The Hanged Man's Song

suspension, numb steering, and underpowered engine. I’d had it modified at a tuner shop in Wisconsin, squeezing maybe 300 horses out of it, and the suspension was now reasonable and the custom seats were actually good. A new passenger, riding in a straight line, with his eyes closed, mightthink he was in a BMW 540i. Cornering, though . . . you can only do so much with front-wheel drive.
    I pushed hard, out of the motel by 10:20, staying on the gas, and pulled up to the Wisteria at 1:30. Now the coastal highway looked like hurricane season. Pickup trucks full of plywood, and even sedans with plywood roped to their roofs, were rolling up and down the beachfront, and people were boarding windows and moving boats. Big rollers were coming in from the Gulf, kicking up chest-high spray.
    I’d had a pack of chocolate-covered doughnuts and a Diet Coke for breakfast, so I was an unhappy camper when I boarded the Wisteria. LuEllen was back in the slots, four machines down from a guy who looked like he’d just climbed off an oil rig.
    “How’re we doing?” I asked.
    “Another hour,” she said, slamming a quarter in the slot. “Another half hour, with you here.”
    “I gotta get a sandwich,” I said. The oil-rig dude was giving me the hard eye. “Are they still talking about closing at six?”
    “They’re talking about five, now. The hurricane is picking up speed.” She slammed another quarter, the last in her bucket, dug a notebook out of her pocket and entered a number.
    “Just a quick sandwich.”
    “I’ll come with you. Won’t make any difference on the time. We’re almost done.”
    “You’re gonna bum out your fan club,” I muttered.
    “I know,” she said, with a smile. “He’s kinda cute, too, in a razor-fight way.”
    We went back to the aptly named poop deck, where I got ameatball sandwich and I filled her in. She’d done something to change the look of her hair, or maybe she’d just gone to smaller earrings, little diamonds that sparkled against her dark curls. She was curious about Bobby, since he’d been involved in two or three incidents where she’d nearly gotten her ass killed. I told her how fragile he looked and about the wheelchair.
    “So we’re dealing with some kind of incredible asshole,” she said when I finished.
    “Yeah. An incredible asshole with a laptop that’s got God-knows-what on it.”
    “I gotta believe that Bobby was careful.” One of the reasons LuEllen hung out with me was that I was careful. She worried when people weren’t careful. She was perfectly willing to break into a jewel merchant’s house in the middle of Saddle River, New Jersey, at three o’clock in the morning, knowing that place had more alarms than Wells Fargo . . . but she was careful about it. “He always seemed careful—you didn’t even know his name or where he lived, and you guys have been working together for years.”
    “I hope he was,” I said. “But we can’t take the chance. He knows all about Anshiser, about what happened in Longstreet, about the whole deal down in Dallas—and if Microsoft ever finds out about the XP trapdoor, about that whole thing up in Redmond, they’ll probably hire a couple of killers.”
    “Fuck Microsoft. I’m more worried about the people in Washington.” She wouldn’t even say the initials.
    >>> THE meatball sandwich met the Wisteria standard, which wasn’t good but at least filled some space. When I finished, wewent back to the slots. To avoid the notice of cracker thugs, we’d been carefully taking our time and moving around. Now we just pounded quarters, and nobody noticed. We had our numbers and were out of the casino at 2:30, and out of the motel by three o’clock. I resisted the urge to pee on the carpet before I left, though it would have given the place some character.
    Because the hurricane had taken a bit more of a northeasterly track, we headed west on I-10. Until recently I’d had a condo in New Orleans, but the place had been taken over by a group of Ohio retirees, who’d begun messing with the association rules, and I’d sold out. I’d been planning to buy another one, but got distracted and hadn’t. Now I would have given my eyeteeth to have the old place back, to be where I was comfortable and had really good gear to use on Bobby’s files.
    As it was, we were homeless. We took I-12 north of the city, stopped at a CompUSA in Baton Rouge, and bought a heavy-duty external DVD box that I could hook into my laptop.