The Hanged Man's Song

walked up a flagstone walkto Carp’s front door. I knocked, and the door rattled in its frame, and we felt a change from inside, as though something not quite audible had been going on, and now had stopped. Maybe, I thought, somebody had stopped typing.
    Then footsteps. A curtain moved. Whoever looked out—the window was dark, and he was invisible—could see only John, because I’d moved to the other side of the door, away from the window. Then more footsteps inside, and the inner door rattled, and finally a man looked out.
    He was younger than we were, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, large, with a fatty, football-shaped face, a long, fleshy nose, and a thatch of brown hair. He hadn’t shaved, and a wispy beard showed on his jowls and under his full lips. He had small eyes, and he blinked at us and then asked, “Who’re you?”
    “Are you James Carp?” John asked.
    His forehead wrinkled. “Uh, that’s my brother.”
    “Is he here?” John asked.
    He was about to lie to us. I could see it in his face. “He’s uh, back in the . . . he’s in the back.”
    “We really need to talk to him,” John said. John sort of wedged himself in the doorway. “It’s really pretty important.”
    “I’ll, uh, go and get him,” the man said.
    He pushed the door mostly shut, looked at us one more time, and John said, “That’s you, isn’t it, Jimmy James?”
    >>> CARP broke for the back of the mobile home and John and I went after him. We crunched into each other trying to getthrough the door, and then, once inside, in the dark, I hit the front edge of the folding table and almost went down—a near fall that might have saved my life, because as I was twisting off to the side, Carp, in the back, fired three quick shots at us with a pistol.
    I continued down, hearing the gunfire and seeing the muzzle flashes, and heard John crash out through the door and I thought, He’s hit, and I scrambled that way and fed myself through the door like a snake.
    I thought Carp might be coming after us, and I reached up and pulled the door shut and looked for a place to run. John was on his knees, getting to his feet as I rolled out, and now he was looking down the length of the trailer and calling, “Hey!” and I looked that way.
    There was a back door, somewhere out of sight, or he’d gone out a window: Carp was there, the laptop under his arm, a power cord trailing away. He was climbing into the Corolla and when I rolled to my feet he pointed the pistol at us, and we both dodged back, toward the back of the trailer, and he started the car with his computer hand and rolled out and down the street, and a second later was gone in the twilight.
    >>> JOHN looked at me. “You okay?”
    “I’m okay, you hit?”
    “No, no.”
    Then LuEllen arrived and we climbed in the car and she took off, fast for the first hundred feet, then slowing, slowing, and then she asked, “Was that a gun?”
    “That was a gun,” I said. I felt like I could start shaking. “That was Carp. He’s somewhere out ahead of us in that Corolla.”
    “Wasn’t very loud,” she said. “Maybe a .22.”
    “Even a .22’ll shoot your ass off,” John said. Then, “Maybe not your whole ass.”
    Two minutes later, we were back on the street, heading toward I-10. We were coming up to a gas station and I saw a “Telephone” sign. “Pull over, there,” I said. We’d only been out of the place for three or four minutes.
    I got on the phone, dialed 911, and when the emergency center came up, I shouted, “There’s been a shooting at 300 Quince Street in the Langtry mobile home park. There’s a guy shot. He’s hurt real bad. I gotta go, I gotta go.”
    The woman at the other end was calling, “Wait, wait,” when I hung up.
    Most 911 centers will show a phone number and location when you call. We got out of there as quickly as we could, losing ourselves in traffic.
    “What was that all about?” John asked.
    “I’m hoping they’ll send a cop car or two.” Then we heard the first siren, and we all shut up to watch a squad car zip by, going in the other direction. “I’m hoping it’ll keep Carp on the run. I hope he thinks he shot a cop.”
    “I just hope nobody got our plates in there,” LuEllen said.
    “I didn’t see anybody close enough to do that . . . or curious enough,” I said.
    “I thought that motherfucker had shot you, Kidd,” John said. “You went down like a dropped rock.”
    “No damage,” I