The Hanged Man's Song

idiot savant who remembered his license plate number; one chance in a million.
    Less than that, even—he’d been obsessively careful in his approach to the black man; that he’d come on a rainy day was not an accident. Maybe, he thought, he’d known in his heart that Bobby would end this day as a dead man.
    Maybe. As he turned the corner and left the neighborhood, a hum of satisfaction began to vibrate through him. He felt the skull crunching again, saw the body fly from the wheelchair, felt the rush. . . .
    Felt the skull crunch . . . and almost drove through a red light.
    He pulled himself back: he had to get out of town safely. This was no time for a traffic ticket that would pin him to Jackson, at this moment, at this place.
    He was careful the rest of the way out, but still . . .
    He smiled at himself. Felt kinda good, Jimmy James.
    HUH! WHACK! Rock ’n’ roll.

Chapter Two
    >>> FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW in St. Paul, over the top of the geranium pot, I can see the Mississippi snaking away to the south past the municipal airport and the barge yards. There’s always a towboat out there, rounding up a string of rust-colored barges, or a guy heading downstream in a houseboat, or a seaplane lining up for takeoff. I never get tired of it. I wish I could pipe in all the sounds and smell of it, leaving out the stink and groan of the trucks and buses that run along the river road.
    I was standing there, scratching the iron-sized head of the red cat, when the phone rang.
    I thought about not answering it—there was nobody I particularly cared to talk to that day—but the ringing continued. I finally picked it up, annoyed, and found a smoker’s voice like a rusty hinge in a horror movie. An old political client. He asked me to do a job for him. “It’s no big deal,” he rasped.
    “You lie like a Yankee carpetbagger,” I said back. I hadn’t talked to him in years, but we were picking up where we left off: friendly, but a little contentious.
    “I resemble that remark,” he said. “Besides, it’ll only take you a few days.”
    “How much you paying?”
    “Wull . . . nothin’.”
    Bob was a Democrat from a conservative Mississippi district. He was worried about a slick, good-looking young Republican woman named Nosere.
    “I’ll tell you the truth, Kidd: the bitch is richer than Davy Crockett and can self-finance,” said the congressman. He was getting into his stump rhythms: “When it comes to ambition, she makes Hillary Clinton look like the wallflower at a Saturday-night sock-hop. She makes Huey Long look like a guppy. You gotta get your ass down there, boy. Dig this out for me.”
    “You oughta be able to self-finance your own self,” I said. “You’ve been in Washington for twelve years now, for Christ’s sakes.”
    Pause, as if thinking, or maybe contemplating the balances in off-shore checking accounts. Then, “Don’t dog me around, Kidd. You gonna do this, or what?”
    >>> WHEN all the bullshit is dispensed with, I am an artist—a painter—and for most of my life, in the eyes of the law, a criminal, though I prefer to think of myself as a libertarian who liberates for money.
    At the University of Minnesota, where I had gone to school on a wrestling scholarship, I carried a minor in art, with a major in computer science. Computers and mathematics interested me in the same way that art did, and I worked hard at them. Then the Army came along and gave me a few additional skills. When I got out of the service, I went to work as a freelance computer consultant.
    Aboveground, I was writing political-polling software that could be run in the new desktop computers, the early IBMs, and even a package that you could run on a Color Computer, if anybody remembers those. I was also debugging commercial computer-control programs, a job that was considered the coal mine of the computer world. I was pretty good at it: Bill Gates had once said to me, “Hey, dude, we’re starting a company.”
    Underground, I was doing industrial espionage for a select clientele, entering unfriendly places, either electronically or physically, and copying technical memos, software, drawings, anything that my client could use to keep up with the Gateses. The eighties were good to me, but the nineties had been hot: a dozen technical memos, moved from A to B, could result in a hundred-million-dollar Internet IPO. Or, more likely, could kill one.
    All that time, I’d been painting. I can’t tell you about