The Hanged Man's Song

happen?”
    “LuEllen, the cards do not predict anything. ”
    “Yeah.” She crossed her arms, looked at me with exasperation. “You always say that, then it turns out that they always do.”
    “There have been some coincidences, but that’s all they were.”
    “Coincidences, my ass. Let’s go. You can tell me more about this Hanged Man on the way to Longstreet.”
    >>> LONGSTREET is on the Mississippi River northwest of Jackson. There isn’t much there, but there is one critical thing:a bridge. That by itself gives the town a regional importance. Bridges are uncommon on the lower Mississippi. People can go their entire lives never seeing towns that might be only a mile away, across the river, but fifty miles away by road.
    Longstreet was a tough place to get to from Beaumont. The trip took most of the day, even cooking along in the Olds. LuEllen’s a good driver, and she’d rather drive than ride, so she spent most of her time behind the wheel. I plugged in the laptop and continued to dig through the DVDs.
    “The pattern is, he encrypted everything but inconsequential stuff,” I said. “If the same pattern holds with the laptop, then we’re good.”
    “That cheers me up. But even if he does have some stuff, it’d hardly be on me, do you think?” She was paranoid about personal security. She’d led a long life as a thief, including some fairly outrageous episodes, and had never done time, never been arrested, never been fingerprinted.
    “Not unless . . .”
    “What?”
    “Bobby knew where we were sometimes. Exactly where, and exactly when. There’s a tiny chance that he had us photographed, just out of curiosity.”
    “You think?”
    “No. I don’t think so,” I said after a moment. “For one thing, he knew who I was, exactly, and he could get a picture of me on-line. That show at the Westfeld Gallery last winter had an online catalog along with the regular one. You could get my picture there. Still can. So I think we’re good, or you’re good, but man—I’d like to get that laptop. John’s worried, too. His friends, you know . . . Bobby may have some details on them, too.”
    “Political stuff.”
    “Yeah.” We rode along for a minute. “You know, you sometimes get these charismatic assholes, the racist preachers and bigot politicians who are too smart to join the Klan or the Nazis. They can do a lot of damage, especially in local elections, school boards, and so on. Sometimes you think, If there was only some way to make them go away. I’ve always wondered if John’s people, and maybe Bobby, didn’t make some of these guys go away. For good.”
    “You mean, kill them?”
    “That’s a harsh word, kill.”
    “Ah, jeez.”
    >>> WE ALSO had time in the car to consider our individual guilt as involved the previous night’s sexual episodes; and there was some. LuEllen had been seeing a Mexican guy, a modern-dance teacher, at the university in Duluth. She was drawn to the dark-eyed tribe . . . but she said she considered the attachment to be purely temporary. She might consider all attachments purely temporary, even me; she was a lot like a cat.
    I was in a different situation. Even though Marcy had broken it off, I was sure I’d precipitated it, and then I’d jumped straight into the sack with an old flame.
    I said all of this to LuEllen, who immediately brightened up. Women, in my experience, are the social engineers of the humanrace, and love to analyze and dissect relationships. Even their own. All that began a conversation that meandered through our relationship and all the people we’d known since we first got together, and why we couldn’t seem to stay together.
    LuEllen argued against guilt. She said we were old enough friends, and had had on-again, off-again sex for so long that it no longer counted as infidelity. It was more like a hug, she said. What she’d done was the emotional equivalent of first aid.
    “It didn’t feel like a hug,” I said. “You were barking like a dog. Anytime somebody’s barking like a dog, you can be pretty sure it’s not a hug.”
    “I was not barking like a dog,” she said. “You know what you’re doing? You say stuff like that to be funny, and to take the importance out of things. But this is pretty important, since you really liked the woman . . . not that I ever knew what you saw in her, her being a cop and all. But you knew six months ago that she wanted a kid, and you knew her time was running out, and you