The Hanged Man's Song

dumped whole databases to the DVDs and the index ison the laptop. It’s like a hacker’s reference library. When he needs something, he can look it up.”
    >>> WE FORDED a couple of low cross streets and came up to a well-lit intersection. I took a left on a major street, no idea what it was. John had been silent for a few minutes, then said, “So we gotta get the laptop.”
    “Yup. Or destroy it.”
    “But we gotta get the guy who killed Bobby, too. That’s just as important—to me, anyway. The local cops won’t do it. I think we’ve got to call in the feds.”
    “Yeah,” I said reluctantly. Then, after a few more minutes, “I wish there was some way to get the feds interested in Bobby, without them knowing that he’s Bobby. Some way to get them chasing the killer. Like seriously on the job.”
    More thinking, then John half-laughed, looked at his watch, and said, “Well, I know one way. If we got the time.”
    John’s a smart guy. When he told me his idea, it made me laugh, as it had made him laugh, the heartsick sound you make when somebody presents you with an insane proposition that would probably work, and that you’re probably gonna do.
    After a little more talk, I said, “Ah, boy.” I couldn’t think of anything nearly as good. I told him so, and added, “Or as fuckin’ nuts.”
    >>> WE FOUND an all-night convenience store where I bought some cookies and candy and a couple of cans of motor oil andtwo gallons of spring water from a sleepy clerk. John dumped the spring water out the window as we drove along, poured in the oil, and, after wiping them clean, threw the oil cans out the window into a roadside ditch. We stopped at an edge-of-town gas station, parked so the filler cap was away from the station, filled the tank with gas, and then added gas to the two water jugs until they were three-quarters full.
    Then we went back to Bobby’s, nervous as cats, cruised the neighborhood, saw only two lights—it was past four in the morning now, and working people would be getting up in the next hour or two. Everything around Bobby’s was quiet, though, so we pulled in and went inside.
    Tried to ignore the body, though John said, talking to him, “This is for you, Robert.”
    We were planning to use clothes-hanger wire if we had to, but Bobby had a long roll of picture-hanging wire that worked just fine. We used the heavy side boards from the bed for the main frame, and the picture-hanging wire to strap a couple of old cotton blankets around the boards.
    We’d been working frantically, gloved again, fumbling everything so we had to do everything twice, but we were ready to go by four-thirty. I carried our creation outside and soaked it with the gas, then threw the empty jugs in the backseat of the car.
    “I’m going to hell for this,” John said to me across the yard, as he wired it to a front-porch upright.
    “Think of it as performance sculpture,” I said. “Don’t light it until I’ve got the car in the street.” I backed the car out of the driveway, got it pointed, pushed open the passenger door, and John struck a match and threw it at the gas-soaked rags.
    I can tell you from experience that when you’ve got a lot of gas, it doesn’t just flame up, like paper: it goes with an audible whump. The thing was burning like crazy, even with the rain, and John was running and then he was in the car chanting, “Go, go, go,” and we were out of there.
    We planned to stop a mile or so away and call the fire department, but by the time we got to the pay phone, we could hear sirens and they were getting closer. So we kept going. But I’d looked back from the corner as we’d gone slewing around it, and even in the driving rain, the fire looked like a bad dream out of Revelation, or out of Jackson, Mississippi, in 1930.
    John had been right. For bringing in an FBI investigation, nothing worked quite as well as a dead black guy and a great big stinking Fiery Cross.

Chapter Five
    >>> AT TEN O’CLOCK that morning, the bedside alarm went off. I sat up, disoriented for a moment, in a bed at the Days Inn across Interstate 55 from the La Quinta. I’d dropped John just before five, then crossed the highway and rented a room.
    When I checked in, I told the clerk that I’d intended to arrive earlier, but I’d gotten stuck in a casino, and then in the rain. He did a desk-clerk’s indifferent chuckle-nod-and-shuffle—he could really give a shit what I’d been doing—and told me I had to be