, “Bet she had a nice pair of thirty-eights, huh?”

We both had to laugh at the stupidity of it. Then I said, “What about Bobby?”

“I don’t know,” John said. “He sounded good-I mean, bad, but good for him-last time I talked to him. That was like two weeks ago, one of those phone calls from nowhere.”

“No hint of this.”

“Nothing. I tried to remember every word of what he said, when I was coming over here, and I can’t remember a single unusual thing. He just sounded like… Bobby. Hey, turn left at that stoplight.”

JACKSON, Mississippi, may be a perfectly nice place, assuming that we weren’t in the best part of it. The part we were in was run-down and maybe even run-over. Some of the houses that passed through our headlights seemed to be sinking into the ground. Driveways were mostly gravel, with here and there a carport; otherwise the cars, big American cars from the eighties and nineties, were parked in the yards.

The streets got bumpier as we went along, and eventually we got into a spot that was overgrown with kudzu, the stuff curled up and down the phone poles and street signs. Water was ponding along the shoulders of the roads; street signs became hard to locate and, with the kudzu, even harder to read.

“Too bad you can’t smoke that shit,” John said. “Solve a lot of problems.”

At one point, a big black-and-tan dog, probably a Doberman, splashed in the rain through our headlights, looking at us with lion eyes that said, “C’mon, get out of the car, chump, c’mon…”

We didn’t. Instead, John picked out streets on his map, confirmed it from one street sign to the next, and finally got us onto Arikara Street. “He ought to be in this block, if the numbers are right.” The street was bumpy, potholed, with trees hanging over it, and was lined with widely spaced houses with dark exteriors and dark windows. I’d brought a flashlight along with me, and John had it on his lap, but we didn’t need it. We came up to a bronze-colored mailbox, the best-looking mailbox I’d seen all night, and in the headlights saw 3577 in reflecting stick-on numerals.

“That’s it,” he said.

I went on by. We looked for light, for movement, for any kind of weirdness, and didn’t see or feel a thing. The house had a carport, but it was empty. Some of the houses had chain-link fences around the yards, but this one was open. A porch hung on the front of the place.

“Take another lap,” John said. “Goddamnit. We shoulda worked out an alibi.”

I shrugged. “Tell the truth. That we’re old computer buddies of his, that we knew he was near death, and that he asked us to check on him if he ever became nonresponsive.”

“Yeah.” He sighed. “I wish we had something fancier.”

“At two-thirty in the morning? We were out looking for Tic Tacs, Officer…”

“Yeah, yeah. I just rather not have them run my ID through their database.”

“No shit.” The next lap around, I said, “I’m gonna pull in, unless you say no. You say no?”

“Pull in,” he said.

I PULLEDinto the driveway, up close to the house and, before I killed the lights, noticed a wheelchair ramp going up to a side door from the carport. The neighborhood was poor, but the lots were large and overgrown. The neighbors to the left could see us, if they were interested, and the people across the street might get a look, but there were no lights in the windows. Working people, probably, who had to get up in the morning.

When I stopped, John climbed out, with me a second behind, and we shut the doors quickly and as quietly as we could, to kill the interior lights. Dark as a tar pit, rain pelting down; the place smelled almost like a northern lake. We squished through the wet side yard to the porch, then walked up to the door. John hesitated, then knocked.

Nothing.

Knocked again, then quietly, to me, “Jeez, I hope there’s no alarm. I never even thought of that.”

“If there is, we run.” I tried the knob. “Shit.”

“What?”

“It’s open. Don’t touch anything.” I pushed the door with my knuckles, and immediately smelled the death inside.

“Got a problem,” I said.

“I smell it.”

The odor wasn’t of physical decomposition, but simply of… death. An odd odor that dead people gather about them, an odor of dying heat, maybe, or souring gases, not heavy, but light, intangible, unpleasant. Something best not to think about. I was afraid to use the flashlight, because nothing brings the cops faster than a flashlight in a dark house. Instead, I pulled John inside, closed the door, groped around, found a wall switch, and turned on a ceiling light.

The first thing we saw was the wheelchair, and then what looked like a pile of gray laundry in a corner. We both stepped that way and saw the nearly weightless, eggshell skull of a young black man, with a scattering of books around his head. There was no question that he was dead. His face had been wrinkled, maybe from pain, and though you could tell he’d been young, he had a patina of age.

“Ah, shit,” I said.

“I would have liked to have met him,” John said softly.

I moved closer, saw the gun in the corner, and said, “There’s a gun,” and then stepped over the body and saw the misshapen skull and the blood. “Somebody killed him.”

“Somebody…” John stepped over, saw the blood. “Oh, boy.”

“Let’s check around,” I said. I glanced at the wheelchair, noticed the tray with a series of clamps. “John, look at this.”

“What?”

“Looks like a laptop setup.”

“No laptop.”

We both knew that was bad. We did a quick run-through of the house and found a wi-fi router in a back closet, plugged into a cable modem. “No servers,” I said. “I wondered about that.”

“What?”

“He seemed to have servers, but that would have made him vulnerable. So he has virtual servers. All of his stuff is… out there, somewhere. What wasn’t on the laptop.”

John said, “Let’s see if we can find some gloves, so we don’t leave fingerprints all over the place.”

BOBBY’Shouse was a mix of old and new. The entire house had wooden floors-board floors as in old southern farmhouses-covered in the dining room by a semi-threadbare oriental carpet that looked as though it came from the turn of the twentieth century. But it wasn’t cheap; it fit the room well and looked inherited. A dozen plants were scattered through the half-dozen rooms, including five or six orchids, one blooming with gorgeous white flowers like a spray of silvery moons. An upright piano sat in one corner of the living room, the keyboard cover up, sheet music for Cole Porter’s “ I Get a Kick Out of You ” perched on the music stand. There was all the usual stuff-a big TV, game cartridges, a stereo system with a CD player and maybe a thousand jazz and classical CDs, a modern turntable for vinyl records, and three or four hundred records to go with it. He liked Elvis Presley, I noticed, along with all the big blues masters.